The Lark team love getting involved in charity community events, we feel strongly that craft sessions can bring togetherness to an event and is a great way to promote wellbeing.
We have done many workshops for charities including friendship and support group activities for Age Cymru & Unpaid Carers across venues in Gwent, a 10 week Sewing course for Afghanistan Refugees at their temporary housing in a Cardiff hotel, monthly Facebook LIVE sessions for the Royal Voluntary Service where we promote a range of crafts and at the studio and on Zoom we monthly Parent & Child workshops for Single Parents Wellbeing.
We have been successful in securing funding to do several workshops in British Sign Language for the Deaf Community of Wales.
We have also done other events including - Gemma (owner of Lark) does annual lectures and interactive sessions to Occupational Health University students on the importance of design as part of one of their final year assignments and we have sent teams to many outdoor events including the MADE in Cardiff festival, Green Man Music Festival, Rudry Music Festival and Insole Court Open Days.
All in all, we are open to all sorts of ideas, our experience means we understand what is needed to create a successful event and consider ourselves easy to work with as we take control of all elements of our creative sessions leaving you to focus on other parts of the event.
It is important to say that we are not in a position to offer free or really cheap events - a request we receive all the time. We understand that your charity or reason for holding a community event is important but we are all self employed and every hour we work is essential in ensuring we can pay our small business costs and pay ourselves at the end of each month.
To give you an indication of cost, a 2 hour community event with a fun sampler craft would cost a minimum of £150* (this would typically cover a group size up to 10 people & within 10 miles of the studio) This cost would cover our preparation, set up, admin, teaching, materials * and pack away. We are open to all sorts of group sizes and locations so if you get in touch using the form below, please include as much information as possible, we’ll then get back to you with suitable crafty ideas and can arrange a call or for you to pop in to discuss ideas.
*raw materials differ in cost so this price would cover most of workshops below but things like candle making, jesmonite, leather journals and sewing would cost more
Soap Making Workshop at the DEAF HUB in Cardiff
Sewing course for Afghanistan refugees in temporary housing in a hotel in Cardiff
To follow are some examples of the crafts we are able offer groups
They vary in timing, cost and the suitable group size so we can discuss this more but they are useful starting point….
FAQ’s
GROUP SIZE : Some workshops are better suited to larger groups than others, for instance we would suggest no more than 7 people for ‘beginners’ workshops e.g. crochet and sewing - the focus of these workshops is learning a new skill so a lot of 1-2-1 support is needed.
Many are great for for a really mixed group as they are easy to learn and the results are always great, for example
Some crafts are limited by the number of tools we have, for instance we can only do group sizes of around 10 people for leather crafting, sewing & memo boards
Some crafts are better suited to people with more crafty experience e.g macrame and embroidery
MULTIPLE CRAFTS : Many of the simpler crafts work well with larger groups and we can bring several along and attendees move around the craft stations and therefore talk to different people and learn multiple skills and take several hand made things home.