A Dawlish craft shop will soon offer free craft courses to anyone who would like to participate.

Speaking about the shop, Lesley, manager of Crafters of Dawlish CIC, said: "We are a local shop selling various craft supplies, and we also have displays of our local crafters' work, which are beautiful and unique.

"We're a Community Interest Company (CIC), which is run solely by an amazing team of volunteers.

"We're able to offer help and assistance to new crafters, or to an older crafter that maybe has got stuck on something.

"We offer local crafters an outlet to sell their craft work. We don't charge a shelf rent for that - we do however take a small percentage of their sales.

"All the profit that we make goes back into the shop or the buying of new stock, and it will also allow us to pay for the free classes for local people."

With regard to the upcoming free classes, Lesley added: "I manage the shop - a number of years ago, the shop opened up and was called 'Butterflies'.

"When I took over, they were running a 'Knit and Natter' group once a week, and our volunteers ran it and anybody was welcome.

"Obviously with the Covid situation, we've had to stop doing that, so that's just been left.

"We've had a lot of people, not just between lockdowns, but since then a lot of people coming in that have started a craft during lockdown - we've got a lot of the younger generation coming up now that want to start doing craft.

"So I thought: enlarge on the Knit and Natter group, and start offering courses for children and adults.

"It's going to be a free starter course, it'll start with the very basic of something, and it will go as far as a crafter wants it to go.

"We've had people come in saying that somebody's bought them a sewing machine and they don't know how to use it - so that's going to be a very basic course on how to use a sewing machine.

"How to knit, how to crochet - we'll be doing needle felting, two lots of découpage, crochet, knitting, and any other crafts that people want us to do.

"It is free, however with some of the courses it will incur a small charge for the materials.

"We will be printing off leaflets saying what classes are going to happen when, it'll have a phone number on it and an email address. You could even just pop in, because all the details will be here in the shop as well."

Crafters of Dawlish CIC can be found on Queen Street or here on Google Maps.

Dawlish Nub News also conducted a video interview with Lesley - keep your eyes peeled for its publication soon!

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