Workshop Information – Hazel Blomkamp's Fine Needlecraft

GENERAL INFORMATION

If you would like to organise a virtual workshop for your group or guild, please read through the following information and also, look through the available workshops at the links provided at the bottom of this page. Thereafter, email Hazel on [email protected] to set about organising such an event.

Choosing a Project:

The first step when organising an online workshop for your group or guild is to choose a project.
The workshops displayed at the links below are currently available. Click on the links below each image to access all of the details of the workshops.
Most of Hazel’s designs can be taught online.
If you would like to do a workshop not available at the links at the bottom of the page, we can discuss it and do a detailed proposal for you.
If you go to https://www.hazelblomkamp.com/shop/kits/ you will see what those designs are. Click on each title and have a look at what’s in that group of projects.
Because of contracts with publishers, projects that are in any of the books written by Hazel require that participants need to own the book for the instructions. Some of those books are no longer available in other parts of the world, but we have South African editions of most of them (they’re identical save for the publishers’ details) and they can be sent over when project kits are shipped.
The last section – Studio Designs – are projects that don’t feature in any of Hazel’s books and those come with an instruction booklet as part of the full kit.
Claude the Phoenix and Hand Stitched Crazy Patchwork Embellishment will be taught at the Dallas Seminar in 2025. Those workshops are not available to Guilds until 6 months after that event.
In addition to all the above, the book that I have collaborated on with Phillipa Turnbull is due out in autumn of 2025. Those designs will become available for teaching from then and will be added to this website.

Dates and Kits:

When you have chosen the project and we have agreed on dates, we work out a final proposal for you by email.
The cost of the kits includes the teaching kit and shipping.
Concomitantly, you will work up contracts on your end and send them to me for signing, etc.
You set about advertising the workshop and plan to be able to give us the numbers around 8 weeks ahead of the starting date. This will give us sufficient time to finalise the kit packing and get the box over to you in time for onward shipping (see below*).
We ship all the full kits (which include tuition kits) to you. These packs contain everything needed for the project other than tools, hoops, etc. and you will be provided with a list of those in the original proposals.
*International shipping is very expensive, and the most cost-effective way is to ship everything to one person and that person reships them to the participants. This is because shipping from our end works on a sliding scale meaning that the heavier the parcel, the lower the cost per kit. If you look at the shipping cost comparisons AT THIS LINK, you can see what a difference it makes.
Sometimes we ship in two parcels so that the value of the contents of each parcel falls below your country’s duty free limit. That’s always a bit of a balancing act and we only decide on the number of parcels once we can work out the value based on the numbers.

Live Sessions

All of the live sessions are done on Zoom and to this end, participants need to have a Zoom login account. This doesn’t cost them anything, but it is important. They must be able to log into Zoom.
In addition to that, because many participants would probably be older and not necessarily tech savvy, they need to familiarise themselves with Zoom beforehand. The best thing is to find a teenage boy. They work their way around it so easily. It wouldn’t be a bad idea for them to have that same teenage boy on standby when the first lesson starts, just to make sure they can get into the live session because, if they send Hazel an email telling her they can’t get in, she doesn’t see it until after the live session is over, because she is concentrating on the live teaching and not looking at her emails.
We work out what time to start the live sessions bearing in mind, the time zone differences. If you are, say, on the East Coast of the USA, you are 6 or 7 hours behind us (depending on the time of year) so, if you plan to start at about 9 to 10 am, that would be 3 to 4 pm here. We do it on your time.
From experience, it is best to make the live sessions not longer than 4 hours. 8-hour sessions are just too long for most participants who have lives outside of embroidery – children and husbands and dogs that need to fed, etc. It’s also a long time to sit in front of a screen so it’s better to break it up into shorter sessions.

Additional Resources

In addition to the live sessions, participants will be provided with the links and passwords, in an access document, to the private domain on this website.
This will give them access to pre-recorded lessons which helps them to recap on what was covered in the live sessions.
It will also give them access to the dedicated stitch dictionary for the project. This is an online page with all the video clips of all the stitches and techniques. In addition to the video clips, there is a link to a PDF document that provides step by step written instructions and illustrations for each stitch or technique.
This means that when the live workshop is done and dusted, they have all of what was taught to them as a reference point when they are working through the project in the following weeks and months.
The links and passwords don’t expire. They have access for as long as they need to have it.
Prior to the start of an online workshop, we need to email the access document to each of the participants.
To this end, the organiser of a group virtual workshop will need to give us all the email addresses that apply.
Because of the spam settings on their various email addresses or on their servers, participants need to be advised that they should add Hazel’s main email address ([email protected]) to their safe senders list. If they haven’t done this, the emails that she sends might bounce back to her.
Alternatively, the access document can be emailed to the organiser to forward to the participants.

All the above information comes from a checklist developed over the last 4 or 5 years. Inevitably, glitches that haven’t occurred before will happen and they will be added to the above. For now, though, this probably covers everything you need to know about virtual classes from our end.

The online workshops, currently available can be found at:

Workshops: 2-Day or 4 x 4 hour Online Sessions

CLICK HERE to view all of these workshops and to access the information that applies to each one.

Workshops: 3-Day or 6 x 4 hour Online Sessions