Unlocking the Courses

Thank you for being so patient and understanding during this crisis. It's been tough for most and heart breaking for others. Our sympathies and thoughts with all of you that have lost family or friends through this virus. We are still awaiting the green light here in the Borders to be able to proceed and open up the gallery and courtyard workshop area. We've been fortunate to live in a rural area that has not been affected too greatly by cases. We want to keep it that way ! To this end we have decided to begin very tentatively with reduced number courses. We propose to attempt the following as from and inclusive of August 29th 2020.

For those of you that have been unable to attend and still want to come on a course we propose to :

• reschedule you into new dates in 2020 and 2021 on FRIDAY or SUNDAYS for the one day courses such as stool making, spoon, treen and bird carving, polelathe turning, sitooterie and woodprint making. These will have to take place on a Friday as we have no other days free this year due to the courses being fully booked til Xmas
• for those booked onto weekend courses such as chair making, shave horse construction and stone lettering we will have set specific dates for these but will have to run into the winter months of Jan and Feb 2021
• they will be allocated on a first to respond basis with no changes or cancellations being made once you have confirmed a date. You might be disappointed not to get the date you want - but you'll at least attend a course.
• this might take some time to run through til everyone has been reallocated. Some of you will have accommodation re-booking to do so that's going to be tricky as well.

We have to do it this way. If we shifted everyone across into next year we lose a whole year trading and no time or dates will be available for new attendees. Therefore we will have no income at all in 2020. The workshop and gallery are going through a different set of unlocking issues and may take a lot longer to regroup and recover.

Refunding postponed courses is not possible. Those of you who no longer wish to or won't be able to attend will have their course fees used to pay for all the materials, tooling, external tutor time, rent, insurance, utility costs etc that we have had to pay over past few months. We are sure you will all understand. We will start to reschedule folks in as from 8th August. So watch out for an email from us soon.


Thanks - Eoin Big Tree Person