Woodturners retreat
As one of the founding members of the Woodturners retreat I thought a little background information was needed.
The year 2020 was a year like no other and will never be forgotten.
The Pandemic of COVID-19 gripped the whole world.
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The pandemic forced the World, ONLINE from regular household shopping to billion £££ companies. Also including
the craft and woodturning community.
So woodturning demonstrators, myself included rapidly put together a studio so we could broadcast to the world via ZOOM which would become one of the most used words of 2020.
I was allready a member of a online woodturning club under the name of WOODTURNING ZOOM which was set up
by Martin Clarkson.
Early October I approached Ron Campell who ran a physical event called CAMPELLS HANDS ON RETREAT which due to the Covid-19 pandemic had to be cancelled along with every small and large event around the world .
Ron campell & myself set about creating a online PRE-RETREAT. I contacted Martin Clarkson and asked him to host the
pre-retreat event.
At this time I approached Jeff Hornung A woodturning demonstrator from the US to join us at the Retreat and so a small group of us formed the retreat.
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So with organization of the retreat well under way I spoke with Martin, Ron
& Jeff about a much bigger Retreat. We came up with a list of potential
demonstrators'
and after contacting them all we were happy to go ahead with
Kade Bolger, Joanne Sauvageua both from Canada.
Tod Raines from the US & Stewart Furini from the UK
The WOODTURNERSRETREAT was formed.
Our first event
THE SIX TURNERS
Dec 12th 5pm uk time
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After a great but hurried first event we were very happy with how things worked out . We had some things to change & improve upon. As a group we decided upon Three double header events which were relatively successful,
All of this was completely new ground for us as a group we as individuals had all done physical in club demos. We were using the ZOOM platform in a way it hadn't been used before in the Woodturning community .
The last of the double headers were in march we decided on our next event ,We had a break of about four weeks .
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The end of may beginning June we got back together to sort the event projects out and some other changes we wanted to implement as to the actual format of the event. We agreed on the new format it worked really well alongside promotional activity, the last few weeks before our six turners event were just crazy busy, from prepping demo pieces, advertisin & meetings to decide on running order of the event.
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Thanks so much to everybody that made this six turners event the best yet. and not forgetting our zoom host Martin Clarkson who I don't have a photograph for lol.
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