Become a Crafty Bird and run your own sewing courses.
Here’s how….
If you’re a Textiles teacher looking for a way to earn additional income, or would simply like to compliment the daily life of teaching with some “no pressure” sewing lessons to a group of friendly adults, Crafty Birds can help you do that. There’s next to no planning involved for you, you just teach the course, go home, and get paid!
The daunting and time consuming tasks that Crafty Birds do for you:
Running a Crafty Birds sewing class is easy. That’s how I planned it. Doing everything that is involved in designing, marketing, and delivering a sewing course is labor intensive, time consuming, and requires high amounts of (potentially unknown) expertise. Just delivering a sewing course is easy, quick, and familiar. Here’s how Crafty Birds does all the other stuff for you:
I have 8 courses already designed, tried, tested, refined, ready for you to choose and deliver
I market your course for you; this means that I promote it on Google and on Social Media, in person at regional shopping locations, with posters and leaflets in your area, and process the bookings and payments
I source the materials and patterns your customers need, prepare them, and send them to you in advance of the course
I send you two kits-one to make the project before the course starts - this is your “preparation time” (your time spent doing this is fully paid as well btw), and one to use for demonstrations during the course
I have already written the session by session schedule with all the steps of making, when to provide demonstrations, minute by minute, for each week of the course
I take care of all of the complicated legal and financial requirements that come with running a business
Delivering your sewing course
I’ve been running sewing courses from my school classroom which I teach Textiles in during the day. My school is listed on schoolhire.co.uk, and yours is too! My school is hiring out their sport pitches, dance studio, music rooms, and classrooms, for an hourly rate. I asked my Head of Department if they’d be happy for me to use my Textiles classroom to run my own private sewing courses, which they were, providing it doesn’t disrupt day to day lessons, damage equipment, or use school supplies (which they don’t).
My sewing courses vary in length, from 4 weeks to 8 weeks or more. Each session runs for either 2 or 2.5 hours. You can decide when to run your chosen course-what day of the week, the time, and which weeks of the year. You should base this on a combination of personal preference, school commitments, and customer preference. Once you’ve decided on dates, place your classroom hire on the School hire website, wait for your school’s site team to approve it, then ask me to publish the course on the website, start promoting and processing bookings. We should make sure we allow a minimum of 10 weeks between publishing the course and the course start date, to allow enough time to reach minimum booking numbers required to run the course.
In each week of the course, it’s advised that you spend 20 minutes before the customers arrive, setting up your sewing machines, getting out equipment, and moving chairs around if necessary. Then the customers arrive and you will deliver the 2 or 2.5 hour session. The customers usually help pack up some equipment, and you only need to spend 10 minutes packing up before heading home. So if the course runs from 6pm to 8.30pm, you will work from 5.40pm to 8.40pm. This is called your “delivery time”, all of which is paid.
Your earnings
I pay tutors £20 per hour, and will be paid for both your preparation and delivery time. For each course, this time is set when you choose the course that you want to run. Depending on the project, preparation time, and number of delivery weeks, you could earn up to £ .To view the courses and the earnings that you can make from each course, go to the course page here.
The legal stuff
insurance
contract
compliance, customer
Get in touch
To get started running your own sewing courses, get in touch with me, Anneka, either by email or telephone