Have you ever wanted to learn the craft of sewing - everything from basic sewing skills, such as mending and altering, to creating your own clothes? Illustrious Art, run by Kerri Mazzocco, an experienced costume and fashion designer, offers small classes in an intimate garden studio.

The 8-week Basic Sewing Course, is two hours per week and covers the basic sewing skills, by hand and on a domestic machine, such as taking up a hem, different seam finishes, sewing in a zip, different types of pockets and many other design details. All of these techniques and many more will be practiced on a variety of different fabrics. By the end of the 8-week course, and as you gain confidence, you will be able to make a skirt or simple dress of your choice.

Following on from the Basic Sewing Course, you can take your new-found skills to the next level and design and create your own garments. The Basic Clothing Design Course is where you will learn about design principles, colour theory, fabric selection, basic pattern making and fashion illustration. For those of you who have wonderful design ideas but don't know quite how to express them on paper, here you will learn basic body proportioning of the fashion figure, then move on to experimenting with different rendering techniques such as pencils, markers, gouache paint and ink. The course also covers design for different figure types and recreating designs from different eras.