As part of the 24th edition of the Yogurt Fair and Festival of Folk Traditions and Crafts at the Ethnographic Museum in Razgrad, a children’s workshop “First Steps in the Craft” was held on July 22. It was organized by the Regional History Museum.
The training was attended by 40 children who had the opportunity to get acquainted with and enter into traditional Bulgarian crafts, with their peculiarities, subtleties and importance for the life and livelihood of Bulgarians. The classes were led by three craftsmen, each of them established in their craft.
The famous master potter Tanya Staneva from the “Ethara” Ethnographic Museum worked on the potter’s wheel, revealing the secrets of this craft – how art is created by creating everyday objects. The children, under her guidance, participated in practical activities with the potter’s wheel and shaped clay vessels. Pottery aroused strong interest in the children participating in the workshop, who gained a lot of knowledge about the traditional technique of creativity using the potter’s wheel. With the help of the master, the children made their first clay vessel.
The technique of dry felting wool was presented by the craftswoman Donka Ivanova. The panels made by the participants in the children’s workshop were decorated with motifs from Bulgarian embroidery.
Master embroiderer Detelina Dacheva introduced the workshop participants to the basics of traditional Bulgarian embroidery and folk embroidery.
At the end of the workshop, each child had the opportunity to take home the created product as a souvenir from their participation in the children’s workshop. It is now a traditional event organized by the Regional History Museum to preserve the love for Bulgarian craft traditions among the younger generations. During the children’s workshop “First Steps in Craft” at the Ethnographic Museum, foreign guests of the Yogurt Fair – delegations from Romania, Moldova, Turkey – visited the children’s workshop while the training was taking place. They got acquainted with the presented crafts, to which they showed great interest, a representative of one of the foreign delegations even turned the pottery wheel. At the end of the event, the director of the Regional History Museum, Tanya Todorova, thanked the three craftsmen who taught the children and wished them to continue to preserve Bulgarian traditions with love.
The craftsmen Staneva, Ivanova and Dacheva received certificates on behalf of the mayor for their participation in the “First Steps in the Craft” training.
