Emmerdale actress enjoys our Adult Summer Showcase
An acting extra from Emmerdale, a wannabe property developer in her 20s and a superfan of our cookery and catering courses were among the hordes of people who participated in our Adult Summer Showcase at the weekend.
The Showcase, which was held on campus, offered members of the public an opportunity to try out one of our adult courses during a three-hour or four-hour taster session for a cost of £15 that also included a hot drink and breakfast item.
Here we throw the spotlight on three attendees, who had their own different reasons for choosing one of the 12 taster sessions that were staged on Saturday morning.
First up is Serena Stampfer, who opted to book on our Introduction to British Sign Language Showcase taster session with the view of being able to communicate better around the Emmerdale set with a fellow acting extra who is deaf.
“Learning British Sign Language has always been something that I’ve thought, ‘I should do that at some point’,” Serena (pictured above second from the right) explained. “What clinched it for me, though, is that I work as an extra for ITV on Emmerdale and one of my fellow extras was deaf, which made me realise how hard it is to communicate with somebody who can’t hear you.
“I noticed him getting a bit lost when everyone was talking among themselves, so I tried to learn a couple of signs and being in that situation really motivated me to look for a course and I saw that York College was doing this taster session, so thought I had to do it. We learnt the basics during the taster sessions like the alphabet, numbers, greetings, short questions and signing my name. I’m planning to do the full course now.”
Next up is Anna Hinchcliffe, who enrolled on our Introduction to Bricklaying taster session because she and her partner harbour aspirations of building their own home.
“I came to learn a new skill and me and my partner are potentially fancying building a house one day, so I thought it would be good to have a go and, even if we don’t end up building it ourselves, it would be useful to learn these skills and find out more about them,” Anna pointed out. “I learnt lots of new terms like putting things on plumb and about the different parts of a brick and how the bricks at the bottom of a house are different to the ones further up, which I didn’t know before and was really interesting.
“They’re the things that you look at every day, but don’t really think about. I think it would be really cool to come back and do the actual full course and see how far we could go with it.”
Finally, we also spoke to Julie Herrington, who is a regular at our Showcase events and, on this occasion, tried the Introduction to Chocolatier taster session.
Julie admitted that the cookery skills she has acquired with us have helped not only improve her talents in the kitchen, but also saved money off her weekly shopping list.
She reasoned, too, that people should not feel intimidated by techniques they perhaps feel are beyond their capabilities.
“I’ve done a few taster sessions with the College before, including the patisserie course and pasta making and the chocolatier one caught my eye because it’s chocolate and everybody just has a fear of chocolate making,” Julie said. “I’ve studied at York College before, so I know that the staff are friendly and approachable – the tutors make it so easy, so you should never be afraid of trying one of the courses.
“I’ve gone from never touching anything in a kitchen before to going through all the levels and understanding what and why you’re doing it. I know there was a bread-making session (during the Showcase) as well.
“People can think bread-making is so complicated but, if you come to York College, the fears you might have when you walk through the door will not be fears anymore when you walk out of it. I’m hoping I can go home and start making chocolate, because I make my own pasta all the time now.
“I don’t buy it anymore, because it’s just so nicer and so easy to make, as well as being very cheap – it’s just a bit of flour and an egg and that’s it. I bought myself a pasta maker to roll it out.
“People think it’s difficult to make pasta and it’s difficult to make bread, but actually it’s not when you’ve got a few key skills. You can open up a whole new world of cooking and, especially with the economic crisis that we are in, it is cheaper to make and can go a lot further.
“During the chocolatier session, we watched a demonstration of how to make the mousse filling and discussed how we start to build up the layers of the chocolate decoration. We used splattering patterns with our fingers to make different shapes and looked at the effects that you get from how the cocoa butter blends with the colour.”
Along with the above taster sessions, other courses that were run at the weekend were Digital Photography, Jewellery, Pottery, Printmaking, Introduction to Painting and Decorating, Introduction to Plumbing, Introduction to Welding, Bread Masterclass and Cupcake Creations.
Please see a collection of photographs from the Showcase below.
To learn more about our adult course provision, please click here
