3 Roots education stresses sustainable, local, creative learning

Sustainability, keeping it local and being creative are so essential to Shannon Carey that she used those pillars as the premise for the name of her art and education business.

3 Roots education opened this spring in downtown Ridgefield and offers art, gardening and cooking courses for infants, adults and all ages in between. The courses range from infant drop-in art classes to wine and wisdom adult art classes to indoor gardening. Carey breaks down the courses for preschool, early elementary, upper elementary, middle school, young adult and adult.

“Sustainable, local and creative — those are the three roots,” she stated. “We make our own supplies for art and use local plants and flowers for pigment. I simply got done using spinach as a pigment for watercolors.”

Carey, a 23-year-old Ridgefield resident, operates three Roots education out of Ridgefield flowers at 15 Danbury road within Girolemetti court. Carey is the supervisor of the flower shop and arranged thru owner Mary Jones to have courses held there.

“It’s a healthy partnership,” she said, adding that being a part of the community is a part of the commercial enterprise’s mission.

She additionally teaches art at Sphere CT, a Ridgefield-based totally nonprofit organization that serves adults with disabilities.

Carey is a credentialed artwork trainer and wrote her senior thesis on sustainable products in art, a subject inspired by a classmate who had a reaction to ink and was not able to attend the art class to any extent further.

Even as teaching art at an elementary school in Tennessee, Carey was surprised to learn many of the products utilized by her college students had been poisonous and terrible for the environment.

“I continued to dig and uncovered there are so many things we can make in extra sustainable approaches. people don’t think about where their art supplies come from,” she stated. “From crayons to tablecloths, cleaning supplies to make-up, domestic gardening to domestic cooking, there's lots to discover with regards to sustainable practices. And we aim to teach it all.”

Carey makes her personal crayons with beeswax and herbal pigments. Her guides at three Roots schooling encompass all natural watercolor, all natural printmaking, all natural textile layout and seedling gardening.

“I’m just doing my small part to spread the word and why it’s important,” she stated. “I want to be a community resource and want all and sundry to experience comfortable coming right here.”

Carey keeps a small garden outside the entrance to Ridgefield flowers. The vegetables and vegetation are used for pigments and classes. The large cabbage plot thriving now might be used for a fermented food course.

She hopes to expand in the coming years and open at her own location with a large garden plot.