Upcoming Classes
Making and Carving a Brettstuhl
North Bennet St. School
Boston, MA
March 18-23, 2025
Learn to make a vernacular, two-board chair. Practice staked-chair construction and incorporate sliding dovetail battens. Then, work from a template or your own original design to decorate the back of your chair with pierced shapes and shallow relief carvings. All levels welcome.
​
​https://nbss.edu/community-education/
​
Carved and Decorated Treen
The Woodworking School at Pinecroft
Berea, KY
April 5-6, 2025
Carved and decorated treen, or handmade domestic objects made of wood, have been a part of daily life for thousands of years. Whether intended for use by the maker themself or as a gift for a loved one (or, not without historical precedent, a potential loved one – romantic!), this form has endured as a way to express personal sentiment. In this class, we’ll attempt to reconcile symbolic language with the everyday object.
Though the covered concepts are adaptable to other forms, participant’s focus will be on carving one of several types of combs. Templates from historical examples will be provided, but personal design and flourish is, of course, encouraged.
We’ll explore a number of decorative elements: pierced shapes, punched motifs, carved patterns and hand lettering. Our goal will be to establish a vocabulary of our own by selecting, reinterpreting, and arranging elements that can work together.
​
Introduction to Pattern Carving
Peters Valley School of Craft
May 10 – May 11, 2025
In this class, each participant will develop their own vocabulary of carved patterns. We’ll ask how to capture shadow, how to reinterpret historic (or even prehistoric) patterns, how and where to use comfortable shapes and lines, and how to compile and arrange decorative elements within the form. Using an assortment of gouges, we’ll spend time learning tool strokes and carving motifs, gaining inspiration from historic furniture, architectural carving, folk art, tattoos, plants, flowers, scaled animals, and so on.
​
​
Designing a Three-Legged Stool
Arrowmont School of Arts and Crafts
June 8-13, 2025
This workshop will consider the three-legged stool as an entryway to exploring an idea. Over the course of this workshop students will dive in, whether that idea might be a design principle, decorative motif, attractive line, or a specific intention of use. Students will use traditional chairmaking tools – the froe, drawknife, and spokeshave – to split and shape components by hand from a freshly felled log. Then, by applying a combination of greenwoodworking techniques and aesthetics students will design and build their own unique stool comfortable for our bodies and functional in our daily lives. The focus of this class will be on handwork, improvisation, and intuitive craft: where do the material properties, the vocabulary of tools, and functionality meet?
​
​