Winterers' Gathering is happening November 20-22! Join us for a weekend of celebration, presentations, dancing, craft, and the Arctic Film Festival. Free and open to all. 

Be part of the Winterers’ Gathering fun by volunteering! Volunteering is a great way to get connected with the North House community. Sign-ups are open now! Click here to volunteer.

Olivia Hochstadt is a fiber artist and Resident Artisan in the Artisan Development Program. Coming from New England, Olivia writes about discovering new dye plants and traditions in northern Minnesota.  

Hello Northern friends! This is your resident New Englander chiming in.

I am a knitwear designer, yarn spinner, and natural dyer using plants I forage for. If you have seen someone clad in knitwear picking leaves or flowers on the roadside, it’s probably me! Coming from New England, the dye plants in northern Minnesota are completely different. One of my goals being here is to explore the breadth of dye plants that root me exactly where I am: hawkweed, Norway Maple, chokecherry, etc (thanks to Theresa Hornstein’s book Invasive Color). In September, I assisted Tasha Miller Griffith’s Natural Dyes and Beyond class and learned how to treat plant fiber fabrics for natural dyeing. Tasha’s recipes helped me expand my application of natural dyes and sew garments from my naturally dyed fabric! 

Dyes used (top to bottom): cochineal, tansy, jewelweed, black knight scabiosa, chokecherry

My fiber obsession has long been a lifestyle. In 2021, I apprenticed with master fiber artists in Shetland, the Faroe Islands, and Chile through a fellowship I was awarded by my alma mater Colby College. In Chile, I worked with a Mapuche (the local Indigenous tribe) woman named Paty Ayelef to learn the native way of foraging, naturally dyeing, and spinning wool. Creating a color palette of natural dyes from southern Chile inspired me to learn about the various dye plants in my home. From jewelweed to buckthorn, I discovered a wealth of colors and created my business KO Knits.

My interest in foraging has led to a fascination with harvesting plants to weave baskets. Recently, when some women from the Grand Portage National Monument were at North House demonstrating 18th century crafts, one of them showed me how to use dandelion stems to make cordage. The way the stems twisted and held together while letting their deep golden color shine through was glorious.

I pushed the idea further and twined a basket with dandelion stems which brought out their purple color. 

When I accepted ADP, I thought my purpose was to grow my business and experience in fiber. But since then, I have found it’s much bigger than that. I’m really here to build a life in craft. Not just an income, but a way of being deeply connected to the seasons, nature, and making what I need to live on a daily basis. How can I learn the gifts of the plants around me and incorporate them into the way I live? As the year unfolds, I’m excited to learn what the plants have to teach me to ground my life in Grand Marais.

The 2026 Arctic Film Festival lineup is here! Join us November 20-22 for over a dozen films that share some of the incredible stories of the North. 

The Great Gear and Ski Sale is happening November 21 at Winterers' Gathering! Sell gear you no longer need and find great bargains for the upcoming season. Learn more and find a gear registration form here.

We're honored to welcome Kayleen Ward-Peter as our Winterers' Gathering Featured Speaker! Kayleen is Gwich’in from Venetie, Alaska, a small village located north of the Arctic Circle. Join her for her presentation Saturday, November 21 at 7pm. 

Meet Elizabeth Belz, one of our store's Featured Makers! As a blacksmith, her work is made to last forever. Find spoons, skewers, and more made by Belz here. 

Cooper Ternes is one of this season's Featured Makers in our store! Cooper is a woodturner who makes rolling pins, bowls, snack boards, and more. Find his work in our online store!

Cal Stalvig is a sculptor and Resident Artisan in the Artisan Development Program. In his first post, Cal writes about moving to Grand Marais, the language of wood, and inviting the past into the present. 

I've been making things for as long as I can remember. My earliest sculptures, The Vacuum Cleaner Series, were made in second grade and constructed from wood. Behind the theatre where my Grampa directed plays, I'd cull the scrap pile in search of 2x4s and plywood I could glue and screw together. Wood was plentiful, forgiving (up to a certain point), and could be worked unsupervised with the tools I had at hand. More than three decades later, wood remains a vital material in my art practice.

My name is Cal Stalvig. I'm a sculptor born on the South Shore of Gichi-gaami (Lake Superior). For much of my life, wood has been a material through which I've expressed ideas, thanks to its accessibility and relatively low barrier to entry. Over the years, I've developed a certain literacy without studying its lineage and language too deeply. I've come to North House to make a technical and linguistic leap in my art practice and career.

ADP Studio in Grand Marais

I want to learn better woodcarving and joinery techniques, about trees and forests, how to harvest and prepare logs, maintain tools, and operate a chainsaw with confidence. I want to create relationships with people who have tirelessly carried the knowledge, traditions, and stories of woodworking, so I can in turn continue the parts of the transmission. More than anything, I'm excited by what will emerge from a deeper relationship with wood itself and the stewards of its past, present, and future.

Learning to carve with a knife

Alongside sculpture, I operate a small candlemaking business. Fire, beeswax, and the intimate rituals of tending a flame have occupied my imagination for years. During my time here, I hope to push the material and form of beeswax candles in new artistic and technical directions, while building a sustainable business rooted in the restoration of fire craft.

Candles for sale in the North House School Store

My sculptures are informed by two distinct histories that meet in my own inheritance: Black fugitivity and the persecution of those condemned as witches and heretics in European courts. Working in the folk traditions of ghost stories and haunting, I create objects that invite the past into the present. I am interested in what survives persecution and migration, what knowledge remains alive in our hands, and what we reconstruct from the fragments left behind. The witch, the wise person, the griot, green man, and craftsperson are figures I invoke to help me in my work. Through sculpture, I seek to make visible the presence of those who came before us. Like ghosts, they continue to possess our bodies through the muscle memory and eyes we depend on to create our respective crafts.

Sculpture made from former ADP leftover materials

I'm honored to be part of ADP Cohort X alongside Olivia and Ian. Beyond the studio, I'm looking forward to learning to sail aboard the Hjørdis, traveling through Sweden to meet North House colleagues in January, making a sauna and design pilgrimage to Finland, and visiting the Steilneset Memorial in Vardø, Norway. Back at our ADP home, I’ll be spending plenty of time knitting in our bay window, baking sweet rolls, and getting to know this community. If you'd like to visit my studio in Grand Marais, share a story, or simply say hello, please reach out. I'd love that!

Sketches in wood: form material exploration

January-June 2027 courses are now open for registration! Find new craft courses in everything from blacksmithing to basketry to boatbuilding. View all courses here!

Is the waitlist worth it? If the class you want to register for is full, here's why the best thing to do is to get on the waitlist. 

Liz O’Brien is a local fiber artist, a frequent North House student, and was part of North House’s Artisan Development Program. When looking for a new class to take, Liz was excited to see a Beginning Spinning class with Martha Owen scheduled for Fiber Week. There was just one problem: the class was already full, and there was a waitlist. 

As North House has grown, many classes fill up quickly, sometimes soon after registration opens. This can feel disappointing for students who go to register for a class only to find that it’s already filled. Some students wonder if it’s worth registering for a waitlist, especially if said waitlist is long. And while there’s no guarantee that a spot will open, there is more movement on waitlists than many people realize. 

When students add their name to a waitlist, it sends a clear signal to our Program Managers that certain classes are popular and that there’s demand for more sessions.

Despite Martha Owen’s class being full, Liz decided to add her name to the waitlist. A few months later, she got a call from North House: a spot had opened up in the class, and it was hers if she wanted it. 

“That had been a pie-in-the-sky one for me for a long time, to try to get into Martha’s class,” Liz said. “I was really excited that I got in—it was a nail-biter since I was on the waiting list, but I got the call and got in.”

How Waitlists Work

Most of the time, North House waitlists run in chronological order; the person who registered for the waitlist first is the first one to get contacted when a spot opens up. In these cases, people on the waitlist typically have a day or two of time (depending on how soon the class starts) to decide if they want to take the spot before it’s offered to the next person on the list. This means that it’s still best to register for a class early, even if you’re on the waitlist—you’ll have a better chance of getting into the class you want the higher up on the list you are. 

However, there are times when a student drops a class last minute. When a class is scheduled to start between one and two weeks away, those on the waitlist get contacted in the order they registered, but without the wait time to decide. And if a class starts within one week, everyone gets contacted at once, and the spot goes to whoever replies first. This means that while there is no guarantee, there is still a chance of getting into a class even if you are farther down on a long waitlist. 

If there's a last-minute opening in a class, all students on the waitlist get contacted at once, so it's still worth it to add your name even if the waitlist is long. 

“It is absolutely worth it to add your name to a waitlist if the class you want to take is full,” said Rachel Andrus, Front Office Host at North House. “The chance of a spot opening in a class is something that cannot be predicted, but it does happen regularly. Our front office staff team typically calls at least one waitlist per day. And if there are already many names on the list, I still recommend adding yourself, because if a spot does open, many times we end up working our way down the waitlist as folks who added their name have made other plans and are unable to accept the spot.”

When Liz O’Brien checked into her Beginning Spinning class, she met several other students there who had previously been on the waitlist.

“I think that speaks to the fact that no matter how long a waitlist is, there’s still a chance you can get in,” Liz said. “Schedules change, people get sick, things come up, so it’s always worth getting on the waitlist even if you think you’re not going to get into the class."

Registration opens August 27 (or August 26 for members) for January—June  2027 courses. Find everything you need to know about registration, waitlists, and more here. 

The Craft Education Internship is a year of change. In this blog post, Anna Crabtree writes about a life in motion, and about growing in relationship with the landscape, with materials, and with each other. 

Before arriving at North House, while pressing a lilac-purple, cappuccino-filled mug to my chest, listening to its warmth, pondering my wants and wishes for growth, I was struck, full-force, with the intangible desire to know the world. All of it. 

On a concrete level, I was curious: what would it be like to see with eyes capable of discerning proportion, shadow, color, perspective, force, and light? What would it mean to distinguish the rhythmic notes and melodies of the world's whistling, buzzing, humming, and booming? Could I swallow the flavors of the consumable, savor the surfaces of the indigestible, and inhale the hues of the earth into my lungs? And how would I feel if I could truly feel it all—texture, temperature, movement, depth, stillness, and soul?

This desire itself is not astonishing. It is fundamentally human to be curious, to want competence, and to seek relationship. What is astonishing is the choice to seek material knowledge in an age focused on the digital—to recognize the value of a relationship with the physical world and our ability to create tangibility within it.

So, with all of this desire, behold! I became an intern at North House Folk School, where knowledge is a conversation between my hands and the earth. And here, I am finding intimacy with the world.

I am learning the knowledge of motion—of weaving, grabbing, twisting, pulling, prodding, compressing, expanding, and releasing. With every action of my hands, I find that we are all moving, all in transition, all forming, transforming, and decaying. My hands and the axe they hold; the wood being carved and the tree from which it came; the wooden floor supporting us; the timbered building containing us; and the sky and lake and forests beyond. We are all in perpetual movement, perpetual change. 

If I pause, close my eyes, and listen, I can almost feel my hands form, grow, wrinkle, and return to the earth. The axe forms and falls apart, the tree rises, collapses, becomes a spoon by my hands, and whittles away. The floor assembles, creaks, and falls; the building rises and falls, rises and falls, rises and falls. And suddenly, I awaken to look at Lake Superior. Together we inhale, exhale, form, and release.

We are all changing, and we are all changing one another. In this movement, I am finding that knowledge of the world is not some abstract competency of the senses, but a dynamic partnership of transformation. As my hands catalyze change—as the wood bends and the floor creaks—I must ask: what kind of partner do I want to be?

So I am learning how to be in relationship too—how to love and care, nourish and hold, give generously and freely, and love without possession. When these actions are ascribed to our partnership with the world, two brilliant things happen. 

First, the world is uplifted. Our landscape and creations are honored, transformed, loved, shared, and allowed to eventually return to the soil, just as we would hope for ourselves and for our kin.

Second, we are uplifted. When I am making, my mind quiets, and all attention flows to the creation I am altering. The world and I become intertwined, and my definition of self and selflessness blurs. I wonder, if all my attention lies in the world instead of within, where is my true self? Am I my body, or the creation, or both? Either way, what a gift it is to be intertwined with the earth! In that space of time, in that act of service—in fully giving myself and my energy to the uplifting of another being—I am nurtured. We uplift another, and in return, we are uplifted.

This is an ancient knowledge, a knowing of motion and relationship. An education of problem-solving, oral traditions, and treating the environment and our bodies as teachers. I cannot say where this way of knowing will lead. All I can say is, I feel the change. 

I fall asleep feeling things in my hands now—grainy wooden handles, steadfast fibers, and metal that sucks the heat out of my fingertips. Sometimes, my body knows things before my mind does, finding solutions before my brain has even processed problems. My attention spends more time in the world than in my mind. And when I look deep into the depths of the landscape, our creations, or my friends' eyes, I see cycles of source, transformation, and renewal. I see the transformed, the transformers, and the transition we are all in.

Every day, I watch people come here to grow closer to themselves and to the world. I witness a flow of learners and makers through this beautiful crossroads meant to nourish, transform, and release. What a gift to see my dreams sprout to fruition, and to do so in a community of people desiring the same relationship to their hands and their landscapes. 

Thank you Lake Superior, friends, hands, body, and heart, for these gifts of knowledge and growth. Thank you world, for nourishing the changing and for the continuous opportunity to become. 

What's the point of making beautiful things when it feels like the world is unraveling? In this blog post, Lauren Newby reflects on beauty as a reason to care for one another and for the places that sustain us. 

“While men work in the village, Anne is carving in the forest. I imagine her holding the axe in her left hand and a stone in her right. With the stone, she taps the butt of an axe so that the blade pokes its way through the soft fibers of the pine. Around her, seven cows are grazing. In their stomachs, grass turns to butter.” D is for Daughter by Elina Birkehag

While traveling this winter, I found a book of photos, poetry, and essays describing the lives of female shepherds from Dalarna, Sweden, from the seventeenth through the twentieth century. The photos document inscriptions left on tree trunks by girls and women who left their villages to live and work together on the fäbod, or summer farm, where they grazed cattle. Their existence and stories remain on the trunks of Scotch pines, hundreds of years old, with a coded language of dates, initials, and notes to one another.

The pines of the fäbod are an archive left by women whose lives were otherwise romanticized or forgotten. The shepherds teach me about life in the forest, as a place of labor, companionship, and memory. 

Another essay in the collection To Speak of Trees by Amelia Groom and M. Ty, extends that conversation. The writer reflects on photographer Zoe Leonard, whose images of New York City trees show trunks swallowing metal fences, branches catching plastic bags, and people gathering under their shade. The trees carry evidence of cities and industry, yet continue to grow, shelter, adapt, and witness.

Leonard questioned the value of making such quiet photographs during the AIDS crisis. She told her friend that while the world was unraveling, she felt she was "just photographing clouds." His response has stayed with me: "The photographs are so beautiful, and that's what we're fighting for. We're being angry and complaining because we have to, but where we want to go is back to beauty. If you let go of that, we don't have anywhere to go.”

This sentiment has become an unexpected companion this summer. Beauty may not be an escape from difficult reality, but it is a reason we care for one another and the places that sustain us. The shepherds' carvings and notes to each other tell of fear, love, loneliness, boredom and friendship. Leonard’s photographs complicate the romance of nature, depicting trees holding fences and plastic while still growing and sheltering people. 

I keep returning to those images as I spend time outside, learning from generous friends, and teaching. Working with wood has allowed me to hold these lessons in equanimity. Projects begin with a living tree, and each bowl, table, or chair carries a trace of the tension between care and use, beauty and labor, gratitude and responsibility. Our craft pays attention to material, knowing it deeply so that gratitude accompanies use, and beauty is inseparable from care. 

Craft has always existed in the contradictions (tension) I feel. Care and use, beauty and labor, gratitude and responsibility live together. The women’s marks were not only decorations or records, but evidence of lives that held joy and hardship, companionship and solitude.

Join us for an unforgettable week at Craft Exploration Camp for Families! Spend 5 days beside Lake Superior sampling favorite crafts at the folk school, all rooted in our relationship with the natural world. 

The sailing season is underway! Book a sail on our schooner Hjørdis and experience Grand Marais from the water. Sails through late August are open for booking now. 

After a long winter, May on the North Shore feels like being reborn. In this blog post, intern Teagan Weiss writes about the bounty of spring ephemerals, and approaching the halfway point of the internship. 

There is no sweeter gift than the month of May. Here in the Northwoods, the winter months envelop us in their deep quiet and darkness, bidding us to slow down, rest, and retreat. The nights are long, the light is sparse, and the wind will bite if you’re not prepared. We bundle up and enjoy the stark beauty of the season, and then it's March and then it's April, and we hunker down and endure what some of us can no longer bring ourselves to enjoy. 

And then it's May. I am not being dramatic when I say that May on the North Shore feels like being reborn. That first warm breeze, the precious fuzz on the earliest willow buds, the long-awaited symphony of spring peepers is nothing short of sacred. It feels like the earth has been mustering all of the goodness and greenness just below the surface to finally burst forth in the most brilliant display of aliveness. It takes a moment for all of your senses to adjust to the sudden abundance after the long season of scarcity. 

Left: Dutchman's Breeches (Dicentra cucullaria); Right: Carolina Spring Beauty (Claytonia caroliniana). 

The jewels of May are the spring ephemerals: woodland wildflowers that live their entire lifecycles between snow-melt and leaf-out. These hardy little plants sprout, blossom, and are pollinated in that brief window of direct sunlight available between the ground thawing and the leaves emerging in the forest canopy. 

Bloodroot (Sanguinaria canadensis) is my favorite of the spring ephemerals because when harvested responsibly, it can be used as a natural dye, as discovered by Indigenous peoples thousands of years ago. Some dear friends heard me mention bloodroot dye and offered to let me harvest from the patch growing on their hillside. I had only seen small patches before and was astounded to find their hillside absolutely carpeted in the delicate white flowers. It was a joy to have my hands in the dirt and unearth the quirky little rhizomes.

Another of my favorite spring ephemerals are the wild leeks, called Ramps (Allium tricoccum). The leaves and bulbs are edible and can be sauteed or grilled, or turned into seasoning salt, butter, or pesto! 

What an honor it is to enjoy the fleeting beauty and bounty of these wild plants. Now that the leaves on the trees have fully emerged, the Spring Beauties, Dutchman’s Breeches, Bloodroot, and Ramps have all completed their life cycles and lie dormant underground until they are ready to burst forth again next spring.

The emergence of these gifts of May has me thinking a lot about the seasonality of the Internship program. As an intern, I feel a bit like a spring ephemeral myself. When we arrived in Grand Marais in January, we were welcomed with open arms into a quiet but nurturing community. We spent the winter months “underground” learning the ropes at North House, getting to know our network of neighbors and friends, and pouring our energy into rooting in this place. With a solid foundation beneath us, we are ready to emerge into the bustling pace of Grand Marais in the summer. With many classes, seminars, and facilities shifts under our belts, we now burst forth as deckhands, pizza connoisseurs, and instructors!

As we approach the midway point of the internship, I am acutely aware that there will come an end to this season, as is the nature of all things. The pace of life will slow back down, we will return to the community that has nurtured us, and we will eventually leave this place in the dark and quiet of winter, the same way we arrived. For now, we will take our place in the sun, knowing our time here is fleeting and the gift of a lifetime.    

Every traditional craft practice raises the question: why bother? With hide tanning specifically, this question takes on a different depth. Program Director Jessa Frost writes about Hide Week, and the why of traditional tanning. 

Each week, North House Folk School is transformed by the sights, sounds, and smells of the many traditional crafts taking place. One week, the steady pounding of black ash logs and the scent of freshly baked sourdough wafts through campus. The next, the classrooms hum with the noise of chain mortisers and the smell of white pine timbers. This past week, campus was filled with the distinctive sounds and smells of hide tanning as some of the finest natural tanners in the world gathered for Hide Week to learn, teach, and share about the ancient craft of turning animal skin into durable leather.

But along with the smoky scents and sounds of scraping, a question permeated each classroom: “Why bother with hide tanning?” 

For the uninitiated, “Why bother?” is a pretty fair question to ask any North House student. Few of the things we make here are strictly necessary anymore; for any craft that can be made by hand, there’s usually a cheaper, faster way to produce it elsewhere. But as most folks who try their hand at craft realize, making things is about much more than just production. Craft is pleasurable, beautiful, and useful, and it has the ability to connect us to generational knowledge and the joy of being human. And with hide tanning specifically, the question of “Why bother?” takes on a different depth. 

With a few exceptions, most of our fingertips graze over leather on a daily basis: shoes, belts, furniture, and wallets are common items in our lives. But today, our actual knowledge—let alone experience—of making leather is minimal. Turning the skin of a dead animal into a useful material is a complex, intricate, and physically demanding process. It’s a skill that humans have been at for 40,000+ years, but has long been removed from daily view and looked down upon in many cultures. Now, it’s one of the least-explored crafts, and perhaps understandably so: hide tanning takes a certain kind of grit, and an overcoming of the initial “ick” factor. But Hide Week showed that beyond this, tanning is filled with joy, connection, time-honored knowledge, and deep satisfaction. 

At this year’s Hide Week, North House hosted eight courses with many of our usual talented instructors in tanning and leatherwork. We also welcomed five special guest instructors from the US, Canada, and Sweden. Students from Alaska to Germany to many First Nations territories in Canada and sovereign Native nations in the US to neighbors from just down the road all gathered on campus for a full week spent exploring these traditional skills together. They fleshed, scraped, smoked, and sewed everything from moose hides to beaver tails, from fish skins to cow, deer, sheep, and goat skins. With so many curious learners and teachers present, classes were immersive, and conversations stretched over long fika breaks and late into the evenings.  

As the week progressed, the question of “Why hide tanning?” was asked and answered, and the answers were as varied as the folks who joined in. 

For guest instructors Darla Campbell and Kevin Lewis, visiting from Ministikwan Lake Cree Nation with their mother, Mathilde Lewis, moose hide tanning is a deeply cultural practice rooted in the land, song, and story. It’s a part of generational healing needed to sustain their Cree culture and language. 

For Matt Richards, of Traditional Tanners, natural hide tanning is science and sustainability. It requires not just physical labor but our analytical brains to produce a durable material. Traditional tanning makes use of tons of otherwise-wasted animal byproducts from farming and hunting, and lacks the noxious impact of the industrial tanning process. Can all of our consumer demand for leather be met by traditional methods? No, but Matt points out that the scientific knowledge embedded in traditional methods holds promise to improve the industry and give people what they want: responsibly-produced goods made with care for animals and the planet. 

For Swedish tanner Karl Karlsson, tanning is part of preserving and adding to our collective inheritance of human knowledge, ensuring that after thousands of years, ours is not the generation that loses these skills. His commitment to documentation and exploration of historical sources is part of keeping traditional tanning methods a vibrant practice.

Students also shared their own stories of why—to honor and utilize the animals, to understand the source of the things they use on a daily basis, to feel the joy of doing hard work alongside other people, and to simply experience the magic of the process. It’s an honor to host a gathering like this, and we look forward to the next Hide Week in the years to come. 

A huge thank you to the many hands and hearts that made Hide Week successful: Emily Derke, Nate Johnson, Eric Edgin, Jean Marshall, Leanna Marshall, Erik Carlson, Shelby Gagnon, the Shakopee Mdewakanton Sioux Community, the Grand Portage Band of Lake Superior Chippewa, our many instructors, and of course, the North House staff and our community of supporters.  

On Friday, June 5, join Erik Carlson for Why We Burn Blueberries, a presentation about managing blueberry habitat with prescribed fire. Part of our First Fridays community nights. Photo by Emma Carlson

Inspired by the electric blues of Sweden, Lauren Newby set out to mix the perfect ultramarine for her Windsor armchair, using a combination of milk paint and raw earth pigments. 

In chairmaking, stick chairs, or Windsor-style chairs, are often painted because they are a mix of wood species. Ring porous woods, like white ash and oak, are split out for thin and flexible spindles. The seat is often a softer and lightweight wood for carving, like white pine or poplar. Chairmakers often employ color theory to adjust for the warmth and depth of color. For example, it is most common to put a layer of red under black to create a warm and deep black. 

After I finished a set of armchairs earlier this month, I was looking forward to mixing paint for a very particular shade of blue. I was enamored with the colorful interiors I encountered in Sweden, from the Karin and Carl Larsson home to Sätergläntan’s campus. This electric blue was seen on doors, light fixtures, and furniture. Back in the studio, I was trying in earnest to use a variety of milk paint colors to reach the desired tone. 

Sticking with milk paint for its familiarity, I spent time using color theory to mix up a warm, red-toned, vivid blue, without much success. With many craftspeople and woodworkers in Grand Marais, I connected with my friend Cooper Ternes over the blue I was searching for. He was also on a search for a particular green. And so a playdate for milk paint and color theory was set.

At Cooper’s, not only did we bring our collection of paints and pigments, but we made milk paint from scratch with Johnson’s skim milk and guidance from Make Fresh Milk Paint by Nick Kroll. Cooper, in his second year of the Artisan Development Program, was similarly inspired by the vibrant colors seen in Swedish homes, public spaces, and museums. We mixed vibrant greens and played with earth pigments to get the desired colors: Cooper for bowls and I for chairs and stools. Unable to mix milk paint shades for the vibrant colors, Cooper taught me how to mix raw earth pigments with unpigmented milk paint. The beloved familiarity and texture of milk paint will continue with a whole new world of color possibilities opening by using earth pigments.

Drenched in ultramarine blue and carved poppy finials, the armchairs are complete. I am often after specific colors and hues, and look forward to employing earth pigments to achieve them. Often, the pigments are minerals, and in labs, their molecules can be built with the same particle structures to create “synthetic” pigments. I unearthed a textbook from college we would reference in a color theory class called Artists’ Pigments, a Handbook of their History and Characteristics by Ashok Roy. On ultramarine blue, the name may come from 13th-century Italian painters who treasured the blue “from across the seas.” The pigment was ground from Lapis Lazuli, a rock found in modern-day Afghanistan. In the 14th and 15th centuries, it was as expensive as gold. Renaissance painters used it in reverence for the robes of the Madonna, with less expensive blues and greens built up underneath. It remained expensive until a synthetic was invented in the 19th century, made up of sodium aluminum sulfosilicate.

While waiting for the paint to dry, I have been building kid-sized shave horses for youth programming at North House. I have had the joy of teaching kids how to build with wood over the past few summers, putting hand planes, augers, and drawknives in their hands. I am looking forward to sharing with them the opportunity to use your whole body on a shave horse with a draw knife to carve wood away. To do this, I connected with Jeff Lefkowitz, a chair maker and engineer who has published chair and shave horse plans. We adapted the plans to fit small humans, with four little horses now living at North House for kids. They are sturdy and hold wood so securely, with a few adjustable pieces, heights, and lengths to fit a variety of ages. 

The northwoods change so quickly in the spring. This May, spend a morning outside Birding and Botanizing with naturalists Joe Walewski and Joe Lutz!