Courses

Fully experience the craft of making a traditional birch bark basket for the gathering and storage of berries or anything you please. This course includes time focused both on basket making and on material preparation. Day one includes an extended session in the woods to harvest the birch bark in…

Scandinavians and Russians commonly kept small, flat birch bark boxes in their pockets in the 18th and 19th century for the then-popular taking of snuff. Larger finger and lap jointed boxes often held coffee, tea or salt. Today they continue to made and hold keepsakes, buttons, spare change, jewelry, dried…

Birch trees have a variety of uses that can be seen all around North House. Discover the sturdiness and the beauty of the White Paper Birch by weaving with its bark. In this day-long course, you will learn about the bark harvest, how to process & treat the materials, and…

Whether woven into a basket, a shoe, a backpack or necklace, birch bark is a beautiful material, with natural tones of white, grey, brown, yellow and even pink depending on the tree, the harvest and the layer of the bark. Highlight the variations of the bark (and your fine motor…

The ash splint lidded basket has its roots on the north eastern seaboard of North America amongst early indigenous tribes, such as the Micmac and Passamaquaddy. Fine examples of workmanship can be found in collections in New York and Boston, to name but a few places. In this course, students…

The black ash pack basket: it's beautiful, highly functional and can be made using simple materials. The first part of the class will be spent preparing black ash splint for your basket by pounding a locally harvested log. Next, you'll weave the basket and finish it with a rim, handle,…

The knutkorg, or knot basket, is a classic style of Scandinavian basket. Constructed from willow and split cedar, the basket is an interlocking framework of bent and notched pieces. The pieces fit together like an ingenious puzzle, making the knutkorg a craft marvel. Over three days, students will learn to…

An abundance of easily accessed and harvested native materials very suitable for basketry grow in our northern region. In this class we will make a frame with strikingly red osier dogwood and then weave a basket with a handle using a mixture of cattail and iris leaves, basswood fiber, willow…

North House is pleased to welcome returning scholar, artisan, and teacher Vladimir Yarish, of Veliky Novgorod, the capitol of Novgorod Province, Russia to teach this tutorial course. After scouring museums and archaeological sites all around the world, Vladimir has authored a definitive guide focused on the history and myriad traditional…

Work with locally-harvested sweet grass, cattails, and sedges during this two-day class while learning the art of coiling a sweetgrass basket. We'll incorporate an elegant agate as a base for the basket and make a small birch bark ornament wrapped in sweetgrass. Hands-on instruction provides students with an introduction to…

If you’ve been out berry picking in August, you may have encountered the problem of discovering bountiful harvests of raspberries AND blueberries at the same time: what to do?! The two berry basket with two compartments is a perfect answer-- and it also works for quarantining paper clips from binder…

Start your holiday season off with a weekend on the North House Folk School campus weaving traditional and contemporary ornaments from birch bark. Explore a range of birch bark weaving, from the simple bead to the 3-dimensional birch bark star. Working with colorful embellishments, students will create a small collection…