Courses

This course offers a full immersion into the signature tree of the boreal forest: the white birch. The objects that can be made using all parts of this tree are many. Using a slojd knife, students will carve the freshly harvested green wood into butter spreaders, cheese boards, coats hooks…

Cranks wind, gears turn, dragons chomp and birds fly. Welcome to the whimsical world of automata: simple wooden machines that delight and amaze. Join Cecilia Schiller for a four-day exploration of the art of making wooden machines and the mechanisms that make things move. Starting with the design process in…

Make the wood chips fly!  This course is for students ready to stand at the chopping block and learn to use classic wooden bowl-carving hand tools – the adze, axe, gouge and push knife.  During this class, topics including selection of wood stock, elements of bowl design, strategies for hand-hewing,…

Another appropriate name for this course could simply be: “Let’s Keep Carving!” It is an inspiring immersion for students with prior carving experience, including seasoned figure carvers, as well as new-to-carving folks who have just completed the three-day Scandinavian Style Figure Carving course. Need some inspiration or a few new…

This course provides beginning carvers with the opportunity to carve several figures in the Scandinavian flat-plane style. Beginning with tool sharpening, the course provides hands-on carving experience as you complete a figure in step-by-step fashion. You will then paint the figures and apply a final oil finish. After this initial…

The timeless beat of the drum stems back to a time when we made our own music literally from the ground up. Before drum shops and before Putumayo, materials were hand-harvested from the forest to create wonderful sounds and were used to find rhythm in the world. In this course…

Meet Jock Holmen, the “Norwegian Termite:” when it comes to carving on timbers, you can’t “stump” him. From blueberries to little people, lettering to logos, Jock can help you chisel your ideas into white pine as you design and carve decorative embellishments for your home. Choose from a variety of…

Carving wooden spoons is an old folk tradition in Scandinavia, where carvers crafted spoons for home use, seasonal income and to give as gifts. The techniques, designs and embellishments commonly used today are deeply embedded in centuries of cultural history, but spoon carving is also a vibrant and growing craft…