Class Description:

This class will cover the very basics of weaving on 4-shaft floor looms, from dressing the loom to simple finishing techniques. Open to anyone with any level of experience in weaving or fiber arts, class participants will have the chance to design and weave their very own project to take home.

Sampling and Experimentation: The first part of this course is dedicated to learning the basics of weaving by playing with color, structure, and texture on several pre-dressed looms. Floor loom weaving offers relatively little opportunity for improvisation, so experimenting with sample pieces is important for determining your personal preferences.

Designing New Projects: With so many variables in play, designing your own project for a floor loom can be daunting. We’ll break it down step-by-step so choices like fiber content, warp calculations, and weave structure are less intimidating.

Dressing the Loom: Front-to-back? Back-to-front? If you’ve ever looked up how to warp a loom you know there’s a lot of information, often confusing or conflicting. We’ll cover the basics of front-to-back warping in this class, from winding a warp to threading the heddles to beaming. Where possible, students will be shown multiple techniques so they can choose what works best for them.

Oopsies and Uh-Ohs: Not a day goes by in any weaving studio without something going wrong. Whether it’s a broken warp end, threading error, or loom misbehavior, almost nothing is too catastrophic to fix. We’ll address common mistakes and mishaps as they arise so students have the skillset necessary to tackle weaving woes on their own.

Finishing Techniques: There are as many ways to finish a piece as there are to weave one. We’ll go over wet finishing as well as two different kinds of fringe tying at the end of the week, and students also will be provided resources on other methods to pursue in future projects.

All material costs and daily lunches are included in the course fee at Pine Croft.

Class Description:

This workshop invites students to discover the exciting fundamentals of woodturning and broom-making in a vibrant, open, and collaborative atmosphere. Whether you’re beginning your journey or looking to refine your skills, this experience will empower participants with knowledge of design, tool selection, sharpening, safety, and techniques.

Students will unlock the creativity of combining woodturning with broom-making, crafting unique brooms that showcase their individual personality and expression. They will delve into design and surface embellishment, experimenting with milk paint and texture.

By the end of the workshop, each student will leave with a small collection of finished brooms, along with a deeper understanding of woodturning and broom-making as expressive art forms.

All material costs and daily lunches are included in the course fee at Pine Croft.

Class Description:

The People Collection Stools are made in the Student Craft woodshop by its staff and students. Berea College is one of about 10 work colleges in the country. Students get free tuition to attend, but commit to working 10 hours per week somewhere on campus to offset tuition costs.

The process of making these stools is designed for production. Shop made jigs and fixtures allow us to produce multiples. We’ll usually try to make 30 per production run. We are by no means a furniture factory, but we do aim to be efficient to keep costs down.

You probably won’t operate your home shop as a factory either, but I think you’ll appreciate the efficiency of this approach—and I think it will impact your productivity at home. The act of woodworking is as much, if not more, about developing a process as it is about putting a tool to a piece of wood.

There are many ways to accomplish any of the tasks we’ll be working on through the weekend. I encourage you to inquire about different ways to make tenons, or drill mortises, or shape seats. We can look at these methods as a class and take the path that suits us.

To get a sense of this production mode, over three days we’ll each make two stools. You can see how we make ours and determine how to adapt that process to your home shop.

We’ll use tools that are common to the home shop: Routers, the tablesaw, the band saw, the drill press and the lathe all play a part along the way.

Required Tools:

• Safety Glasses
• Tape Measure
• Pencil
• Random Orbit Sander & Sanding discs (80, 120, 180, 220 grit paper)

All material costs and daily lunches are included in the course fee at Pine Croft.

Class Description:

This six day class will give students a glimpse into the rocking chair production process developed for this chair over at Student Craft.

Katie Bister worked in the Woodcraft studio of Student Craft for all four years of her tenure at Berea College. Adept and willing to try many mediums in the craft world, Katie connected with the idea and practice of chairmaking. Over the course of her senior year, she set about to design a chair for the Student Craft catalog. Working alongside Director of Woodcraft, Rob Spiece the two spent the year iterating different ideas. After 6 months and 12 different chairs, they refined the vision into the People Collection Rocker. It’s an armless rocker that encourages an active participant to knit, strum, or rock backwards if they’d like.

This class will be a solid foundation in chairmaking that covers hand carving the seat, round mortise and tenon joinery, turning for furniture, bent lamination, drilling angled joinery accurately, and building an approach to making that suits your own workshop. We’ll share our jigs and processes used to produce these at Student Craft, but will also show you ways to approach this build with the tooling you have available.

If you don’t have any experience in the world of chairmaking, I’d recommend taking our People Collection Stool class first. This will be an ambitious six days to make this rocker from scratch!

All material costs and daily lunches are included in the course fee at Pine Croft.

Class Description:

Beginner tapestry Weaving is designed to introduce students to tapestry weaving. In this class students will learn weaving on a portable tapestry frame loom from start to finish. We will begin the 3-day class by learning about tapestry and how to warp our looms.  From there students will learn the basic tapestry weaves and 2 rug knotting techniques. Once the basics are understood, students will have the opportunity to create a design and weave it. On the final day of class, we will take our weavings off the loom and learn finishing techniques. We will conclude our experience together with the opportunity to share our successes. All materials will be provided, and students will take their looms home with them. It is suggested that students bring a sketchbook and a few basic drawing materials. No previous weaving experience is necessary for this course.

All materials and daily lunches are provided at Pine Croft.

Class Description:

I bought my first bandsaw over 35 years ago; a 14-inch Central Machinery junker from Harbor Freight.  That machine made a significant difference to my efficiency, and 35 years later, I am still learning fun new ways to get my curve on.

Cutting a smooth and fair curve freehand on a bandsaw is a freeing experience.  But knowing how to generate perfect repeatable curves through good fixturing design is a game changer.  Not only in improving the quality of your curved work, but in making curves efficient enough and accurate enough to open up new design potential for your furniture. Losing old boundaries also tends to free up the imagination.

With bandsawing mastered, bent laminating and steam bending fixtures become more manageable and precise. This three-way approach to the potential of making curved parts opens up your ability to make, design, and imagine furniture that was impractical or even unthinkable before.

We’ll learn several ways to get more precise curves on the bandsaw and how to get perfect bent laminations from bandsawn fixtures.  We’ll also cover steam bending techniques to greatly increase your success in this wood cooking process.

-Brian Boggs

All lunches are provided at Pine Croft.

Class Description:

In many ways, tables are among the simplest furniture forms: a flat surface supported by legs or some form of pedestal. But despite the general simplicity of form, a table can change how a room feels to be in, how it feels to walk around it, and how it directs our paths through a room.  The potential impact on a space and the feeling tables create when not in use makes their artistic value greater than that of their physical function. With that thought in mind, a table’s appearance is of utmost importance in a home. This is by no means a reason to compromise physical function for aesthetics. But we don’t want to lose the balance in how we consider the creation of value when designing a table or any other piece of furniture.

In this class, we will explore the possibilities a table brings to a space, what to consider in its shape and size relative to the room it is in, what function it needs to serve, and why you would choose legs vs. a pedestal or a round top vs. a rectangular one. We will also discuss and explore surface design with veneers and engineered cores, as well as various ways to extend a table.

We will include ideas for dining, side, hall, and coffee tables.  To free us up to play with multiple options, we will only make scale models of ideas you want to explore. This allows more play with form and less concern about full-scale woodworking. You can make several ¼  scale dining table models or a mix of table types.  This class focuses on design rather than a finished table, so we will not build any full-sized. But we will discuss joinery options for each model.  For joints new to you, it will be good to make full-scale joint samples and go over different ways to make these, but I don’t want to spend much class time on joints.

This clarity of focus on form allows the creation of more new designs without the fuss of complex fixturing for mortise and tenons.

Tools you will need to bring:

Coping saw,

Carving knives

Architect’s scale

Drawing paper (8 x 11 is the minimum size)

Pencils

Gum eraser

Straight edge you can cut against

Utility knife

Tape measure

12″ tri-square

A few chisels (¼”, ½”/3/4”)

All lunches are provided at Pine Croft.

Class Description:

All material costs and daily lunches are included in the course fee at Pine Croft.

Class Description:

This workshop is an excellent next step for anyone who has already begun to learn the fundamentals of woodturning. Beth leads participants through a series of projects that utilize proper spindle and end-grain turning techniques to create boxes, vessels, and bowls. Additionally, students learn to make custom tools for hollowing and specialized applications.
Beth emphasizes safe and efficient tool handling throughout. She also creates a supportive atmosphere in which students can develop their creative voices. Among the decorative skills she covers are architectural carving for twists and patterns, offset turning, and pyrography.

This is also the class where woodturning and printmaking collide! Learn the basics of woodturning to create cylinders.

Learn the basics of relief printing and then carve your imagery on cylinders to create beautiful, rolled prints. When the prints are dried students will use the bandsaw and lathe to create personalized containers and sculptures, connecting paper to wood in a variety of ways. Printmakers expand printmaking into 3D.  Turners learn how 2D can elevate the objects you are making. Learn how to safely use the lathe, Bandsaw and carving tools. This is a perfect class to get a taste of two great art forms and make fun personalized objects, in a supportive creative atmosphere!

All material costs and daily lunches are included in the course fee at Pine Croft.