We’ll get there. Only about 10 weeks until Aspen Golann shares her creative energies and immense talents with Berea during her “Intro to Carving” class, scheduled to begin October 8th. It’s been a long time coming. It’s challenging to be a school when you don’t host classes! But that’s the predicament COVID put us in – waiting and cancelling and pushing the schedule back. Soon, hopefully, we’ll return to a full bench room, the sounds of carving tools and mallets, and the joys of a shared meal.
I’m excited for guests to join us again in the Pine Croft shop (formally The Kelly Mehler School of Woodworking). Kelly closed it, sometime around 2014-’15, to focus on his health. In 2019, Berea College purchased the full property and reopened the shop as “The Woodworking School at Pine Croft.” Kelly and I both taught classes at Pine Croft in the early summer of 2019. We made plans for our first full season in 2020, which were cancelled in early March of last year, along with the plans of so many other craft schools. I loved our line up of guest instructors for our initial, full season of 2020; Megan Fitzpatrick, Brendan Gaffney, Michael Puryear, Cathryn Peters, Kelly Mehler, Pete Galbert, with Nancy Hiller hitting cleanup (baseball reference).
We created a smaller schedule for the spring of 2021, which seemed appropriate given the level of uncertainty with community health. We took a cautious approach (and will continue to take a health conscience approach) to the pandemic and knew we might need to push the classes back. Which happened around February. Aspen and Megan (the Dutch Tool Chest) rescheduled their classes for October. We’re thankful Aspen and Megan can join us in Berea and worked with us through the changes. But we’re tired of changes and are all ready to teach again. Pine Croft is ready to host classes and welcome guests to Berea.
Feels like we’ve taken the long road to get Pine Croft to the starting line. It’s nearing, and we couldn’t be more excited.
–andy glenn
