“What one person can do, another can do. Once you’ve done it, you can teach it. And if you can teach it, it will live.“
– Roy Underhill
Broom Tying
Broom tying combines material awareness, muscle memory, and aesthetic restraint. Once common in households across North America, the skill has largely vanished from everyday life. This class revives those methods using natural broomcorn, twine, and hand tools. We’ll explore the cultural history of broom making, regional variations in form, and the meditative value of repetitive craft. Students will leave with both a handmade broom and the confidence to tie more.
Coopering
Coopering once supplied the world with barrels, buckets, and tubs, all made without modern adhesives or fasteners. This course introduces the foundational techniques of stave construction and hooping, using hand tools and historical methods. Students will construct a small coopered vessel while exploring the historical role of coopers in agricultural, maritime, and domestic economies. Emphasis is placed on grain orientation, shaping geometry, and the beauty of practical joinery..
Beginning Blacksmithing
This hands-on introduction to blacksmithing covers the core skills of working hot steel with hammer and anvil.
Students will learn how to manage a forge fire, shape metal using basic tools, and create useful items such as hooks, nails, and simple hardware. No prior experience is required.
Hand Tool Woodworking: Making a Box
Explore the fundamentals of woodworking with simple tools and timeless techniques.
This beginner-friendly class introduces layout, cutting, and assembly of a small lidded box. You’ll learn about tool use, wood grain, and the basics of joinery—all without power tools. Perfect for beginners or those looking to reconnect with tactile, unplugged craft.
Slow Craft: Being Intentional in a Noisy World
Best for: tech conferences, maker festivals, digital wellness panels
In a culture of speed, craft asks us to slow down.
This talk explores the philosophy of slow craft—an approach to making that values attention, rhythm, and relationship with materials over efficiency or scale. Drawing on the practices of traditional trades like blacksmithing, joinery, and broom-tying, it examines how working with the hands cultivates not only skill, but patience, presence, and meaning.
Slow craft is a form of resistance to disposability, distraction, and the pressures of constant productivity. Whether building a box with hand tools or tying a broom stalk by stalk, the act of intentional making becomes a way to reclaim time, focus, and care. This talk offers a framework for reconnecting with the physical world through deliberate work—one cut, one joint, one strike at a time.
Preindustrial Crafts: Tools, Trades, and the Wisdom of Use
Best for: folk schools, heritage events, educational institutions, slow design forums
Before electricity and automation, there were tools built for rhythm, repair, and resilience.
This lecture introduces the world of preindustrial crafts—blacksmithing, woodworking, and coopering—as systems of knowledge rooted in material literacy and community need. Far from obsolete, these skills offer insight into sustainability, intentional living, and the long arc of human ingenuity. We’ll explore how these trades worked together, how they’re being revived today, and what they teach us about labor, dignity, and design.