Yearly Archives: 2012

25th Annual Homestead Fair

November 23-25, 2012
Friday and Saturday, 9 A.M. To 9 P.M.
& Sunday, 12 noon to 5 P.M.

www.homesteadcraftfair.com

This year, The Ploughshare together with Homestead Heritage is cosponsoring the 25^th annual Homestead Fair on Thanksgiving Weekend, Friday – Sunday, November 23-25, 2012. We invite you to attend.

Activities for the Entire Family

Everyone in the family can watch, learn about and participate in a wide variety of activities, including milking a goat, making soap, helping to raise a timber frame barn, preparing and spinning cotton into yarn or watching a master craftsman fashion a fine Windsor chair straight from a rough log. Other activities include hands-on projects, sheepdog herding, horse farming, pottery, blacksmithing, woodworking, quilting, weaving, spinning, basketry, boot making, cheese making and much, much more.

Great Food

Sample the multicultural dishes from our food court—from hamburgers to Israeli falafels, sourdough pizzas, tacos and gorditas, egg rolls and more, all home made fresh from the farm. Enjoy a delicious sorghum pecan ice-cream cone, apple cider donuts, or a bag of kettle corn while touring our farm on a horse-drawn hay wagon.

Hands-on Activities

Children especially enjoy the hands-on activities, in which they can learn to:

make a candle
weave a basket
build a bird feeder
make a toy sailboat
weave a coaster
hand-hammer a brass spoon
shell popcorn
braid a dog leash
or many others

Adults can try their hand, too, and one of the high points of the Fair is parents working with their children on these projects.

Seminars on Sustainability

The Fair also features a number of in-depth and practical seminars on sustainability. Most seminars last about 30-40 minutes, with a time for questions afterward. Topics are still being finalized in preparation for the Fair, but the preliminary list includes:

Seminars on important aspects of sustainable culture
Small-scale family farming
Sustainable gardening
Raising and caring for backyard chickens and other poultry
Beekeeping
Food preservation
Cheese and bread making
Sustainable energy
Sustainable building with local materials
Creative writing workshop, and more.

Music and Singing

Lively and moving music is a central part of the Fair, with our bluegrass musicians, our Homestead orchestra and adult’s and children’s choirs.

Unique Opportunities for Holiday Shopping

You will also find unique opportunities for holiday shopping with a great variety of unique hand-crafted items, from soaps to leather goods to pottery, quilts and other products made by our craftsmen and children.

Admission

Parking passes—good for all three days of the Fair—are available for $10.00 per vehicle on site, or you can pre-order them for $7.00 online. There is no entrance fee.

More Information about the Fair

For more information, including driving directions, camping and lodging information, food and events at the fair, visit the Homestead Fair website at:

http://www.homesteadcraftfair.com/

We hope to see you at the fair.

Learning to Make Hard Cheeses

Cheeses that each person learns to make and takes home at the end of our hard cheesemaking class. Clockwise, starting at top right, the cheeses are: Colby Jack, Caraway Gouda, Parmesan, Chipotle Cheddar and Pepper Jack

My wife recently attended a class on making hard cheeses at The Ploughshare. Below is her report on the class:

My wife holding the Caraway Gouda cheese that she made in the class. Once it has been turned and pressed in the cheese press several more times, then soaked in a salt brine overnight and aged for about two months, it will be ready to eat.

After having made soft cheeses at home I was ready to forge ahead and learn to make hard cheeses, so this past Saturday I took a class. Rebekah (one of the instructors) began our class with a very informative and thorough discussion on how milk becomes cheese that even included a brief chemistry/biology lesson on pH levels and bacteria. She then demonstrated making two types of cheese starter culture—Mesophilic and Thermophilic. She moved smoothly through each step, describing the varieties and types of cheeses, the cultures and the different processes used to make cheese. She shared stories from her own experiences along with examples of what to do and what not to do.

Rebekah, one of the instructors, explaining about the natural rind on Parmesan cheese.

We made six types of cheeses in the class: Chipotle Cheddar, Caraway Gouda, Parmesan, Colby, Pepper Jack and Monterey Jack.

Transferring curds into the cheese press to make Colby Jack cheese.

Altogether eight people took the class. A mother and son made Pepper Jack together, another team made Parmesan, and everyone else picked one type to make themselves. I chose the Caraway Gouda. We donned our aprons and with our recipe book in hand, took our places at the stoves. As the gallons of milk heated up in gleaming stainless steel stock pots, we chatted and peeked into each other’s pots to see how our cheeses were coming along. Rebekah and Robin bustled about us, answering questions, checking our progress, feeling the curds and giving help wherever it was needed. Although the step–by–step instructions in the recipes were easy to follow, it was reassuring to have such knowledgeable instructors nearby the first time we made these cheeses.

Wrapping the cheese with cheesecloth in preparation for aging it. Rebekah also discussed several other ways to prepare the cheese before aging.

By lunchtime, the milk had turned into curds and whey. We packed the curds into molds, placed them under the wooden cheese presses, added weights to the levers and waited 30 minutes. Then we pulled the cheese out of the molds, flipped it, repacked it in the molds and pressed it again for 30 minutes. We repeated this step several more times, and the curds solidified more and more into a beautiful round of cheese. Since the cheese needs to age for two months, we left them with Rebekah and Robin. But we all took home five wedges of the various cheeses that a previous class had made. In about two months, another hard cheese class will reap the results of our efforts.

Cutting up the cheese and packaging it to bring home at the end of the class.

We left at the end of the day with our cheese-making manual, a bag of delicious cheeses and the inspiration and confidence to make hard cheeses at home. With broad smiles, Rebekah and Robin encouraged us with, “Call us if you need any help!”

A Photo-Essay of Our 18th Annual Sweet Sorghum Festival

Nearly 1,500 people came to our 18th Annual Labor Day Open House and Sweet Sorghum Festival yesterday. Here is a photo-essay of the event along with a description of a few of the activities.

Making Sorghum Syrup

Beginning at 3:30 a.m., about a dozen young men began harnessing mules. Using hay wagons, they hauled sorghum canes, which they had cut and loaded the prior day, up to the sorghum press.

Mule-powered Sorghum Press

This sorghum press is considered a “third generation” press, based on its design. It was originally built in the late 1800′s or the early 1900′s. The press, or mill, as it is also called, is powered by a team of mules. The long boom to which the mules are hitched turns several vertically-mounted rollers within the press. Young men feed sorghum canes, a few at a time, into the press. The rollers pull the canes into and through the press, crushing them and releasing the sap. The sap drains into one of three stainless steel holding tanks adjacent to the press, while the “chews” (the crushed canes) are slowly ejected out of the press.

Pressing sorghum with a mule-powered sorghum press

After filling a holding tank, we let the sorghum sap settle for about two hours before processing it further. Having three tanks lets us fill one tank, while sap in the second tank settles, and while sap in the third tank is slowly piped downhill to a wood-fired copper cooking tray, where it is cooked into syrup.

The cooking tray is essentially a large, flat rectangular pan, partitioned with metal baffles every few inches in an alternating pattern. Sorghum sap is gravity fed through a pipe slowly and continuously into the near end of the cooking tray.

A wood fire beneath the tray heats and boils the sap, while it is guided slowly through the tray. As you can see from the steam, a lot of water is boiled off during the cooking process, and by the time the liquid reaches the far end of the tray, it has been distilled into syrup, which occupies about one-tenth it’s original volume as sap. While cooking the syrup, we use skimming tools to skim off impurities, and we slowly guide the syrup along between the baffles. It takes about 30-45 minutes for thin, greenish sap entering the near end of the tray to exit the far end of the tray as a thick, golden-brown syrup.

Cooking sorghum sap to make syrup.

Inside the sorghum house, the finished sorghum syrup flows from the copper wood-fired cooking tray through cheese cloth. After filtering the syrup multiple times through cheesecloth and skimming off the foam, we bottle it up into jars.

Some of the bottled sorghum syrup.

Sustainability Seminars

Meanwhile in the LaRue barn, The Ploughshare gave two seminars, one on sustainable gardening and a second on beekeeping. Both seminars were very informative and very well-attended.

There was a lot of interest in our sustainable gardening and beekeeping seminars.

Grinding Blue Corn

Year-round, we grind wheat and other grains in our gristmill. In addition to this, Joe Claborn set up a portable mill for grinding cornmeal and demonstrated how it worked. This portable mill is powered by a single-cylinder “hit-or-miss” engine. The engine uses a centrifugal mechanical governor, which adjusts how often the engine fires in order to keep a nearly constant speed (rpm) whether the engine is under load or idling. Ground corn is fed into a sifter that uses two screens to separate the corn into fine cornmeal (for making cornbread), coarse cornmeal (for making grits) and chaff.

A single-cylinder hit-or-miss engine powers a gristmill for grinding corn.

Kiln Opening Sale

As we’ve discussed previously, we recently finished building a wood-fired pottery kiln. Our potters had their first “Kiln Opening Sale” today with lots of beautiful pottery. (We hope to have more kiln opening sales in the future. If you would like more information about them, please give us a call at 254-754-9600 or leave a comment below.)

After firing our wood-fired kiln during the weekend, we had our first kiln opening sale.

Fiber Crafts

In our fiber crafts shop, there was a lot of activity. One spinner was using a conventional flyer wheel to spin cotton, which we had grown on our farm, into yarn. She intends to weave her cotton yarn into cloth, then sew it into a garment.

Several other people were spinning cotton on tahklis. The tahkli is a small supported spindle (similar to a drop spindle, except that you support it rather than drop it) that works well for spinning cotton. Tahklis are inexpensive and very portable, and someone with experience can spin on the tahkli nearly as fast and as effectively as someone spinning at a wheel.

Practicing spinning cotton on a tahkli.

Make-Your-Own Crafts

Many children (and parents/grandparents along with them) enjoyed our make-your-own crafts. Children hammered out brass spoons. They also wove coasters, shaped clay “pinch pots” and built toy boats. I particularly enjoyed seeing the faces of the children using spokeshaves to carve wooden spatulas for the kitchen.

Hammering out a brass spoon.

Thank You

Thank you for coming out and enjoying the day with us.

Questions

As always, if you have questions about our crafts, seminars or other activities, we would like to hear from you. You can leave us a comment here, or call us at 254-754-9600.

18th Annual Sweet Sorghum Festival

Cooking Sorghum Syrup

Join us on Monday, September 3, for the 18th Annual Sweet Sorghum Festival at Brazos de Dios. The festival will be from 10 a.m until 5 p.m, and there is no admission fee.

Watch as we make sweet sorghum syrup—from pressing the raw cane with a horse-powered mill to cooking the juice into rich, golden brown syrup. Sample some sorghum syrup on freshly baked cornbread made from stoneground cornmeal!

At this year’s festival:

Special Music at Noon

Horsedrawn Hayrides
Outdoor Barbeque
Freshly Cranked Ice Cream
Demonstrations of Various Fine Hand-crafts
Various Make-Your-Own Activities for children
Free Seminars on Sustainable Living
Special Music at Noon

About Sorghum Syrup

Over 70 years ago, sorghum syrup was a common sight on the dinner tables of rural Texas. Many farmers grew a small patch of sorghum in their fields. At harvest time, they brought their cane to a neighboring farm that had a mill, and the families worked together pressing cane and cooking syrup.

Pressing Sorghum

At Brazos de Dios, our annual sorghum harvest preserves this community tradition. We hand cut the 10- to 14-foot-tall canes and haul them from the various family farms to our sorghum mill. Here, we feed the raw cane through a 100-year-old horse-drawn press. After squeezing the cane, we allow the juice to settle 2-3 hours before channeling it downhill through underground pipes to the sorghum house where we cook it over a wood-fired furnace.

The green juice bubbles and boils its way through the channels of the hot, 12-foot-long copper pan. After the excess water evaporates, the juice reaches the end of the pan as a thick, sweet, golden brown syrup ready for bottling. Be sure to try a sample of this year’s syrup at the sorghum mill or at our restored homestead gristmill!

Driving Directions

The sorghum festival is hosted at the Homestead Heritage Traditional Craft Village at Brazos de Dios, which is located 5 miles north of Waco.

Take I-35 to Elm Mott Exit 343; go west on FM 308 for 3 miles, then north on FM 933 for 1 1/2 miles. Turn west onto Halbert Lane and proceed a half mile straight ahead to the entrance.

View Larger Map

For further information, call 254/754-9600.

Trip Report: Ax-Making at Gransfors Forge

These are the finished axes and laminated knife blades I made in the class.

Gransfors has a forge, a pottery shop, a museum and a cafe. The first morning there, I took some time to wander around the shops and the museum. I watched and talked to one of the ax makers who has worked there for over twenty-five years.

Tour of the museum. Gabriel Branby (left) is the CEO of Gransfors.

They have had an unusually cool and wet spring in Sweden, and everything is very green. The flowers are gorgeous.

The creek that runs behind and forms the border of the Gransfors property.

In the ax-making workshop that I’m taking, there are eight students, including me. The other students are from England, Denmark, France, Wales, Sweden and Germany. We are quite a cross-section from our occupations also, ranging from computer techs to military civil engineers and from gardeners (what we would call lawn work in the U.S.) to blacksmiths.

The ax-making class.

Lars Enander is teaching the class. Lars is a native Swede. His teaching method is European in that he wants to let you figure things out on your own. He kind of gets you headed in the right direction and lets you go without a lot of explanation. But he is also very willing to answer questions if you ask. He is a very knowledgeable and helpful instructor and went out of his way to make sure that I learned a lot during the class.

Lars Enander, our instructor, preparing for the next session of the ax-making class.

Lars started the class by giving us each a bar of 3 1/2 cm x 2 cm steel to make a slitter that we will use to punch the eye of our ax later in the class. We also made a set hot-cut from a piece of 33 mm x 37 mm bar. I also had time to make a drift. I also started making a candle holder and a rose while waiting for the other students to finish.

Here I am, making a slitter that I will later use when making axes in the class.

July 12: While the other students were finishing their hot-cuts and tongs, I finished making the candle holder. When everyone had finished the tongs that we made to hold our axes while we work on them, Lars showed us how to make a laminated knife blade by folding the end of a piece of mild steel flat bar (approximately 1/8 x 3/4″ flat) over 2 1/2″ or so and placing a piece of carbon steel the same width and thickness and two inches long in between.

A view of the tool racks.

We left a little space in the fold of the mild steel that will be welded and then drawn for the tang. We then forge-welded the “sandwich” and cut the bar off at an angle, removing the end of the welded pieces to remove anything that did not weld. The purpose of this exercise was mainly to give us practice forge welding carbon steel between mild steel, which we will be doing in making our axes.

Laminated knife blades.

July 13: I made three knifes before lunch, and Lars asked if there was anything he could help me make, such as tools I might need. I told him that I would like to make a scythe, but I didn’t know if that was something we could do. He said that he should know something about that . . . . So I made a couple of tools that would be used when shaping the scythe and started a small scythe, which I finished today. It was only about 18″ long and not perfect, but it works, and I learned a lot and had a lot of fun making it.

The scythe blade that I made during the class.

July 16: The last three days we have spent making axes! The method we learned is very old and was used in times past, when steel was hard to make and not readily available. They would make the body of the ax out of wrought iron and laminate a piece of steel into the edge, which is the only place that needs to be hard.

Seating the edge steel into the mild steel of the ax head.

Thank you to everyone who contributed toward this trip.

Caleb Nolen

Report from Sweden

Caleb Nolen, our blacksmithing instructor has been attending an axe-making class at Gransfors in Sweden. Below is a photo of axes, knife blades and a scythe blade he made during the class.

We’ll post more information about the trip when he returns.

Blacksmithing in Sweden

The LaRue Barn

This article is an excerpt from the Spring 2012 issue of the SustainLife journal.

The LaRue Barn

We found the LaRue barn through a phone call from a woman in northern New Jersey who had heard about our work of moving and restoring barns. She wanted to know if we would possibly want to move an old barn that was in danger of being demolished to make way for a new suburban development.

At the time this was only our second barn to move, so we did not know entirely what we were getting into, except that we wanted to restore more barns. As it turned out, this unique barn was originally built about 1760 in the northern New Jersey town of Mahwah, close to the New York state border on Route 202, an old Colonial road that runs from Boston to Philadelphia, skirting to the west around New York City. It is what is known as an English-framed barn, though the LaRue family who built it was of French Huguenot descent. The timbers are oak and chestnut, felled by ax from the surrounding virgin forest and hewed by hand. It was moved in 1876 to where we found it, about a half mile from its original location. Moving barns was a common occurrence, as they were meant to last for centuries and could be readily unpegged, disassembled and relocated to another farm.

Crooked Braces

As you look overhead in the LaRue barn you will see unusual curved and dovetailed wind braces connecting the long overhead tie beams to the outside wall posts. These are called “crooked braces” because they were cut from the crook or curved limb of a tree. This feature is unusual to find in an American barn because there was so much good, straight wood available for building timbers that it was not necessary to use such curved pieces of wood. The use of such tree “crucks” indicates that the barn was probably built by a barn framer who learned his trade in Europe, where crucks were often used due to the shortage of straight timber.

Crooked braces (cruks)

A Role in the American Revolution

Early in its history, the LaRue barn played a role in the American Revolution. During the cold winter of 1780, General George Washington spent two days at the LaRue house, and undoubtedly Continental soldiers under General Washington spent nights in this barn. The soldiers would have been part of a Virginia regiment of “light horse” cavalry under the command of Colonel George Baylor, and were also known as Washington’s “Life Guard,” soldiers whose job it was to protect the commander-in-chief. They accompanied Washington wherever he traveled. It was not far from this barn in 1778, when temporarily detached from the main army, that Colonel Baylor and his cavalrymen were sleeping in barns and were massacred by a British surprise attack in the middle of the night. It was part of a deadly rivalry fomented by a young British officer and spy, Major John Andre, who was later hanged as Benedict Arnold’s accomplice in attempting to sell the important American fort of West Point to the British.

We can imagine these soldiers’ conversation about the war and their families as they settled down in the barn loft for the night. But one thought that definitely did not cross their minds was the fact that one day, over two hundred and twenty years later, some young men from a place called Texas would come to New Jersey and dismantle the barn they were sleeping in and move and rebuild it nearly two thousand miles away—much less that they would fly through the air to get there! We can also most likely claim that “George Washington’s horse slept here!”

We have placed the LaRue barn with a log cabin in a small homestead setting. They are a combination of homestead elements from different times and places: a 1760 New Jersey barn, an 1830 Missouri cabin, an 1860 New York smokehouse, an 1890 New York silo and a 1930 Texas windmill. Yet somehow they all complement one another. If you can, visit in the late afternoon as the sunset casts a golden light across the fields and over the homestead.

Visit SustainLife journal for more information about the journal.
To subscribe, visit Subscribe to SustainLife.

The First Firing of Our New Wood-Fired Pottery Kiln

Inside the kiln, a view through the peep-hole

We finished the construction of our new wood-fired kiln on June 16, 2012 and fired it the same day. It was a great success!

Inspecting a vase after the first firing

Inspecting a pot after the first firing

We started the fires at about 5:20AM and fed wood into the kiln for the next 12 hours. The temperature climbed steadily until it reached about 2100°F, then it began to stall. Toward the end of the firing, it is not uncommon to have difficulty getting the temperature all the way up to the required 2400° F.

Fueling the fire

One of the men from the woodworking shop next door came by and gave us a few suggestions on how to stoke the fire, which helped a lot! Once we made some adjustments to how we were managing the fire, the temperature resumed it’s climb and reached 2400° F in roughly 45 minutes. Then we stopped feeding the fire and closed the fire box doors and the damper.

Unbricking the kiln’s door

On Monday morning, when we unbricked the door (removed the bricks that form the kiln door) and began taking pots out, the results were beautiful! The colors were more vibrant than they had been in our gas-fired kiln, due to the influence of the ash on the glazes.

A look inside the kiln after the first firing

Overall, we are very pleased with the results of the new kiln and look forward to gaining more experience with it in the weeks ahead.

Pots fired in the first firing

To read more about the kiln and how and why we built it, read the articles listed below:

Coal for Blacksmithing

Bituminous coal

Introduction

There are a number of fuels you can use to heat iron for blacksmithing. For most of our work at Heritage Forge, we use coal. Coal is available in several grades, including lignite, bituminous and anthracite. In this article, I discuss the ranking of coal, the type of coal best-suited for blacksmithing and several important points related to the use of coal in your forge.

Grades of Coal

Coal consists primarily of carbon and secondarily of hydrogen, sulfur, oxygen and nitrogen, along with other metallic and non-metallic elements and minerals. Coal is classified both by rank and grade. There is a lot that could be said about rank and grades of coal, but I will stick to what is most relevant to blacksmiths. Coal’s rank is determined by the amount of water, volatile matter and elemental carbon in the coal, as well as its heat content, also known as its calorific value (measured in BTUs). A higher rank coal contains less moisture and volatile matter than a lower rank and has a higher heat content. Grade has to do with coal’s economic value and depends on the amount of minerals, or impurities, contained in it. The composition of coal depends on the conditions in which it was formed, and in some cases, a low-rank coal may be of a higher grade than a high-rank coal. Though additional ranks of coal exist, as blacksmiths, we are concerned mainly with these three: lignite, bituminous and anthracite.

Lignite

Also known as brown coal, lignite is the softest and lowest rank of coal. It is not far removed from peat in its composition and appearance, and it has a distinctly woody texture. Lignite is generally either strip-mined or mined in open pits. Most Texas coal is low-grade lignite, used mainly to power electric plants. As a rule, lignite contains the highest proportion of nonburnable minerals and sulfur of any rank of coal.

Clinker

When you burn any type of coal, the nonburnable minerals in the coal, such as metals and silicas, will melt and coagulate in the bottom of the firepot, forming a sticky semi-solid mass known as “clinker”. As clinker builds up, it will begin to block the forge’s air flow and draw heat away from the fire. In fact, that is why old-timers called clinker a “thief”. Because clinker emits contaminants in a hot fire, its presence, even in small amounts, will inhibit forge welding. Although lignite can be used in a forge, it will produce more clinker than any other grade of coal, making it poorly-suited for blacksmithing.

Bituminous

Bituminous is the coal-of-choice for the blacksmith. It is a soft, mid-grade, black coal. Mined from deeper mines than lignite, it burns much more cleanly. When burning coal in the forge, we keep a “stock pile” of wet coal on the sides of the fire. As it smolders, most of the impurities are burned away, leaving primarily carbon, in the form of what we call coke.

Coke formed by heating bituminous coal in the forge

Having been reduced, coke burns very cleanly and hot, and it is what we heat the steel with. When you properly build and maintain a fire in the forge using bituminous coal, it will produce coke that sticks together in large chunks. The heart of the fire emits a very intense light that can be harmful to your eyes, but by maintaining the fire properly, the smith can keep the heart of the fire covered by a dark layer of coke to shield his eyes from the intense light.

Bituminous has a low sulfur content, which is important for several reasons. Sulfur lowers the quality of the coke, contaminating the steel you are working and causing it to become brittle. It also pollutes the air with sulfur dioxide and sulfur trioxide. When combined with oxygen and water, it forms sulfuric acid, which is very corrosive to all the metal parts of the forge and chimney.

Coal fire in the forge

Anthracite

Anthracite is the hardest and highest rank of coal available. It is considered a metamorphic rock. When split, it has a bright, shiny cleavage. Anthracite is generally the cleanest burning coal, and it contains the most energy (BTUs) per pound. However, unlike bituminous, the pieces of coke that anthracite produces are small and tend to blow up and out of the fire. Because of this, it also does not shield the smith from the brightness of the heart of the fire and is not as commonly used for blacksmithing.

In the U.S., anthracite is mined from deep mines in small areas of Pennsylvania and Oregon. An interesting historical fact is that during the American Civil War, blockade runners used anthracite to fuel their steam boilers. Any smoke would give them away, but anthracite was so clean-burning that it produced no visible smoke.

Conclusion

In conclusion, bituminous is the best coal for the blacksmith. It is relatively clean-burning, cokes up nicely, making it easy to manage the fire well, and it produces relatively little clinker. Some of the best bituminous coal in the south is taken from mines near Birmingham, Alabama, which are the source of the coal we use at Heritage Forge.

Online Benefit Auction for The Ploughshare

A few of the items in our online benefit auction are shown above. To see all the items in the auction, visit http://theauctionworks.org/Ploughshare/index.php

We invite you to participate in our 2nd Online Benefit Auction.

The auction features:

One-of-a-kind Heirloom Furniture
Hand-sewn Quilts
Award-winning pieces

There are 21 pieces in all.

All proceeds will go to benefit The Ploughshare Institute for Sustainable Culture.

To view all items in the auction, visit the link below:

View Items in the Auction

To register so that you can bid in the auction, visit the link below:

Register for the Auction

More Information

Here is your opportunity to purchase a one-of-a-kind heirloom piece of furniture or hand-sewn quilt while supporting a worthy cause. This auction has expanded significantly from the first auction, held in 2011, and will feature several unique, custom furniture pieces hand-made by a number of craftsmen including Frank Strazza, master woodworker and teacher at The Ploughshare’s Heritage School of Woodworking in Central Texas. The auction items are available to view online now, and bidding will open on Thursday, June 21. Bidding closes at 8PM Central, Sunday, June 24.

All proceeds from the auction will go to support The Ploughshare in our efforts to continue to expand our class offerings and student capacity.

Again, this is a great opportunity to own a unique and valuable piece of artisan craftwork while investing in a worthy cause—helping to promote and teach traditional trades, crafts and sustainable living skills to people around the globe.

To view the items in the auction, click the link below:

View Auction Items Now

Register to bid in the Auction