Heirloom crafts, solid skills and camaraderie—upcoming Foundational Woodworking

Hand Chopping Mortises

Join us in the comfort of our air-conditioned workshop for a hand tool woodworking-packed week. Our Foundational Course this coming August 4-9 has a few openings left so sign up soon!

Jonathan Schwennesen Teaching

It is sometimes hard to express in writing the amount of knowledge that you will gain by actual hands-on work. Jonathan Schwennesen will be teaching and will take you step by step through a series of lectures and projects from sharpening to joinery. He will lead you on a hand tool journey, taking you down a path that will open your woodworking to a whole new world!

The class starts with an introduction to sharpening, the most important part of hand tool woodworking. He will then take you through a series of exercises starting with sawing practice and then moving right into dovetails. You will build a small candle box, learning about dovetailing and using a plane to both smooth surfaces and round the edges on the top and bottom. You will also learn how to set hinges by hand.

You will then move on to a joinery-packed project, a wall shelf complete with hand-cut dados and mortise and tenons joints. This project incorporates curves which will be cut using only a saw, chisel and spokeshave! All of this is just in the first three days!

On the fourth day, you will learn how to build a walnut end table. Starting with hand chopping mortises, then cutting tenons. You will learn a host of other things from, tips and tricks on how to fit tenons, cutting arches in walnut, tapering legs with a drawknife, and flattening a table top with a scraper.

Building a Table

This class was designed for those that have never done woodworking as well as those that might have been doing power tool woodworking for many years.

Shaping Legs with Drawknife

So mark your calendar for this coming Monday, August 4th through Saturday the 9th. Sign up for the class right here.

We look forward to seeing all of you in class.

Frank Strazza

One Response to Heirloom crafts, solid skills and camaraderie—upcoming Foundational Woodworking

  1. Chad August 20, 2014 at 12:18 AM #

    I took the above class and am so glad that I did. A few weeks ago I had an idea for a table but zero knowledge of how to build it. I looked online for woodworking schools and this was the only one I found in Texas. I knew absolutely nothing about woodworking, I’d never read a woodworking magazine and had no idea that craftsmen like this still existed. I must say this is the best money I’ve ever spent, rather invested. These guys were amazing! Stan is full of wisdom and was patient with me and Mark and Jonathan do an amazing job with the shop and treat everyone with the utmost respect. I would recommend this class to anyone who has ever wanted to work wood but doesn’t know where to start, I hope to come back and take more classes in the future. Oh yeah, the food at the cafe is excellent!