Instructors - Craig Stevens and Greg Horton

July 14 - 18, 2025 9am - 5pm (5 weekdays, Monday - Friday )

The Introduction to Woodworking is a weeklong class designed to guide beginners through specific techniques and exercises, helping them build strong fundamental woodworking skills. Students will explore the tools, techniques, and attitudes use to create fine hand-made furniture and woodworking projects. The focus of this process-oriented class is the development of skills as they relate to hand, eye, and workbench. The emphasis will be the sensitive use of hand tools combined with the proper and safe use of machines.

This class has been created to help woodworkers develop safe, accurate, and efficient woodworking techniques that lead to successful results and minimize many of the frustrations that occur when learning on their own.

The Introduction to Woodworking course is intended for students new to woodworking as well as those who have some experience but want to develop a very strong foundation in the skills and methods needed to become a skilled craftsperson. Through lectures, demonstrations, and hands-on work, participants will learn and practice traditional techniques essential to high-quality furniture making and explore important woodworking information such as:

• the vocabulary of woodworking

• have a deeper understanding of wood, how it behaves, purchasing it, and selecting grain for projects

• sharpening plane blades, chisels, knives, and scrapers

• understanding and using essential cabinetmaking hand tools, such as planes (western and wooden planes), chisels, card scrapers, layout tools, saws, etc.

• using machines and accurately milling lumber

• mortise and tenon joinery

• an overview of common joinery

Towards the end of the week, students will make an attractive and useful serving tray (pictures to come shortly) that will use skills learned throughout the class while showing new techniques and tools. The serving tray has rabbeted sides that are reinforced with dowels, tapered wooden nails, or decorative nails and an edge-glued bottom panel. We’ll use the drill press and router for its construction along with hand tools to fine-tune the fit and appearance of the tray. After a few days of learning the fundamentals, we think making a small project is a great way to finish the week.

Cost includes all materials