Whaaat in the world, y’all!?? We woke up this morning to find that we’ve been getting messages all night from people desperate to sign up for the Apprenticeship winter term. And then the minute it opened at 8:00 a.m. somehow several people signed up. We hadn’t even sent the email campaign announcing it.
And as soon as we sent the email out, people have been lining up like crazy.
So, I don’t know what time you’ll be reading this blog post, but at this rate… I don’t know if there will be any openings left by tonight.
If there are slots available as you read this, sign up now!
– Joshua
This morning, our students in the Apprenticeship program turned in the last of their assignments – they’ve posted pictures of their shellac and milk paint projects and shared their essays of reflection on the past eight weeks of dedicated craft work. We’ve watched these folks go from green and a little nervous on day one to steady growth in confidence and skill over two months. They’ve taken these challenges head on, working through freehand sharpening, stock prep with hand tools, mortise-and-tenon joinery, dovetails (through and half-blind), rabbets, dadoes, green woodworking, and shellac and milk paint finishing. It has been an exhilarating term. Mike and I spent countless days this year creating an online hand-tool woodworking educational program that offered personal...
The first term of the Mortise & Tenon Apprenticeship Program is wrapping up this week. We designed this eight-week course to offer students the opportunity to build structured handcraft practice into their lives, and to start to develop a pre-industrial way of thinking about woodworking. And it’s been an amazing ride. Joshua and I intended this course to be more relational than most online learning tends to be – we wanted to give regular feedback to our students and give them the chance to interact with one another. Handcraft has always carried a community aspect to it, and even in our compartmentalized lives today (and through a limited digital medium) our goal was to keep personal engagement at the center of...
It’s Greenwood Week in the Mortise & Tenon Apprenticeship Program, and our students from around the world have been felling trees with axes, riving, hewing, and carving their woodworking projects! In our Apprenticeship Forums, there’s been a lot of discussion about different greenwood projects that we can do. One of my favorites is making balsam whisks. I use balsam fir for these because it’s the most prevalent conifer in our woods, and because it’s super easy to find nice, symmetrical whorls. Five or six branchlets is ideal, and hunting for just the right whorl is half the fun. After finding a few good whorls, I bring them home, peel them, and bind them to dry a bit. This step helps...
After months and months of planning and content creating, Mike and I held our breath as the first day of the Mortise & Tenon Apprenticeship Program opened this morning. The email went out notifying apprentices of the Week One Launch, and we let out a sigh of relief when they started in on the videos. Several apprentices began wading into the reading material weeks ago. Photo courtesy: Guy E. This is a great group of folks. We have people from all over the US as well as Canada, UK, Norway, and a few in Australia. Over the past month, they’ve all been sharing stories of how they got into hand-tool woodworking (including one guy’s dramatic story about a tornado nearly...
Many of you have offered personal anecdotes and insightful replies to the previous videos in which we discuss the ways people can learn woodworking these days. Thank you for sharing your thoughts. We’ve enjoyed discussing your comments. In this final video, Mike and I talk about the necessity of committing to a daily practice and the struggles to do this in our own lives. No one starts out with the ideal setup. Instead, we get started with make-do situations and discover what we actually need only once we’ve begun to develop the foundational skills. This past year, Mike and I have been discussing the importance of a structured, committed practice coupled with the guidance of a mentor. We’ve been developing...
