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- 2025 class schedule -
April 19 & 20, 2025 Simple Shrink Pots weekend; fundamental hand-tool skills, green woodworking, carving & hand boring - 2 days / weekend, exertion level medium +, $ 290 tuition + $10 materials fee
April 25, 26 & 27, 2025 Classic Bentwood Firewood Carrier/Holdall; fundamental hand-tool skills, green woodworking & steam bending - long weekend / 3 days, exertion level easy, $ 435 tuition + $ 25 materials fee
May 3 & 4, 2025 Small Greenwood Projects weekend; fundamental hand-tool skills & green woodworking
- 2 days / weekend, exertion level easy, $ 290 tuition + no materials fee
- MCCS MAINE BUG BREAK ! May 5th to 23rd, 2025 -
May 24 to 28, 2025 Build a Classic Shaving Horse; basic hand tool skills, boring mortises, large-scale joinery
- 5 days, exertion level med/high, $ 725 tuition + $ 150 materials fee
June 2 to 6, 2025 Scandinavian Bentwood Tine Boxes; hand-tool skills, steam bending, spruce root stitching & carving - 5 days, exertion level easy, $ 725 tuition + $ 25 materials fee
June 12 to 15, 2025 Maine Gum Boxes; green woodworking, hand tool skills, decorative carving
- 4 days, exertion level med/high, $ 580 + $ 25 materials fee
June 21 - 28, 2025 MACFAT / Make a Chair From a Tree; fundamental green woodworking skills
- 8 days, exertion level med/high, $ 1,160 tuition + $ 55 materials fee
July 4 to 9, 2025 Spoon Carving Intensive; comprehensive carving skills; spoon design, tree ID, finishing, sharpening - 6 days, exertion level easy, $ 870 tuition + no materials fee
July 16 to 20, 2025 Easy-Peasy Chair Making, Bill Coperthwaite's 4 board chair; fundamentals of design & hand-tool usage - spoke shave, draw knife, scorp, slöjd knife - 5 days, exertion level medium, $ 725 tuition + $ 75 materials fee
July 26 to 30, 2025 Hand Hewn Greenwood Bowls; green woodworking & fundamental hand-tool skills; axe, adze, gouges - 5 days, exertion level high, $ 725 tuition + $ 25 materials fee
August 2, 3 & 4, 2025 Small Dovetailed Boxes; fundamental handcraft skills, "no saw" whittled dovetail carving
- 3 days, exertion level easy, $ 435 + $ 15 materials fee
August 11 to 17, 2025 Coopering Small Wooden Buckets; specialized tools & hand tool skills - 7 days, exertion level medium, $ 1,015 tuition + $ 55 materials fee
- Kortemeier family's summer break - August 18 to September 3rd, 2025 -
September 4 to 7, 2025 Decorative Chip Carving w/ guest instructor Daniel Clay; precision carving and decoration (students bring their own wooden items to decorate) - 4 days, exertion level easy, $ 870 tuition + $ 25 materials fee
September 13 to 19, 2025 - Welsh Vernacular Stick Chairs; hand-tool chair making with some individualized design options - 7 days, exertion level med/high, $ 1,015 tuition + $ 125 materials fee
- tuition per day is $145 for all classes -
Please get in touch with us via email if you are planning to register for a class!
- class descriptions for 2025 -
1. Simple Shrink Pots; fundamental hand tool skills, green woodworking, carving and hand boring
April 19 & 20, 2025 (Saturday & Sunday) - 2 days
exertion level easy
materials fee - none
$ 290 tuition + $ 10 materials fee = $ 300.00 total
This is a classic greenwood project and the applications are almost unlimited once one understands the principal.
First we hollow the inside of a section of green birch, removing all of the wood except for a thin wall (which becomes the sides of the box) and we cut a groove for the bottom of the box. This bottom piece is not green birch like the body, instead it’s very dry pine. As the fresh green birch dries, it shrinks, thus capturing the dry bottom and forming a tight, clever box.
2. Classic Bentwood Firewood Carrier & Holdall; fundamental hand-tool skills, green woodworking, steam bending
April 25, 26 & 27, 2025 - 3 days (Friday, Saturday & Sunday)
exertion level easy
materials fee - $ 25.00
$ 435 tuition + $ 25 = $ 460.00 total
This three day/long weekend class is an excellent introduction to hand-tools and green woodworking. Students will learn how to use essential hand-tools and what it’s like to work directly with a tree to make an elegant, useful carrier and holdall.
We generally use these carriers for firewood at our house, but one can also hold items such as newspapers, towels, magazines, kindling, etc.
This project is based on an ancient Chinese firewood carrier pictured in the 1937 book “China at Work”. Several US green woodworkers that we know of have added to and been inspired by this design. For example, Drew Langsner included it as a project in his 1987 book, “Green Woodworking" and Peter Galbert produced a video with Lie-Nielsen Toolworks in 2017 called “Making a Firewood Carrier”.
A tremendously useful project on several fronts, most especially in terms of the range of foundational skills that can be learned in making it.
Skills learned:
- boring holes at predetermined angels with a hand bit and brace
- making mortise & tenon joinery by hand
- riving with a froe
- squaring wood to a required dimension with an axe and drawknife
- steam bending green red oak
3. Small Greenwood Projects; fundamental hand-tool skills & green woodworking
May 3 & 4, 2025 - 2 days (Saturday & Sunday)
exertion level easy
materials fee - none
$ 290 tuition + no materials fee = $ 290.00 total
This course encompasses the heart of coursework here at the Maine Coast Craft School. It’s our most foundational and introductory class where Kenneth teaches essential handwork skills, the bedrock of green woodworking.
This class could also be called Green Woodworking 101, although the unique projects can be enjoyed and useful to highly skilled carvers or educators looking to teach others as well.
We’ll be using two core hand tools, the sloyd knife (‘sloyd’ is Swedish for handcraft) & also a carving axe. We will develop hand and knife skills while carving projects such as butter spreaders, wall-mounted coat hooks made from limb crooks, Shinto inspired foxes and pine whorl whisks. All on a convenient weekend schedule.
skills learned:
- understanding wood fiber/grain
- understanding theory of sharpness in broad terms
- intro to sharpening edge tools - specifically essential/primary edge tools (sloyd knife & carving axe)
- safety: proper technique to keep oneself safe while using sharp tools
- hands-on projects to apply & understand basic concepts in an experiential way
4. Build a Classic Shaving Horse; basic hand tool skills, boring mortises, large-scale joinery
May 24 to 28, 2025 (Saturday through Wednesday) - 5 days
exertion level med/high
materials fee - $ 150
$ 725 tuition + $ 150 materials fee = $ 875.00 total
Our friend and mentor, Bill Coperthwaite, often said that an important, even requisite project for any maker was to build themselves a shave horse. These are simple devices, yet so utilitarian and helpful, it could be said that the shave horse is an indispensable item in the hand tool work shop.
A shave horse is basically a quick release vise and bench combination.
An item being carved or worked on can be clamped in the vise using a foot lever.
This keeps both hands free to work. The vise is almost effortlessly released and re-engaged, so work that needs to be held securely but also often shifted or turned is made a much easier and safer endeavor through the use of a shave horse.
Shave horses have been around a long time, they were originally found in Europe and migrated to the Eastern United States, where they were used by farmers and rural craftspeople like the Appalachian ladder back chair makers. Shave horses can now be found all over the world, built with a myriad of customizations and used for a remarkable variety of hand crafts.
Students will learn about the history of shave horses, plus we have examples of different styles for people to see and use here at the school. Kenneth will give hands-on lessons on how to get the most out of your shave horse.
5. Scandinavian Bentwood Tine Box; hand tool skills, steam bending, spruce root stitching & carving skills
June 2 to 6, 2025 (Monday through Friday) - 5 days
exertion level - 1
materials fee - none
$ 725 tuition + 25 materials fee = $ 750.00 total
Bent wood boxes have a long and colorful history. Many different cultures have made their own unique versions of them. The traditional Norwegian tine, pronounced "teen-ah", or the Swedish svepask is constructed of a thin piece of steam-bent wood that is laced together with tree root, usually spruce. At the ends of the boxes there are two vertical posts that are cut with notches that are used to hold the lid on. Because of the snapping noise that they make when being closed, they are also called snap boxes. To open the tine, the side posts are gently pulled apart using the flex of the thin steam bent wood, until the lid is freed and can then be lifted off.
During this workshop, we will steam bend the walls of the box around a form and then secure it with spruce roots that are laced in the traditional stitching method. We will fit the wooden posts and bottom which are held on with wooden pins. Then we will carve and fit the top of the box. These boxes are a form of folk art so there are traditional vernacular forms of decorating the surfaces of the boxes that will be included in the workshop. These include varieties of chip carving and painting.
In Norway, examples of these boxes have been unearthed in the remains of Viking ships dating from 840 A.D. They were used to store valuable possessions, grains, meat, or anything else that might need to be secure.
6. Traditional Maine Gum Box; green woodworking, hand-tool skills, decorative carving
June 12 to 15, 2025 - 4 days (Thursday through Sunday)
materials fee - $ 25.00
exertion level - easy
$ 580 + $ 25 = $ 605.00
Book boxes, gum boxes, or gum books — by any name these are lovely, handmade objects for holding precious things, about the size and shape of a book, and often made to be given as gifts. Gum boxes are a Maine Northwoods tradition with historical examples dating anywhere from the mid 1800s until about 1920. Craftsman Jögge Sundqvist showed us how these boxes were often made to hold the family bible or other precious books in Sweden. The Maine State museum and also the Patten Lumberman’s Museum have wonderful collections of antique spruce gum boxes from the 1800s, all made in the same fashion as the ones from Scandinavia. We are once again offering this class to highlight and celebrate the regional handcraft traditions brought to Maine by immigrant craftspeople.
Here’s a link to a nice article about the history of these boxes and spruce gum in America:
https://northernwoodlands.org/knots_and_bolts/remembering-spruce-gum
The boxes we will make are a regional variation on the Northern European tradition.
This is more of a carving project than a typical box-making workshop, as these classic boxes are made by boring and carving out the interior of a wide length of wood, resulting in no joinery in the four main sides of the box. The top and bottom are separate pieces, let into the interior walls, the top joint is a sliding dovetail and the bottom is dadoed. The outside walls of the box are planed and smoothed by hand once the inside has been hollowed, giving the walls a consistent thickness throughout. The outsides of many historical examples have been shaped to resemble books and students can go that route too if they choose.
In keeping with traditional materials and techniques, we’ll create our book boxes of pine or birch wood during this four day course. We’ll be using only hand-tools throughout the process, the same hand-tools that were historically used for these popular, regionally produced boxes well over a hundred years ago.
skills learned:
- boring holes by hand with a T-auger bit and a bit & brace
- using various edge tools such as a drawknife, sloyd knife, spoke shave, block plane & gouges to remove stock
- hand carving a housed dado or groove to fit top and bottom of the box
7. MACFAT/Make a Chair from a Tree (Post and Rung ladder back chair making);
fundamental green woodworking skills
June 21 to 28, 2025 - 8 days (Saturday through Saturday)
exertion level medium to high - materials fee: $55
$ 1,160 + $ 55 = $ 1,215.00 total
Using a minimal assortment of hand tools, students will learn how to craft and assemble this
elegant, lightweight, durable, and very comfortable chair. This is the chair and the class that Jennie Alexander is known for. Kenneth learned this chair from Drew Langsner, who learned and collaborated with Jennie A. and Dave Sawyer, teaching together at Country Workshops over the years. Kenneth in turn has been teaching this style of green wood post and rung chair making to beginning woodworkers since 2004.
This project is a wonderful introduction to a straightforward and simple form of chair making,
it teaches foundational techniques and skills that are used in making more advanced chairs and furniture. We recommend that students start with this class before building the Welsh Windsor chair.
The post and rung chair design is called a ladder-back because the back slats resemble the rungs of a ladder. It has also been called a mule ear because the tips of the back posts are reminiscent of ears. Chairs of this design were an inspiration to the Shakers who appreciated their utilitarian simplicity and lack of ornamentation.
The workshop begins with students learning how to select green logs and then to rive (or split) chair parts with a froe and club. Because we will be working with a freshly felled tree, this type of green woodworking offers a direct connection to the materials used and to an older, more sculptural way of working wood.
The riven posts (chair legs) and rungs are shaped with a draw knife and a spoke shave on a shave horse. Rear posts are steam bent onto a form to create the proper curve for the chair back. Rectangular mortises are chopped into the air dried posts with a mortising chisel, and cylindrical mortises are drilled by hand. Tenons are sized and cut on the rungs by hand. We take advantage of dissimilar moisture content between the air dried posts and the kiln dried rungs to help guarantee a tightening of the joinery from natural shrinkage of the wood as it dries. To fashion the seat, students will learn to weave with twisted natural rush. Finally, the back slats are shaped, steam bent, fitted and pinned in place with small hardwood pins.
Tool use, safety and sharpening will be thoroughly demonstrated and wood finishing will be addressed.
Students will have their red oak chairs assembled and the seats woven by the end of our class time. New for 2024 - We have added a day to the over-all length of this class in order to better allow for proper instruction and completion of seat weaving. In our experience, the weaving takes a full day for most students. Oiling or finishing the chair will need to be completed after the end of the workshop, once the chair has thoroughly dried.
8. Six Day Spoon Carving Intensive; comprehensive carving skills - spoon design, tree ID, finishing, sharpening
July 4 to 9, 2025 - 6 days (Friday through Wednesday)
exertion level easy - materials fee: $0
$ 870 tuition + $ 0 = $ 870.00 total
A wonderful and full week of carving spoons together, for all levels of skill and experience.
We’ll start by looking at trees and natural crooks from which to make curved wooden spoons. Larger serving spoons will allow more room for practicing knife and axe skills, but people will be free to experiment and play with all sorts and sizes of spoons and utensils. Students can experiment with our collection of Scandinavian style carving axes to rough out spoon blanks and get a feel for different weights and styles of axes. We've also got block knives to try for the roughing out process. We’ll discuss layout and design choices before we dive in with straight and curved knives to refine and shape our spoons. Kenneth will introduce a variety of techniques and tool choices, such as bent and dog leg gouges, as alternatives or additions to the standard sloyd knives for carving. Emphasis is placed on designing for curvaceous, flowing lines in these everyday items. Much attention will be paid to proportions and resolving facets in a pleasing way. Because of our small class size (limit of five) Kenneth is able to work with each student to improve and deepen their sense of carving wherever they are in terms of familiarity with design choices, tool skills and previous hand work experience.
9. Easy Peasy Chair Making, Bill Coperthwaite’s 4 board chair; fundamentals of design & hand tool usage
- spoke shave, draw knife, scorp, slöjd knife skills
July 16 to 20, 2025 - 5 days (Wednesday through Sunday)
exertion level medium, materials fee: $ 75
$ 725 tuition + $ 75 = $ 800.00 total
We are excited to offer this 4 day workshop again; it is by far our most accessible and basic chair making class.
We’ll be working with dimensional lumber and hand tools to build a 4 board chair based on an astute and simple design by Bill Coperthwaite.
Building this chair constitutes an excellent lesson in fundamental hand work, as we’ll use just human-powered hand tools, pine boards and (metal) wood screws to construct them. Proper wood selection, tool sharpening and care, plus finishing with milk paint and tung oil will also be covered in the class.
Bill Coperthwaite, our beloved mentor and late friend, spent years perfecting the design and the construction techniques for this simple workhorse of a chair. We have a number of them around the shop in use constantly - they provide lightweight, stable, fun and comfortable seating. One of Bill’s greatest wishes was to encourage people to make things which they need and use every day. He valued simple, utilitarian projects above almost anything, and he believed that these kinds of democratic designs can empower people to live more simply and happily.
Students in this chair making class will learn to use patterns and lay out their chair pieces, which they’ll cut from milled white pine boards using hand saws. Once the parts have been cut and shaped, the straightforward joinery is solidly held together with wood screws.
There will be time to carve facets and decorative textures to enhance the surfaces and edges of these simple chairs.
Participants will learn to use draw knives, hand saws, chisels, scorps, spoke shaves, slöjd knives and block planes.
Check out more information about Bill and his work at www.insearchofsimplicity.net
This sentence is a link to our blog entry about Bill’s democratic designs.
10. Hand Hewn Greenwood Bowl Carving; green woodworking, fundamental hand-tool skills; axe, adze, gouges
July 26 to 30, 2025 - 5 days (Saturday through Wednesday)
exertion level med/high, materials fee: $25
$ 725 tuition + $ 25 = $ 750.00 total
We’ll delve into the reductive process in our Greenwood Bowl Carving class and learn how satisfying the process of carving out a bowl from a rough section of a newly felled tree can be.
Unlike lathe-turning, hewing a bowl by hand offers wider variation in terms of shapes and symmetry.
We’ll use a froe to split the birch log, then an axe, adze, gouges, spoke shaves and slöjd knives to gradually refine the size and shapes of our wooden vessels. During this thorough five day class, we will explore proper tree selection, layout and design, tool selection, various holding devices, decorative carving, wood finishing, and also edge tool use, care and sharpening.
2024 - based on our experience with this class in previous years, we have chosen to expand it in 2024 by adding a day. Therefore if time allows, students will be led through the process of making a shallow wooden platter and / or shown some basics of decorative carving & encouraged to give it a try.
Participants will come away with instructions on how best to dry their hand hewn bowls, as well as thorough information about the process and materials of oil finishing once their pieces have dried.
11. Small hand-cut Dovetailed Box; fundamental handcraft and hand-tool skills, "no saw" whittled dovetail carving
August 2, 3 & 4, 2025 - 3 days (Saturday through Monday)
exertion level easy, materials fee: $ 0
$ 435 tuition + $ 15 = $ 450.00 total
This type of wooden, lidded box might be familiar, since they are historically quite common as containers for wooden matches, salt or other small household items. The box can be hung on a wall or set on a shelf or counter, depending on what it will contain and where it will be used.
This class will introduce students to essential and accessible hand-tool woodworking. The simple, small box project will teach participants about layout, design, wood selection and hand tool use and care.
We’ll use local white pine and the box will be assembled using a few small nails and small hardwood pins for the hinged lid.
Once the box has been assembled, we’ll learn about milk paint and also work on decorative carving skills, since this little box is so agreeable to customization with clever embellishment.
As we build this remarkably useful item, students will gain valuable knowledge and hand-tool skills, which are definitely transferable to all sorts of future woodworking projects.
12. Coopering Small Wooden Buckets; specialized tools & hand-tool skills
August 11 to 17, 2025 - 7 days
exertion level easy, materials fee: $ 55
$ 1,015 tuition + $ 55 = $ 1,070.00 total
Explore the art of coopering by making a classic wooden bucket in this six day class. Finished buckets will be about 10” diameter by 10 or 12” tall. This is one of the few projects at our school where the wood (for the staves or sides) of the bucket is air dried, not green.
Starting with roughed-out, air dried stock, we’ll carefully lay out the bevels and taper of the upright wall pieces, called staves, shaping the bevels with a large wooden jointers plane.
The staves will be made of clear, vertical grain pine.
We’ll use temporary metal bands, and a cooper’s draw shave to roughly shape the inside of the staves into a curve.
We’ll spend time refining the bevels until we achieve water-tight joints between all the staves.
Small wooden pins are used for alignment once the bevels are completed.
The inside of the joined staves will be finished into a smooth-walled cylinder using a curved sole cooper’s plane.
Next, a specialized tool called a croze is used to cut a dado which captures and houses the edge of the carved pine bottom.
The final steps involve making a steam bent oak handle and fitting hoops made from small diameter green wood saplings that are notched and fitted for the outside of the coopered bucket.
13. Decorative Chip Carving with guest instructor Daniel Clay; precision carving and decoration
September 4 to 7, 2025 - 4 days
exertion level easy, materials fee: $ 25
$ 870 tuition + $ 25 = $ 895.00 total
Guest instructor Daniel Clay will be teaching decorative carving skills.
Students may bring their own woodenware items to decorate - wooden spoons, bowls, boxes, etc.
Or they can choose to use pine boards which will be provided as their objects to decorate.
Daniel recently published his first book, available here.
It's called “Chip Carving, Techniques For Carving Beautiful Patterns By Hand”.
It's a great read and would be good preparation for this class.
Skills learned:
- design / layout
- using detail knives for decorative chip carving
- multiple repeatable patterns and borders as examples
14. Making a John Brown inspired Vernacular Windsor chair; hand-tool chair making w/ some individualized design options
September 13 to 19, 2025 - 7 days (Saturday through Friday)
exertion level med/high - materials fee: $ 125
$ 1,015 + $ 125 = $ 1,140.00 total
We will learn to make and assemble a Welsh style vernacular Windsor in this seven day class. The chairs which Kenneth builds (and the way he teaches students to to build them) are based on the unique design and techniques he learned while he was an apprentice with the late John Brown, the self-taught Welsh chair maker.
A pre-requisite for this class is the MACFAT/ Post and Rung Ladder Back Chair class.
Using hand tools, we’ll shape and assemble chair parts, working with both green and air-dried hardwoods. Some parts will be roughed out ahead of time (although this is not a kit) in order to allow for time constraints and various student skill levels.
All necessary specialized chair-making tools will be available for use and materials are all provided.
This is a very full learning experience and students will need to oil or otherwise finish their chairs after the conclusion of the class.
Students will need to be able to transport their chairs home after class.
(finished chairs measure 28” wide, 43” tall, 23” deep.)
"Power machines are unfriendly for they are very noisy and make a lot of unpleasant dust.
Craft woodworking should be a creative activity, with the practitioners as artists.
Surrounded by ugly, noisy, dusty machines the woodworker does not have the environment in which to do good work."
- John Brown, chair maker
