Learn to use what the Earth offers.
Willow Basketry | Wild Clay Pottery | Natural Sheepskin Tanning
Dates: August, 18th – 24th, 2024.
Ages: 16+. Groups typically have a wide age range. Participants age 13-15 are welcome with an adult.
Group Size: 5-10.
Location: Groundwork Educational Farm, Paonia, Colorado.
Housing & Food: Participants will car-camp in our riverside group campsite, bringing their own tent. All meals are provided, with meals based on organic food from our educational farm. Participants assist our farm cook to prepare food.
Tuition: Starting from $748. Groundwork uses a sliding scale to determine tuition. More about our sliding scale here.
Registration Deadline: June 30, 2024.
Course Tuition: 7-Day Courses
Household Income:
Program Tuition:
Program Overview
As the modern world continues to speed up, taking the time to unplug on the land and create with our hands is a radical act of personal and planetary care. In this immersion, we spend a week focusing on a range of skills that connect us to our place, to each other, and to a greater planetary story of our time.
Throughout the week, you’ll be introduced to several different land-based crafts, exploring the ways that people have related to our home places across thousands of years. At Groundwork, we believe that craft is one of the foundations of sustainable culture, connecting us with home and building relationships with our home places that have the power to span multiple generations. When Gandhi wanted to retake India and overthrow the British empire, he turned to the humble spinning wheel as a foundation for local, sustainable economies and symbol of self-determination. Throughout the week, we’ll discuss the role of craft, slowness, and connection in our unraveling world.
By the end of the week, you’ll take home your finished crafts: pit-fired pottery, willow basketry, and naturally-tanned leather. You’ll have the skills and context to explore connection to your own home place more deeply and to share local, land-based craft with the people in your life.
Program Highlights
- Pit Fired Pottery: Sourcing, processing & curing local clays. Creating pots, mugs, & bowls, and pit-fire them.
- Traditional Hide Tanning: Process a hide from rawhide into soft, supple leather. We’ll learn both hair-on and hair-off hides.
- Willow Basketry: Harvesting and processing wild willow, tending to wild willow patches to create good basketry materials, and the fundamentals of weaving.
- Discuss the significance of crafts and localized culture in the modern world.
- Learn practices of land-tending and place-making to understand ourselves in relation to our place and how we are all a part of our local ecologies.
Schedule
Sunday, August 18th: 10am Arrivals. Orientation & Afternoon Wild Clay Processing
Monday, August 19th: Wild Clay Pottery
Tuesday, August 20th: Willow Basketry
Wednesday, August 21st: Natural Sheepskin Tanning
Thursday, August 22nd: Natural Sheepskin Tanning
Friday, August 23rd: Natural Sheepskin Tanning
Saturday, August 24th: Pit Firing Pottery & Closing Circle. 3pm Departure
Meet The Instructors
Forrest Gillies is the primary facilitator of this program, with additional instructors coming in to help teach specific skills including pottery and basket weaving.
Forrest Gillies
Forrest was fortunate to be raised at one of the oldest intentional communities, nestled into the red sandstone foothills of the Rocky Mountains. Being surrounded by wilderness, sustainable agriculture and abundant community shaped him into a human inspired to share these gifts with a world starving for land based connection. Guided by the question of how to create and sustain real, viable culture, Forrest found answers in the seeds. After studying Ecological Agriculture: Seeds, Bees & Soil at the Evergreen State College, he discovered the ways in which seed, subsistence agricultural systems and traditional life-ways create the foundational framework for real culture to emerge. Forrest has managed multiple regenerative farm and education projects including Siskiyou Seeds and White Oak Farm, offers nature connection programs for youth and is apprenticing in natural building. Rooted in reverence for the human & more-than-human world, Forrest walks in service to a more beautiful world we all know is possible. Forrest is a certified Wilderness First Responder.
Jenna Bradford
Jenna grew up in the Sacramento River delta in California, swimming, climbing trees, searching for animals along the water’s edge, studying their ways, and always looking for excuses to be outside. She received her B.A. in Environmental Studies and Bioethics from Loyola University in Chicago. Before becoming a teacher, Jenna worked on farms in Colorado, designed and sewed clothing, and studyied plants through an herbalism apprenticeship with Wildroot Botanicals and an ethnobotany immersion with Raven’s Roots Naturalist School. Jenna taught 5th and 6th grade at Paonia’s North Fork School of Integrated Studies. She is excited to continue with some of her current students on this adventure. Jenna loves teaching because she loves learning and loves to share that enthusiasm with others.
Pieter Van Winkle
Pieter is a father, husband, hobby rancher and youth mentor. He has worked in the business world as an executive coach, sales manager and real estate investor. Pieter believes passionately in the power of youth mentorship — in particular nature-connected, community-supported rites of passage. He is committed to helping foster experiences for our valley youth that helps prepare them for the rapidly changing world they will soon inhabit, lead and transform. Pieter is also a potter who uses clay he gathers from the Earth and processes himself. He lives in Paonia with his wife Emma and their son Wendell.
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