PITTSBORO — As many as 300 woodworking enthusiasts will descend upon Shakori Hills, a 50-acre farm site here, for three days of camping, carving and learning about green wood April 22-24.
The first GreenWood Wrights’Fest will offer speeches from renowned master woodworkers — including Roy Underhill, who hosted PBS’s The Woodwright’s Shop for 37 seasons — and woodworker and author Brendan Gaffney, as well as 26 instructional classes and numerous open-air demonstrations.
GreenWood Market Place will provide an opportunity for instructors to sell their greenwood wares on site. A free early morning yoga session, music, dancing, and food trucks will round out the event.
Local woodworker Cara O’Connell, organizer of the festival, has nurtured the idea of such a gathering for several years and has garnered an impressive array of nationally-recognized hand tool woodworkers and greenwood craftspeople to serve as instructors.
“My mission is to build community through sharing the love of nature and the nature of wood while exploring green woodworking and preserving the history of traditional woodcraft,” she said. “I love it so much — I want to share it with others so they, too, can enjoy it.”
Attendees will have access to beginner and advanced instruction in spoon carving, bowl carving, stool making, bark weaving, spring pole lathe demonstrations, ash basket weaving, carving fan birds, basic carving techniques, etching wood with kolrosing, timber frame joinery, sharpening techniques, tree ID and wood processing from log to finished pieces. Underhill’s classes will be working with heavy timbers using saws and axes.
In addition to Underhill, Gaffney and O’Connell, instructors include Peggy Adelman, Tom Bartlett, Liesl Chatman, Mike Cundall, Bonnie Grace, Tad Kepley, Jasper Mayer, Barton Moyers, Don Nalezyty, Oliver Pratt, B. Terry Ratliff, Emilie Rigby, Aaron Sparks and Ty Thornock.
Both O’Connell and Underhill, along with other volunteers, have been at the site making benches for the bowl and spoon carving sessions.
“Last week we went out and put legs on tenons (rounded tops of the legs that fit into the hole drilled into the bench),” O’Connell said. “All the legs were split from the trees and all the inch-tops were split with sledgehammer and wedge tools.”
Underhill’s keynote address is entitled “The Craftsmanship of Risk and Redemption as Green Woodworkers Save the World!”
“We will explore the question of why on earth are we gathering people together to make spoons — there’s no spoon shortage. There’s another reason — we’ll explore that,” said Underhill, demonstrating his typical wit.
Downplaying his celebrity, Underhill says “The famous people at the festival will be the ones that come and try new things. Rather than just watching an expert, you get to do it.”
O’Connell expects woodworkers from all over the country to attend the event.
“People who love nature and are interested in learning how to work with hand-tools and developing skills with knives and axes — that’s who will want to come,” she said.
Apex resident and woodworker Kat King was among the first to buy a festival ticket.
“I saw some of the incredibly talented carvers that I follow on Instagram saying they were conducting classes there,” says King. “One world-class instructor, Liesl Chatman, is teaching kolrosing. The fact that she’s coming to teach in Pittsboro, North Carolina — how cool is that? I’m signed up for her class! The chance to go to the festival and learn from other carvers and get to be in this community with carvers whom I greatly admire for a whole weekend is thrilling.”
King said kolrosing is a technique using a sharp knife to first etch designs into the surface of a spoon and then rub in coffee grounds or another dark material that keeps the design intact without digging chunks out of the spoon.
“There is a fairly large group of people interested in green woodworking,” said O’Connell. “Although it’s an ancient and traditional craft, here in the U.S. we are just at the beginning of discovering and learning about green woodcarving — I’m guessing there are 30,000 to 40,000 people that do it.”
In Europe, green woodworking is extremely popular, she said. This renaissance of old-school woodworking follows philosophies and teachings derived from Swedish handcrafts called Sloyd.
“Sloyd is a way of working with hand and eye to create the things you need to survive,” says O’Connell. “In the days of farming, you would go out and collect what you needed to build. Sloyd is being handy with handmade tools to build the world around you from the world around you.”
The term Sloyd, she said, also refers to a type of knife and teaching people to use tools in a sustainable way.
“I have a love affair with the process, from going into the forest to identify trees to sustainably harvesting suitable wood, to collecting vintage tools for processing the wood in order to find what the wood wants to be,” O’Connell said.
Those drawn to a Sloyd lifestyle are generally interested in living more simply and closer to the land, which ties into building a community.
“When you build your life this way, life embraces you more because you are part of the community versus buying what you need and being part of the waste-stream,” O’Connell said.
“Festivals like this that follow the philosophies of Sloyd are about being at school for life,” said Ben Harman, a volunteer who will be attending the festival. “I love listening to people talk about their craft. When Roy Underhill talks about traditional handcrafts, it’s like watching human consciousness applied to nature. I get inspired by people talking about their passion for creating things from nature.”
Harman is interested in making things out of what is at hand. He has used experience gained through the Deep River Folk School, which his father founded and operates, to help O’Connell with Festival preparations. Harman’s father is a master craftsman as his father before him.
People from all walks of life are captivated by this greenwood renaissance of old school woodworking derived from Swedish hand crafts called Sloyd. O’Connell spent 24 years as a physical therapist, King is an inclusion consultant, and Harman is an analytical chemist.
Woodworking connects the artist to the materials of nature and the direct use of one’s hands, according to Underhill.
“Discovering the grain of the wood is a very ancient concept in the development of intelligence as human beings,” says Underhill. “Wood has its own character and you have to strategize about how to work with it – you have to think about it. Wood is not Velveeta; it partners with you,”
Underhill speaks of Sloyd and woodworking as self-reliance and connection with nature as our partner.
“We are so dependent on big global structures right now,” he said. “It’s good to have a little bit of our lives connected to nature. It’s also environmentally important — develops your muscles; strengthens you and is good for the climate; not putting pollutants into the air.”
And swinging a hatchet?
“Who doesn’t love that?” Underhill said. “And fresh green shavings, piling up around your feet — and you end up with something nice, a dough bowl or spoon that’s out there in somebody’s kitchen.”
“I think it’s growing — environmental consciousness and our impact on the world around us, awareness of needing less, less reliance on big business and desire to be more off-grid,” Harman said. “Some people are just interested in being connected with the folkways of the past, how their grandparents lived and made things.”
O’Connell is the sole proprietor and organizer of the GreenWood Wrights’Fest and also operates Cara’s Green Woodworking, a business she started in 2020 in Pittsboro. Out of the latter, she creates and sells spoons, bowls, bark buckets and hickory bark sculptures of different sizes.
“I’ll take a cut from a tree and turn it into a human form by wrapping hickory around it,” she said. “My work has continued to evolve to include wooden jewelry and abstract sculpture using functional geometry and architectural design.”
She’s also a well-known installation artist.
“My Moravian work bench sits in the middle of my living room covered in gouges and jigs,” O’Connell said. “Wood chips are all over my house and my husband says our house is a tool box. Now that spring has swung, I work outside most of the time.”
O’Connell’s inspiration comes from her love of nature, hand-tools and woodworking nurtured through childhood trips to Little Island Camp, a hand-built, rustic camp built by her grandfather.
The GreenWood Wrights’Fest brings her full-circle to Shakori Hills; her spoon and bowl carving became energized with a class taken at the Piedmont Earth Skills Gathering held there in 2016.
O’Connell is also an instructor at Underhill’s The Woodwright’s School, where she teaches students how to make bark buckets called Appalachian Berry Baskets.
“People would go for a walk and find berries and harvest bark from the trees to carry the berries home,” O’Connell said. “I use poplar and hickory bark which is amazing stuff, beautiful and strong. I can use the inner bark of the tree like leather in strips to make things like chair seats. I take traditional things and make new things out of them.”
Underhill and O’Connell met in 2014.
“Roy has driven me to pursue this in a serious way and find my niche,” O’Connell said. “He’s been very influential in my progression as a craftsman and woodworker; he got me on my path.”
“The Woodwright’s School is the only woodworking school in American whose back door opens up to a bar,” says Underhill, joking about the school’s location in front of The City Tap on Hillsboro Street in Pittsboro.
The Woodwright’s School conducts classes for the beginner to the very advanced woodworker. Some attendees travel a great distance to do advanced plane or furniture making.
Through the store’s large glass windows, passersby can see a dozen or so people working with hand planes and chisels and mallets. “There’s a lot of folks who have never seen this kind of thing before,” said Underhill. “I’m glad children can still see this and can say ‘I can do that.’”
The doors are open and people can wander in when classes are going on.
“Besides paying the bills, I do believe in this stuff; it has value for people,” said Underhill, reflecting on his career. “It doesn’t mean that somebody’s going to give up their job writing code for software but it enriches lives — it’s important to keep as part of our culture, in our memory. It can also save the darn planet; stop spending your money on plastic and start making things out of wood. Things are getting critical. I’m just trying to save the world through woodworking.”
Main sponsors for the Festival are The Woodwright’s School, Deep River Folk School, John C. Campbell Folk School, and Shakori Hills Community Arts Center.
“There have been other big green woodcarving festivals — in Scandinavia and England and also New England in the U.S. It’s not brand new but it’s the first time here,” said Underhill. “Cara (O’Connell) has organized this festival all on her own and it’s pretty amazing. She’s extremely skilled and has wonderful talent and persistence; without that, talent doesn’t do you much good.”
Examples of O’Connell’s work can be seen on Instagram @Carabnr.
GreenWood Wrights’Fest program schedule, instructor bios and ticket information can be found by visiting its website.
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