People Collection Rocker with Rob Spiece and Katie Bister

This weeklong class will give students a glimpse into the rocking chair production process developed for this chair over at Student Craft.

Katie Bister worked in the Woodcraft studio of Student Craft for all four years of her tenure at Berea College. Adept and willing to try many mediums in the craft world, Katie connected with the idea and practice of chairmaking. Over the course of her senior year, she set about to design a chair for the Student Craft catalog. Working alongside Director of Woodcraft, Rob Spiece the two spent the year iterating different ideas. After 6 months and 12 different chairs, they refined the vision into the People Collection Rocker. It’s an armless rocker that encourages an active participant to knit, strum, or rock backwards if they’d like.

This class will be a solid foundation in chairmaking that covers hand carving the seat, round mortise and tenon joinery, turning for furniture, bent lamination, drilling angled joinery accurately, and building an approach to making that suits your own workshop. We’ll share our jigs and processes used to produce these at Student Craft but will also show you ways to approach this build with the tooling you have available.

If you don’t have any experience in the world of chairmaking, I’d recommend taking our People Collection Stool class first. This will be an ambitious six days to make this rocker from scratch!

All material costs and daily lunches are included in the course fee at Pine Croft.