Article Photos

Advertisement

Traditional crafts might be less common but they never go out of style. The proof is at the artisan's village at Norsk Hstfest.

The village located in Copenhagen Hall features wood carving, weaving, tatting, rosemaling and other arts.

Instructors from the North House Folk School in Grand Marais, Minn., are displaying crafts that fit in with a simple lifestyle.

Jay Arrowsmith DeCoux, an instructor at North House, works with timber frame construction as practiced by early Scandinavians.

"It's fallen out of favor because it is seen as the old way of doing it, and sometimes the old way is synonymous with not as good," he said.

He begs to differ, though, after seeing Minnesota's old timber frame barns built by Scandinavian immigrants still standing. The sides and roofs might be gone but the ridge posts of those barns are as straight as ever, he said.

"A timber frame barn will be up for a couple hundred years," he said.

Timber frame construction involves cutting and fitting timber together, holding it with tension and compression rather than metal or glues. A number of countries have used timber frame, although there are cultural differences in how it's done.

"When you have the system down, constructing out of timber frame is a lot less time. If you don't know what you are doing, it takes a lot longer time," said Arrowsmith DeCoux, who has been advancing his skills with timber frame for about five years.

"It's been a labor of love," he said. "Taking it to the next step, your appreciation for it is just amazing."

North House teaches timber frame to contractors but also to regular folks who want to build on their own.

"A big part of it is to get people to incorporate the preservation of woodworking and the traditional crafts," Arrowsmith DeCoux said of North House's mission.

In 2008, North House offered 334 classes for 1,301 students and conducted programs and festivals that attracted 13,335 participants.

Mary Schliep teaches the flower rosemaling of Valdres and the scroll rosemaling of Telemark at workshops at North House. She's taken classes herself from some of the top instructors in the field and devotes much of her free time to her craft.

"I sit for hours. I paint six, seven, eight hours a day," she said.

She does take some time off, but rosemaling has been her primary art interest since taking it up 20 years ago.

Fred Livesay of St. Paul, Minn., a carpenter and stage rigger who teaches carving at North House and other institutes, said interest in carving is increasing. A carving-knife maker has told him that his business has been on a steady incline over the years, to the point where he can't keep up anymore.

"It's been growing because, I think, people are trying to do something that's going to be useful to them as well as enjoyable, and not so expensive," Livesay said. "People tend to pick it up as a life-long thing."

Carving also is very portable.

"You only need two knives and a piece of wood," he said.

John Beltman, an instructor at North House, was drawing crowds at Hstfest Wednesday with a demonstration in making lefse rolling pins with his spring-pole lathe.

He said he's built many spring-pole lathes for people who have wanted to do traditional woodcraft. His main focus lately, though, has been in making Windsor chairs. He uses the lathes to make chair legs.

"I started with boat building. I actually apprenticed in a couple of boat building shops in the East," he said. "I just sort of fell into chair building, but I have always been interested in woodworking that doesn't require a whole lot of machinery or much investment in machinery. And the wood is directly from the woods. You have a lot more control over the quality of the wood when you harvest it yourself."

Other woodcrafters in the artisan's village include Jock Holmen, who is displaying wood duplicates of the bed posts of a Norwegian queen from the era of the 800s. The dragon carving on the bed posts was typical of the folklore of that era. Holmen explained that the people carved creatures such as dragons to ward off other evil, and having them on the queen's bed posts was believed to provide her with protection.

Holmen, of Burnsville, Minn., is making his first appearance at Hstfest with an assortment of the various carvings that he crafts.

"The fun part to me is to be able to bring your work to places like this and just be able to share things that you have learned," he said. "One of the fun things I do is let people carve who have never pushed a chisel through wood."