Programs · Crafts
Crafts, which is not a soft option.
A kiln, a dye vat, a sewing machine bank, and a glue budget that the finance committee has asked about twice.
- Ages
- 9–14
- Meets
- Tue & Fri
- Capacity
- 14
- Studio
- Hawthorne & Cully
Crafts gets treated as the easy program by people who have never wedged clay. It is the program with the most precise skill progression we run, the highest rate of kids coming back for a second term, and the only kiln on the east side that a ten-year-old can tell you the firing schedule of.
The four studios
Studio 01
Clay
Hand-building first — pinch, coil, slab. Wheel throwing only after a kid can center clay by hand, which takes most of a term. Glazing is a separate skill and a separate week.
Studio 02
Fiber
Hand sewing, machine sewing, natural dye, and one indigo vat that lives in the courtyard and smells exactly like it smells. Kids dye their own program t-shirts.
Studio 03
Wood
Hand tools, joinery, and small furniture. Shared with Engineering, but Crafts uses it for finish and fit, not load.
Studio 04
Paper & print
Zines, bookbinding, screen printing, and the annual STENCH almanac, which is 48 pages and entirely kid-written.
A term, roughly
Fall is clay, because the kiln is warm and the term is long. Winter is fiber, because it is dark at 4:45 and everybody wants to be inside with a sewing machine. Spring is paper and print, because the almanac has a deadline and the Science Fair needs posters.
Kids do not rotate through all four studios. They pick one and go deep, which means a kid might spend three terms learning to throw a cylinder and come out of it able to throw a cylinder. That is a real skill and it is not a consolation prize.
Hot glue is a gateway material. You give a kid hot glue and cardboard and by week six they want a table saw. My job is to make sure they still have all their fingers when they get there.
What kids make
- A set of four thrown cups, glazed, food-safe, and used at the family night snack table.
- A naturally dyed garment or bag, with the dye recipe written down.
- A hand-sewn object with at least one proper seam and one deliberately visible repair.
- A page in the annual almanac, printed and bound by kids.
Pick two. Stay eleven weeks. Show somebody.
Every program runs one afternoon a week for a full term. Kids choose two, and we do not shuffle them around like a tasting menu.