Here we go!!! The Workshop Covington website is live! Check out WorkshopCovington.com and see the assortment of classes we have lined up for the first half of 2027.
We are excited to offer both a range of class types and experience levels. There will be chair making and tool chests, marquetry and design classes, even a chance to play with fresh milk paint. Take a look around the site and see the details for each class.
Mark your calendars, class registration opens on Wednesday, October 7th at noon (Eastern time). Registration will be done by email, all the details of how it works are on the website.
We are looking forward to welcoming you to the bench room at Workshop Covington, right in the heart of Covington, Kentucky. A stone’s throw from many places to eat, stay, and just generally have an all around fantastic time woodworking and exploring the historic city of Covington.
My first chairmaking students in a class co-taught with Alexander Bear at my home shop, the Kansas City Woodworkers’ Guild.
I started teaching chairmaking one year ago, fresh off a week assisting Christopher Schwarz’s Chairmaker’s Toolbox class. I had just a few chairs under my belt and probably wasn’t quite ready to teach anyone else how to make them, but I had a willing co-teacher and enough reckless abandon to try. We set off on a 10-week adventure, building chairs in three-hour chunks on Monday nights.
After a few weeks, one of the students came in and said, “I’ve been reading the book after class – you sound exactly like Chris!”
Learning to narrate your actions while also maintaining accuracy only comes with practice — which sometimes means messing up in front of an audience. Luckily that didn’t happen here!
He wasn’t wrong. I am a self-taught woodworker; the closest thing I had to a woodworking education was “The Stick Chair Book,” the LAP blog, and two weeks at the Willard Street shop. I pored over my notes before every class. It made perfect sense that I was teaching in Chris’s voice. Each week felt like a final exam that I was cramming for, hoping we could make it through the evening with everyone’s parts intact.
I had to cram because I wasn’t fluent in chairmaking yet – I knew the steps but I didn’t really speak the language. I studied and memorized so I could remember how to do something and confidently answer student questions about “what if?” or “why?”– even if those answers weren’t based in personal experience. In other words: I faked it ’til I made it. And we ended up with a batch of decent chairs.
I approach every visit to LAP with a specific goal. Last year I wanted to understand how Chris structured a class. This year’s priority? Stock prep and tool maintenance.
On the last day of the CMT class in 2025, Chris invited me back to co-teach the next one. I wasn’t ready when he asked me but I had a whole year to get there.
Fluency only comes with time on the tools and hours at the bench. I committed myself to making more chairs, from “The Stick Chair Book” and of my own design. I was determined to fix my mistakes (of which there were many: cracked arms, failed finishes, spelched mortises … the list goes on!) so that I could fix student mistakes. I challenged myself to build without referencing notes, relying instead on instinct and memory. It worked. Once I absorbed the processes, teaching became less like reading off a script. It morphed into something more creative, more fun. The act of teaching became a constant soothing affirmation: You know what you are doing. You Are A Chairmaker.
When I walked into the LAP shop two weeks ago, though, I was hit with a whole new set of doubts. I knew I could build a chair and teach a class, but what would it be like teaching in front of the person who taught me? Would the students ask me any questions or would they just want to talk to Chris? How embarrassing is it going to be when he hears me rip off one of his jokes? Am I just a bad bootleg?
Chris taught me how to build my first chair at the Willard Street shop in September 2023. I’m amazed by how far I’ve come and how much further I have to go.
Turns out I didn’t have anything to worry about. I surprised myself: I had built the muscle memory; developed my own questionable jokes (ask me about Tenon Town!); and developed the confidence to teach in my own way, injected with my personality and my experience. I didn’t feel like a mimic anymore; I felt like a part of a craft tradition.
And the student feedback this time?
“You and Chris are so different – you make a great pair.”
I’ve taught woodworking at Dictum GmbH in Germany for many years. And it’s always a bit disorienting (but fun). I’m an American with a German last name who teaches people how to make chairs from Wales, Scotland and Ireland. And the students are German, Swedish, Mexican, Polish, Dutch….
And the class is in Bavaria. But taught in English.
Somehow we make it work, and the classes are always the highlight of my summer. During the last decade, I’ve made lots of close friends overseas through these classes. This year I taught students how to make an Irish Gibson chair, then we spent a week making a comb-back chair with steam-bent components.
Heiko Pulcher, one of my friends at Dictum, took the following video during my class on the Gibson chair. Check it out.
This class also represented a big step forward in my understanding of this Irish chair. I’ve been making this chair form for eight years now, and I have continually refined the process to make it simpler and to remove jigs and math.
I think I have finally nailed it.
This year I plan to film the new process. It will replace our existing video for sale in our store. If you bought the old video, you will get the new one for free. Stay tuned.
It needs some cleaning, paint and sprucing up. But the former picking floor of our warehouse should be a woodworking school by the end of the year.
Thanks to some tectonic shifts in our business at Lost Art Press, it looks like we will have a new woodworking school in Covington, Kentucky, that is literally in our back yard.
Last year we had to stop holding classes in our Willard Street workshop after our insurance carrier dumped us (it’s a long tale that does *not* involve anyone getting hurt. Basically, when you live above your business, things get weird).
In June, our Covington warehouse hit its maximum capacity while we had more than a dozen double-stacked pallets of books on the way. So we moved our warehouse operations a mile away to a building that was purpose-built for order fulfillment with a loading dock, a huge roll-up door and insane room for growth. We signed a seven-year lease.
As luck would have it, two of our favorite woodworkers were interested in opening an independent school. So unless our Covington building gets hit with a meteorite, it looks like their school will occupy the warehouse space attached to our storefront.
The school will be an independent business, but it will be closely aligned with Lost Art Press. Megan and I will teach there, as will a whole host of great instructors.
And our storefront and as-yet-to-be-named school will share space and facilities. Visitors to the storefront will see the school in action. Students who need a book or a tool can saunter a few steps to get what they need.
Students loved the urban atmosphere in Covington, and this new school will preserve that. The new school is even closer to Covington’s hotel district and is surrounded by hundreds of restaurants, bars, coffee shops, bookstores and places to buy freeze-dried ducklings.
Megan and I are planning new classes for 2027 at the school – classes we have never taught before. It’s all quite nice that this is working out for everyone: students, the owners of the new school and Lost Art Press. (And for Covington, too. The owners of Larry’s say they really miss all you guys, especially Scott.)
If all goes to plan, classes will begin in January 2027. We will let you know when the first class list will be released.
My traveling Dutch Tool Chest, with all the stuff I’m about to load into it. And yes, I can lift it once it’s fully loaded…though I admit it’s getting more difficult the older I get!
Chris and I are once again headed to London to teach classes with the London International Woodworking Festival at the end of October. Chris is teaching a four-day (Oct. 26-29) Irish Chair Class, and a short class (Oct. 30) on Peasant Carving, and I am (no surprise) teaching a four-day (Oct. 26-29) Dutch Tool Chest Class, then a short seminar (Oct, 30) on making the most of your tool chest. And we’ll be around for the October 29-30 fair, of course!
