In August 2023 we hosted a Japanese spoon carver named Kotaro Okubo at our craft school in Ashland, Wisconsin. Kotaro specializes in the use of the nankin kanna or wooden bodied spokeshave.

This summer we will host a class at our school with one of Japan’s best spoon carvers, Kotaro Okubo. If you are interested in Japanese woodworking, craft, or making ethos, this will be something you won’t want to miss. It will be great.

This past year has been unbelievable…really. We bought a small garage on a double lot, a few blocks away from our home. In that time we nearly rebuilt the existing structure and added a whole second story, built a fence, planted 100 basket willow cuttings, and garden with woven willow fence.

This past weekend I taught a pole lathe turning workshop to three students at our school here in Ashland, WI. The classroom space is small and I only have four lathes so from that point of view the class was nearly full. I’ve taught good turning classes with as many as twelve students, but there are benefits to small classes….

Last November we bought a small building just a few blocks away from our house in Ashland WI. It was a bit spontaneous, but we knew it would mean something good. We’d been driving by the vacant building for years, often daydreaming about what we could do with it….

Wooden tableware has a rich and long history within the Japanese culture. We share that history here in the West, but the widespread use of woodenware largely ended a few generations ago. There are some exceptions—one being the large diameter bowls produced en masse by bowl mills here in the States. But in Japan the timeline is unbroken and this is one of the reasons why I traveled there…