Home Sweet (Leelanau) Home for Green Door Folk School

Green Door Folk School can teach you how to make a wooden spoon.

Do you need a handmade wooden spoon? Probably not. But it’s not about the spoon. It’s about slowing down in a world that’s barreling ahead with backbreaking speed. It’s about making something with your hands. It’s about being deliberate and intentional with your time. It’s about learning a new set of skills.

Founder Kristina Schnepf recalls when all of this crystalized. There she was, sitting in her corporate job in her corporate high rise, gazing across the way at another one being built.

“I was watching this building go up across from my window and realizing that (the people working on it) leave their job every day and see what they’ve built. But here I was just sitting there moving papers around on my desk,” she tells The Ticker. “I realized I needed that. I wanted that…And I knew I wasn’t the only one feeling that.”

Schnepf founded Green Door Folk School earlier this year with the desire to bring the folk school movement to Northern Michigan. These schools emphasize learning for the sake of learning, often with a focus on hands-on or traditional crafts, skills or methods. 

After hosting more than 100 people in the 11 classes Green Door has held at various locations since March, Schnepf is thrilled to find a permanent home for Green Door at Cedar North at J2 Farm, a 50-acre farmstead in Cedar run by Julie Botsford and James Reznich.

“We were excited when we started because we were doing things in different community spaces, and it was kind of fun for us and our students to have exposure to some places that you might not normally see,” Schnepf says. “But having a space that we can call our own and go back to every week – and that has the amazing resources that Cedar North has – is just wonderful.”

Cedar North bills itself as a “growing community of folks with an interest in art, design, regenerative agriculture, the natural environment and quality food.” Botsford and Reznich had already been involved in some Green Door classes, and they're the perfect fit for Green Door, Schnepf says.

“Just having their space and their energy be a part of what we’re doing in the classroom is...remarkable,” she says.

Classes on the schedule at Green Door Folk School include a wild dyers lab, the art of creating a summer feast, tension tray weaving, spoon sloyd (carving), a multi-day “quilt camp” and more. Past classes included open fire cooking, cyanotype printmaking, wet felting, mushroom growing and yarn spinning, among others.

“Every class has brought together a different group of people that would not have been together had it not been for that particular class, so they are these really neat and unique moments in time,” Schnepf says.

It has not been particularly hard to find people to teach such specific classes, Schnepf says.

“One of the reasons I felt we needed a folk school here is that we have so many artisans and experts locally that we don't need to bring people in to teach stuff,” she says. “Initially when I started talking with people about the need or opportunity for a folk school, everybody told me about someone they knew who taught something or...had a skill or an expertise. I assembled a list of like a hundred people right off the bat. And since we've been open…we've had a number of people come to us.”

Feedback on the classes that have been held so far has been tremendous, Schnepf says. One woman told her she couldn’t remember the last time she had spent a whole day focused on one thing, which Schnepf feels reinforces the need for these classes.

Her goal is to encourage people to take the intentional, slow and deliberate approach found in the Green Door classes and apply that to their everyday lives.

“We often hear comments along the lines of ‘It’s time to get back to the real world.’ And that makes us feel great that we’ve given them a place to relax and enjoy themselves, but we also want to go ‘How do we take this back into your real world? How do you make it part of a practice?”