Description

Within a 6 hour workshop, participants will learn how to make a functional floor broom from start to finish. They will leave the workshop with at least one com- pleted broom, and hopefully, the ability to make more.

The workshop could begin with a short introduction to broom-making and its history, including a foray into the shakers and my connection to them in Maine.
We would then jump into selecting our fiber, and putting it into buckets to soak/soften.

While the fiber is soaking, we would shape our wooden handles from blanks provided by me, using hand tools. At this point, we would also chose our wrapping cord, and I would go into the starting and finishing moves of the broom-making process.

With the handles shaped, and our starting/finishing moves learned, we would jump into the process of making the broom itself, using the pre-soaked sorghum. We would finish by learning how to stitch clamp/flatten a finished broom. This segment would be interspersed with insights on technique, broom size, uses, etc.