In New Hampshire, we treasure our traditional crafts. Here are some of the shops, museums, studios, and schools where you can learn them.
It’s getting to be that time of year in New Hampshire when days become shorter, holidays grow closer, and thoughts turn to crafts—especially those which have been passed on to us by grandparents, home ec teachers, and skilled instructors. New Hampshire has a long crafting history, some of it from Indigenous peoples, others brought overseas by colonists, and all still alive today. Crafting has never really gone out of fashion here. Still, it’s increasingly easy to find studios and teachers offering the basics and advanced methods of the state’s oldest and most popular crafts.
But if you’re not lucky enough to have an aunt who taught you to weave a scarf or a grandfather who could throw a salad bowl on a potter’s wheel, no problem. New Hampshire has dozens of guilds, museums, studios, and schools where skilled artisans offer lessons for beginners and advanced learners.
Here’s a list of places to take lessons in three of the state’s most popular traditional crafts: weaving, pottery, and quilting.
Weaving
1. Harrisville Designs
Location: 4 Mill Alley, Harrisville
Costs: Five-day workshops range from $675 to $750. Lodging for participants at the 1853 Cheshire Mills Boarding House is an additional $70 a night. Harrisville Designs also has some free online tutorials and wool works school curricula, which start at $7.50
Enroll: Register online.
Harrisville Designs is the epicenter for those seeking an intense, immersive weaving experience set in an authentic 19th-century mill town with a textile-manufacturing history dating back over 200 years. Experienced and would-be weavers come from around the country and the world to sit at crafted wooden looms in an 1830s mill building and learn from renowned weavers how to turn rainbows of colored yarn (made on site) into heirloom garments and home décor.
Workshops are offered at different skill levels. Harrisville Designs provides looms and 100% virgin wool yarn, spun on site.
2. Strawbery Banke
Location: 14 Hancock St., Portsmouth
Costs: Prices range from $55 to $450
Enroll: Register online.
Strawbery Banke Museum offers a variety of traditional craft lessons, including basket making, quill writing, knitting, and weaving in a museum setting. Their weaving classes include four-week beginner workshops like Introduction to Textile Weaving and Introduction to Rag Rug Weaving, as well as mini sessions like Weave a Scarf in a Day and Introduction to Drop Spinning.
3. Sanborn Mills Farm
Location: 7097 Sanborn Road, Loudon
Costs: Two-day workshops start at $288; five-day workshops start at $576. Optional housing and meal plans are extra. Free online tutorials on weaving and educational curricula are available.
Enroll: Register online.
Sanborn Mills Farm is a trip for anyone who wants to learn a traditional New England craft, including weaving. The working farm is over 250 years old, teaches traditional crafting and farming methods, and offers over 130 workshops a year. In addition to weaving, it offers tinsmithing, basket making, and woodworking, among others. The scenery alone at this farm, including horses, oxen, pigs, and chickens, a gristmill, and a water-powered sawmill, is enough to inspire creativity.
Pottery
1. Voice of Clay
Location: 16 Meeting House Rd., Brookline
Costs: Classes range from $25-$60 for one-time beginning throwing and glazing classes, and $295 for six-week throwing/hand-building workshops. Private lessons are also offered.
Enroll: Register online.
Voice of Clay offers would-be and experienced potters a wide variety of small classes and six-week workshops as well as private and group lessons. You could say owner Wendy McKenzie started her relationship with clay and earth in childhood. Her parents owned New Hampshire’s iconic Pickity Place in Mason, a restaurant, garden, and greenhouse featuring everything that grows in New Hampshire soil.
After an inspiring pottery apprenticeship at the High Mowing School in Wilton, she fell in love with pottery and opened Voice of Clay 27 years ago. “There’s something about being a New Englander and using your hands to create and innovate things. It’s part of our culture,” she said.
2. League of NH Craftsmen
Location: North Conway Fine Craft Gallery, North Conway
Costs: Lessons start at $65.
Enroll: Register online.
League of NH Craftsmen North Conway offers a long list of pottery classes, from one-week wheel-throwing classes to three-hour project sessions to create an ornament. Continuing students can use the gallery’s open studio time for $55/month, plus $5.50 for firings (includes clay and glazes).
3. Mud City Clay
Location: 73 Pickering Rd., Rochester
Costs: Eight-week adult sessions start at $460, including clay, glaze, and firing. Children and teen lessons, including those geared to home-schooled students, vary in price.
Enroll: Register online.
Classes at Mud City Clay are held in a 19th-century mill building and are designed to provide a creative outlet and “a community to help share resources, teach each other the endless possibilities clay has.”
Mud City offers a wide variety of classes for different age groups and proficiency.
4. Rooted in Clay
Location: 208 Middle Winchendon Rd., Rindge
Costs: Weekly lessons are $30 per person for a 90-minute class. Private and group lessons are also available.
Enroll: Register online.
Teaching artist Shana Brautigam has owned and run Rooted in Clay for 23 years. She specializes in hand-built, nature-inspired pottery.
Quilting
1. Quilting Guilds
Location: 30 throughout the state, including Hannah Dustin Quilters’ Guild, Hudson; Monadnock Quilters’ Guild, Peterborough; Capital Quilters Guild, Bow; Ladies of the Lake Quilters’ Guild, Wolfeboro; Seabreeze Quilt Guild, Exeter; Cocheco Quilters Guild, Dover; and Whitefield Needlers, Whitefield. Go here for a full listing of quilting guilds in the state.
Quilting guilds are community associations with dues, officers, regular meetings, classes, exhibitions, and charity work – often creating handmade counterpanes to auction or raffle off for special causes.
While New Hampshire has a long history of quilting, quilting guilds sprang up from a revival of the craft starting in the 1970s, according to the International Quilt Museum website.
2. Night Owl Quilting Studio
Location: 199 Route 101, Amherst
Costs: Prices vary by level and project—private lessons: $75 an hour. Sewing machines are available to rent.
Enroll: Register online.
The cozy Night Owl Quilting Studio is owned by a mother/daughter team with over 60 years of combined quilting experience. Their goal, according to their website, is to inspire “our community through education and creativity, one person and one quilt at a time.” The owners and guest instructors teach classes and private sessions.
3. Compass Point Quilts & CPQ Studio
Location: 59 Sanborn Rd., East Kingston
Costs: Classes range from $25 — $100
Enroll: Register online.
Compass Point Quilts & CPQ Studio is owned by artisan Lisa McCarthy, who teaches quilt-making with dramatic geometric patterns and vivid colors, as well as colorful patterns by designers like Judy Niemeyer & Jacqueline de Jonge. In addition to classes, the studio also hosts free “Teach me Tuesday” nights.
