Week Eight: Crafts and Construction
This week, gappers helped build a house, learned to knit, pressed cider, and more, all under the guidance of many of the wonderful Glen Brook staff members.
Electives were the perfect opportunity for the gap cohort to learn from the many knowledgeable people at Glen Brook, and dip our toes into some new crafts, construction, and content. Hear from Marie, our guest editor, as she writes the blog for week eight!
On Tuesday, we started our electives. In the morning, we had the first session of our three day electives; either knitting with Julia, or cabin construction with Grant. In the knitting elective, Julia taught us the basics of knitting, like casting on, the knit and purl stitches, and how to decrease, and very patiently answered all of our questions. By the end of the week, all six of the gappers in the knitting elective successfully knit a beanie! The three gappers that did not learn how to knit spent their mornings with Grant, starting the construction of a new staff cabin. They started the process of building the foundation, by mixing concrete and forming the footers for the house, and constructing the first of many carrier beams. There is still a lot of work to be done on the project, but the opportunity to help construct a house is an exciting one, and hopefully a few other gappers will aid with the process next week as well!
Our first morning electives spanned a few days, but our next ones were shorter, giving us just enough to give us a taste of the activity. Options ranged from weaving and mending, to hide tanning and car maintenance, to food preservation and apple cider pressing, and beyond! Glen Brook staff members have a wide range of skills that they so generously shared with us during our elective week.
As your guest writer for the week, I’ll share a few of my favorite moments from electives. Learning how to knit with Julia is probably the best thing that came out of electives, for me, because I have been trying to learn how to knit for years, and I have now made a whole hat! Hide tanning with Charlie was another one of my favorite electives, though, because it is the sort of thing that I would not encounter in my life outside of Glen Brook, so it was very interesting to get a glimpse into the process. Some other highlights were creative arts with Nora, cider pressing, and making sauerkraut with the whole Gap crew in the main kitchen.
Outside of electives, our week was fairly typical. On Tuesday night we had book club at the Granite ring with Nora, where we discussed a reading about the American cultural definition of nature and the wilderness. The reading, called “The Trouble with Wilderness” by William Cronon, sparked a lot of conversations about how the way we define nature impacts the way that we interact with it, and how integral cultural ideals are to practical ideas about the wilderness and conservation. On Thursday night, Charlie was kind enough to come back for round two of Adulting 101: Taxes with Charlie. He taught us all about retirement savings accounts, and walked us through 401ks and Roth IRAs. Now all of us gappers know how to file our taxes, and save for our retirement! Thanks, Charlie!!
As per usual, we had a field trip on Friday, and the one we took this week was impeccably timed right after most of us learned how to knit. We visited a town about 15 minutes away from Glen Brook, Harrisville, NH, where we toured the water mills that the town was built around. Specifically, we visited a studio called Harrisville Designs, who use the water power to spin wool, and have been doing so for over 50 years. We learned a lot about the history of the town, and how water power has influenced that history. During our tour of the facilities, we also got to observe the wool spinning process, which could not have come at a better time after our week of knitting!
The weekend was filled with visits from family members for quite a few gappers, our regular town errands – which included quite a bit of Halloween prep, this week – and the weekly Glen Brook potluck. Now we are all recharged and rejuvenated for another exciting week of electives!!
