About Living Craft Project

Living Craft Project teaches natural building, and explores the art of a handmade life. We work to equip people with sustainable life skills, honoring our essential human needs through craftsmanship. It is our right to live in beautiful, affordable structures that preserve personal health and, inseparably, that of the environment. We teach the skills necessary to harvest resources locally, process them into building materials, and use them intelligently and gracefully with the technologies available today to make safe, natural buildings. We equip individuals- young and old- with the confidence to build for themselves and accomplish high quality work for others. But construction is only one thread in weaving a home. A craftsperson lives in an ongoing relationship- using, repairing, remaking, and remembering. Living Craft Project explores many aspects of simple living, from clay plastering to home-cooking. We commit to teaching with gentleness.

A craftsperson is a keeper of stories. Every skill passed on and each object made with integrity remembers our history and describes our future. Living Craft Project is a school dedicated to a handmade life. When we interact closely with the objects of our daily customs, our work transforms from tedium into a tactile celebration. A clay pot simmering on the stove ceases to be only cooking apparatus, becoming, in addition, a vision of the mountains where your teacher showed you how to harvest clay, a recollection of it’s pliability between your fingers, and an homage to those who tended the cooking fires through the centuries, enabling us to live today.

Living Craft Project is a sprout of The True Nature Society, a 501 (c)(3) non-profit organization that makes its home at Quail Springs, a permaculture learning center and farm in the high desert Cuyama Valley of southern California. We teach at Quail Springs where students can participate in the daily work of community living and enjoy the vast national forest surrounding us. (Donate Here.)

Workshops and apprenticeships on natural building are taught by Justin Kirmse, Brock Anderson, Lyn Giesecke, and supported by the Quail Springs Community. We weave together our diverse experience- from timber framing to small farming and permaculture education- to teach prayerfully and with humor as friends who love to work side by side. If you would like more information, feel free to call or write.