Spring Festival 2007 Demonstrators

Get ready for our second annual Spring Festival. The day will be packed full of food and fun for everyone. While you are here, make sure you take time to watch these experts create their artistry.

Basketmaker, Susi Nuss has been a basketmaker since 1979. She specializes in historically accurate New England black ash woodsplint baskets. She has studied with numerous master basketmakers and has taught and exhibited extensively. Her work has been featured in numerous books and periodicals.

Her baskets are all based solidly on 19th century New England tradition. They are a tie to that earlier time. A time when people were more in touch with nature, and baskets were made from indigenous materials to fill the need for functional containers.

She is a founding board member and past president of Northeast Basketmakers Guild. She has been a founding and is a continuing member of the National Basketry Organization. She is the sole content contributor and editor of a website dedicated to the special interest of basketry - BasketMakers.com.

Cooper Dave Miller is known professionally as "The Woxall Cooper." He has been interpreting the trade as bucket, barrel, and wooden commodities maker for nearly 40 years.

Working in the manner of 18th. century cooper, he crafts his watertight woodenware in exactly the same manner as those early craftsmen. He begins with the log and riving staves to comprise sides, heads, and hoops. You will see his pieces evolve in front of you.

This itinerant tradesman has traveled with his covered wagon from coast to coast and border to border rendering his trade for educational enjoyment. He is a published author and historical consultant, and has worked in almost every state and for most significant historical locations. As a producer and restorer, he has thousands of individual items in private as well as public museum collections to his credit.

Felting by Sandra Middaugh-Guerts is a Dutch artist. She went to the Art University in Maastricht and graduated as an activity organizer at the MDGO in '92. The last 10 years she worked in several museums as an experimental archeologist on voluntary basis. Five years ago she moved to the UK and then to Norway to work as a professional Viking artist. She is specialized in old crafts like spinning, felting, sprang and wire weaving. Nature is used as inspiration. At the moment Sandra gives workshops and demos in museums and in markets in the USA under the name "Vikinggirls Workshop". Recently she started a business called "Soap Tree". A 100% natural detergent with soap nuts"

 Woodcarver Marshall Rambaugh is a local artist who has always had a great interest in folk art. His early successes include small carving and painted boxes sold at the Museum of American Folk Art in New York City. Marshall is also published in the Knopf Collector's Guide series Folk Art book.

Mr. Rambaugh has studied wood carving in England and Germany and completed a course in stonecarving in Vermont that provides the background for his craft demonstration at The Lands at Hillside Farms. At our Spring Festival he will demonstrate handcarved pet grave markers -- old examples of which can still be found on The Lands at Hillside Farms. Marshall's interest in folk art gives his grave stones a distinctly early American appearance.