Bill & Wille

part of my craft genealogy thread

I haven’t carved spoons regularly in years now. The last time I got spoon wood I really liked was 2020, an easy year to remember. That was some rhododendron my nephew was thinning out...But I still use techniques I learned through spoon carving. It took me eight years, but I finally got a handle on the door to my shop, from the locust tree that was just taken down outside the shop. There wasn’t much to making this handle, other than seeing it in the brush pile, carving away the bark and flattening one side to fix to the door.

locust door handle

But working it got me to thinking about some of my craft genealogy research, in particular Jögge and Wille Sundqvist. Jögge and I first met in 1988 at Drew & Louise Langsner’s, then 22 years went by before we met again! After that we worked together several times between 2010 and 2018. 

PF & Jogge 2016

Probably more times than he’d care to remember, Drew Langsner has told the story of how Country Workshops got started. The pivot point was a visit from Bill Coperthwaite and Wille Sundqvist in November of 1976. After spending about four days learning spoon and bowl carving from Wille, Drew and Louise cooked up the idea of inviting him back to teach a class. So in the summer of 1978 Wille taught two week-long classes in Swedish carving techniques and Country Workshops was begun. The Langsners ran that school/program for 40 years before retiring in 2017.

I’ve heard Drew tell that story many times, I’ve told it myself. But then I wanted to know about how Bill and Wille connected. The book A Man Apart: Bill Coperthwaite’s Radical Experiment in Living by Peter Forbes and Helen Whybrow gave me the general timeline. It includes a chronology of Bill’s life and cites a Scandinavian tour in 1964/65 as when he and Wille met. Peter Lamb, another close friend of Bill's, firmed up the dates as early winter 1965, based on Bill’s travel notebooks.