ICYMI: actor, humorist, and woodworker Nick Offerman and the incredibly talented local woodworker Lee Buchanan visited the Girls Garage shop! In between stops on their Little Woodchucks: Offerman Woodshop’s Guide to Tools and Tomfoolery book tour, we welcomed Nick and Lee for a meet-and-greet with our students and a special fireside chat for the Girls Garage community.
Setting the stage 🎤
Our Advanced Design/Build cohort, fresh from celebrating a home renovation ribbon-cutting, jumped straight into fabricating the decorative elements of the set: a large monstera potted plant, a fireplace mantel with a roaring fire, and a beautiful end table.
Students in Construction + Community centered their work around one question: What does it look like to build something that holds someone? Their answer took shape in three beautifully crafted wooden chairs that required careful attention to proportion, strength, and comfort.
In Carpentry + Wood, our beginner builders focused on storytelling through visual detail. They created custom frames and hand-painted artwork featuring tools found in the shop. Measuring, cutting, joining, and finishing each frame by hand, they transformed everyday shop objects into art.
Finding a seat in our new living room 🪑
In total, 36 students contributed to the set. What emerged was a fully realized wooden living room imagined, designed, and built entirely by young makers. At the meet-and-greet, students described every part of their building process to Nick and Lee, who listened with care and spoke to our students as peers. The pride in our students’ voices and the confidence in their craftsmanship brought Nick to tears, who said, “I have never been in the presence of so many young woodworkers before.”
Following the student presentation, we were joined by 75 of our supporters, parents, and partners* for a fireside chat on the student-built stage, moderated by our founder Emily Pilloton-Lam. There was laughter, woodworking puns, joyful banter, and serious talk about the value of making things with our hands, together, always.
Girls Garage parent and long-time supporter, Courtney Martin, summarized the evening best:
“On the one hand, it can seem frivolous and naive to focus on the making of a fake fireplace when the world is burning. On the other hand, if the making of that fake fireplace is in the company of other safe and joyful tween girls who are stretching their ideas of what they are capable of doing with their own two hands, and in community, well then it becomes a beautiful counterpoint to…well…the Epstein files and everything they represent, to militarization, to fascism. In this place, Girls Garage, girls are stretching, learning, building, and communing. They are interesting and interested. They are fully and inviolately human.”
In a time that feels splintered by uncertainty and destruction, we look to making. We build, we carve, we craft, we glue, every day, inciting joy and hope with each other.
On tour with the Big Woodchucks!
On their way out for the evening, Nick and Lee selected a couple of woodchucks to bring with them on the rest of their Big Woodchuck comedy tour. On the left, Nick holds up the woodchuck Stella built, which she titled and fashioned after the woodworker himself, “Nick Offerman,” who stood in admiration over the uncanny resemblance the two share. On the right stands a tall, clunky, and chipper woodchuck—which they lovingly named Hazel—that has joined Nick and Lee on stage in Monterey, Santa Barbara, Denver, Salem, and more as they finish out the rest of their Big Woodchuck tour.
