Woodworker's Journal 2001-25-2, страница 29

What she does with her time at the Ranch, near Aspen. Colorado, also involves more than her own woodworking. She invites faculty, makes sure machines are running and supplies are where they need to be, supervises a team of assistants and teaches her own intensive class. "If you're having

In her previous career, Gail Fredell said, 7 kept wishing I was in the shop. * Now, she spends most of her days in

the shop at the Anderson Ranch.

TTih brnrhfrmn Gail is mmtrvrUd from btrd's-tyc maple I and tacqutrrd oak, u-ith aradrmv granite supports.

a really good day," Gail said, "then it's like being a conductor getting everything to flow well. The trick is to anticipate everybody's needs and have this little shop equipped well enough to take care of anything that comes up."

Gait had previously taught woodworking at the California College of Arts and Crafts in Oakland, and was glad to get back into it when the Anderson Ranch position came open. Although she enjoys her own work, she says, she sometimes felt working on her own was "too self-indulgent." Besides, she added. "It can be very isolating, working in a shop. I feel I teaching! makes more of a contribution."

Among those she's taught. Gail noted, is her father. As a child, she had helped with his home and garden projects. The family didn't have any machinery, so, "by the time I went to college. I was skilled with hand tools," Gail said. After she graduated, her retired father learned more advanced woodworking from Gail.

Following that architecture degree. Gail herself did study woodworking — she has a master's from the Rochester Institute of Technology — but she says she's long outworked any romantic feelings about the material or the craft. For her, she said, the api>eal is "more the designing of things and the problem solving, in terms of letting the design work the way I want it to. and the technical problem solving that happens as you go through the process of making things."_

Anderson Ranch: Classes Start Soon

his year's Anderson Ranch

I woodworking courses will include a class taught by Gail Fredell on Beginning Furniture Design & Construction, for those who want "an introduction to making things work in a woodshop." For more information on this and other woodworking classes at the Ranch, call 970-923-3181 or visit

www.andcrsonranch.org.

HHH

Gail Fredell, Anderson Ranch's woodworking program director, (back row, third from left) and her staff welcomed Woodworker's Journal associate editor Joanna Werth Takes (front row. center] to a class last summer. Sam Maloof (front, left) is a long-time supporter of the Ranch.

29