Our craftsmen demonstrate traditional crafts and trades: baking bread, fine crochet work, wood-carving, hat-making, cheesemaking, lime burning, bobbin-lace making, cooking, basket weaving, bonemeal grinding, oil pressing, silk ribbon weaving, sawmill, saddlery, shingle-making, forging, chocolate production, spinning, embroidery, hand-knitted lacework, pottery, weaving and barrel making.

We demonstrate different crafts live every day. For our monthly schedules, visit www.ballenberg.ch from the 24th of the previous month. Our schedule may change at the last minute.

Take a peek over the shoulders of our experts and hear them tell of old handicrafts. Most of the handicrafts demonstrated in the Ballenberg Open Air Museum were being carried out by farm families right into the 19th century as supplementary occupations. The meagre earnings from small farms made an additional source of income necessary. Clock making and bobbin lace making from the Jura region, straw weaving, from the «Sense» and «Freiamt» districts, ribbon weaving from Baselland, needlework from Appenzell, wood carving and the making of woodshaving boxes from the Bernese Oberland - all these examples of typical regional cottage industries and home handicrafts can be encountered in Ballenberg in the appropriate buildings representing the region involved.

The Ballenberg Course Centre for Handicrafts near the West entrance gives you the opportunity to learn one or the other handicraft in courses lasting several days. More information is available at the booking office.