Hands-on workshops & classes in Colorado Springs
11 places in Colorado Springs where you make something with your hands, including Cronk Art & Curiosities, Bishop Castle and Elev8 Premier Glass Studio. Blow glass, throw pots, forge a blade or build a terrarium — an evening you leave holding the thing you made. They spread across Downtown Colorado Springs, Rye (south of Colorado Springs), East Colorado Springs (Platte Ave), East Colorado Springs (McClain Point) and 5 more areas, so two or three can make a whole afternoon. Every entry is hand-vetted against real sources — not scraped off a top-ten list or averaged out of crowd ratings.
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Cronk Art & Curiosities
A queer-owned downtown curiosity shop where ethically sourced butterfly and beetle taxidermy shares shelf space with tarot decks and live tarantulas — and after dark, the owners have been known to let a ghost hunter in.
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Bishop Castle
An enormous castle built entirely by hand over 50+ years by one man, Jim Bishop — towers, a fire-breathing dragon, and ironwork you climb at your own risk in a gloriously un-commercialized, donation-only outsider-art monument.
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Elev8 Premier Glass Studio
Elev8 is a working borosilicate glass studio founded in 2004, not a casual paint-and-sip spot — it runs in production mode all week and only opens its torches to students on weekends. The four-hour beginner Liquid Arts class gives you roughly three hours of actual torch time shaping molten glass, with all tools, oxygen, fuel, and eye protection provided. They won't run a class for a single person, so it's built for pairs. You keep whatever you make.
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Kilroy's Workshop
Kilroy's is an 11,000-square-foot blacksmithing and welding trade school packed with coal and gas forges, power hammers, presses, 28 anvils, and heat-treat ovens. Its real claim to fame: more than 30 people who teach or train here have competed on the History Channel's Forged in Fire, with 13 calling Kilroy's their home forge. Beginner blacksmithing classes have you firing a forge past 2,000 degrees, heating steel, and hammering out a piece — or learning to make an actual blade — on an anvil. No experience required.
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22nd Street Clay
A neighborhood pottery studio on the Westside that leans personal — alongside multi-week classes, they offer private and semi-private hands-on lessons, which is the easy entry point for a couple who just wants to throw clay for an evening. The intimate setup means real one-on-one instructor attention at the wheel rather than a crowded group class.
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The Glass Collective by Sassy Glassy
Opened May 2025 specifically to keep stained glass, mosaic, and glass fusing alive in Colorado Springs, the Glass Collective is part retail shop, part teaching studio, and part community space for glass artists. Their class menu spans all three crafts and is explicitly pitched for date nights and small groups, so you can pick fused glass or mosaic instead of the usual stained-glass default.
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Nomad Neon
Neon bending is one of the rarest hands-on crafts you can actually try as a beginner, and Nomad Neon teaches it in small Denver workshops where you shape glass tube into a sculpture and take it home glowing. The six-hour abstract sculpture class lets you work in three colors and can be booked for one or two people, while a two-day weekend intensive gives you one-on-one instruction in designing, patterning, and bending your own piece. It's worth the drive up I-25 — there's nothing like it closer to the Springs.
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The Charnel Box
This is full-on small-mammal taxidermy taught in an intimate home studio south of downtown. The five-hour Foundations Workshop ($175/person) walks you through real skills on a mouse specimen and sends you home with a finished mount, and graduates can return for Bring-Your-Own-Specimen sessions (mammals only). Bird taxidermy and wet-specimen preservation classes are in the works too. Sessions are tiny, scheduled in occasional batches, and routinely sell out; the exact address is sent 72 hours before class. About as hands-on and unusual as a date gets.
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Novis Mortem Collective (classes by The Terrorium Shop)
A downtown oddities gallery on Tejon Street that runs hands-on workshops in its curiosity-shop setting: insect pinning, taxidermy, plant education and terrarium building. The Denver-based Terrorium Shop hosts sessions here too, including a beginner rat taxidermy workshop. It is a genuinely offbeat spot rather than a generic craft studio, so check their site for the current class calendar before you go.
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MatchBox Candle Co.
A working candle company in Old Colorado City that lets you pour your own custom candles with a professionally trained candle maker guiding the hour-long session. You blend from the shop's scent library — matching a bestseller or inventing your own combo — and pour into either two 9 oz amber jars or one large 16 oz leather-wrapped jar. At $49.95 a person it's an accessible, low-pressure make-it date in a real production studio rather than a pop-up.
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Meraki Springs
A maker studio in Old Colorado City with 30-plus rotating hands-on workshops, from candle and soap making to leather carving, resin pieces, tallow balm, and ring/jewelry making, mostly in the $50–$175 range. Sessions run in small groups and are BYOB, so you can bring a bottle and make an evening of it. Private class options let a couple lock in their own preferred craft and time. It's a one-stop pick when you want choice rather than a single fixed activity.
Hands-on workshops & classes in Colorado Springs — FAQ
What can you actually make at a workshop in Colorado Springs?
Across the 11 listed: taxidermy, keepsake, make it, insects and curiosity shop. Start with Cronk Art & Curiosities and Bishop Castle — every listing says what you leave holding and roughly what it costs.
Which hands-on workshops & classes in Colorado Springs are the strangest?
Ranked by how strange they actually are: Bishop Castle, Kilroy's Workshop and Elev8 Premier Glass Studio. Bishop Castle — An enormous castle built entirely by hand over 50+ years by one man, Jim Bishop — towers, a fire-breathing dragon, and ironwork you climb at your own risk in a gloriously un-commercialized, donation-only outsider-art monument.
Where in Colorado Springs are they?
Across Downtown Colorado Springs, Rye (south of Colorado Springs), East Colorado Springs (Platte Ave), East Colorado Springs (McClain Point) and Westside, Colorado Springs and 4 more. Each listing gives the neighborhood and address so you can cluster a couple into one outing.
Is this a good weird date in Colorado Springs?
That's what the list is built for. Every entry has a specific move rather than a vague recommendation — at Bishop Castle, for instance: Drive the scenic mountain road out, dare each other up the highest tower and the precarious iron bridges, then read Bishop's hand-lettered manifestos on the way down.
How were these hands-on workshops & classes chosen?
An agentic research system digs for the genuinely obscure — the spots even locals miss — and every one is verified against real sources before it makes the list. We deliberately skip the landmarks already on every Colorado Springs guide.