You can learn more about the designer, Leslie Jensen-Inman, in this interview here.

“One of the wonderful features of programs like PhotoShop, Illustrator, and InDesign is that you can design in layers, but you can’t do that in traditional sketchbooks.” explains Leslie about her inspiration for her books. “Sure, you could (and I often did) fashion some tracing paper and maybe create some Macgyveresque graph paper contraption so you could have a grid to draw from, but the solution was always awkward and I found that I lost my creative flow just trying to set up a sketchbook to meet my needs. After all of these years, I still wasn’t able to find a solution that met my needs, so I decided it was time to create the perfect sketchbook to meet my own needs and the needs of other creatives.”

Over email I asked Leslie about using local paper producers to create her books, how her books are made, and the many ways layer books can be used for designs.

— First, some basic questions: I was wondering where you’re from and where your books are made? Also, how long have you been making them?

I live in the Chattanooga, Tennessee area on top of a beautiful mountain. Layer Books are made in Chattanooga. Although, we’ve been working on ideas for Make Awesomeness for a few months, we started creating the Layer Books a little over one-month ago.

– Your main mission is to support the efforts of creatives. Why does this speak to you?

I am a creative. My husband is a creative. Most of our friends are creatives. I am a professor and my students are creatives. I’m fortunate to have a life filled with people who are creative. It’s important for me to support the people I care about—the people who bring meaning into my life and who give greater meaning to our world in general.

Stephanie and I want to create products that support a positive message. When a creative reaches for their sketchbook, they are usually embarking on a new challenge. They are trying to capture a new idea. This can be a daunting part of the creative process. As we all have experienced, a blank page can be a terrifying thing. It can actually stop creativity. Consider this: you reach for a Layer Book and it speaks to you and says “MAKE AWESOMENESS. You can do it. You can make awesomeness.” You open the Layer Book, see a pop of color, and you are energized. You touch the translucent paper, and you know you can make awesomeness anyway you want to—in layers, without layers, with graph paper to guide you, or with a blank slate. You can use your favorite sketching tools without worrying about ink seeping through onto the next page. You make awesomeness, and you make it on your own terms and in your own creative way.

This is what Layer Books allow creatives to do: sketch like they design—in layers.

— Where did the idea for your books come from? It seems like they would be great for animators or any graphic designer who works in PhotoShop a lot. Do you have a background in that field?

The idea for Layer Books developed out of a love for paper and a desire to have a sketchbook that was a better fit for my creative process.

I had been thinking a lot about technology and about my creative process. I have been doing graphic design since I was fourteen. At that time, I had to sketch before I jumped onto a computer because computers were slow and it was more like crawling than jumping. So sketching was an important part of my process, which looked something like this:

Sketch on paper.

Choose the best direction.

Use a computer to execute the final.

Repeat.

– What do most people use your books for? How do people who don’t work on computers for design use them?

One of the most interesting aspects about Layer Books is that people are using them for a vast variety of sketching. One person is using the Layer Books to help her with a new stained glass business. We have parents buying them for their children because they love the positive message. We have a young boy around the age of 9 who plans on using them to create different themes for the cars he draws. He mentioned some car designs with butterflies and others with flames. We have had builders and people in the construction field use the Layer Books to help design different types of windowsills for a standard window. Layer Books are so new that it will be exciting to find out the various ways that people are using them. We’ve had conversations with web designers who plan on using the ability to layer their sketches to create various options for navigation and content like they would in PhotoShop. We’ve had people suggest that Layer Books are great for sketching and developing typefaces. Layer Books are also a great solution for creating patterns crafts like cross-stitch. It is easy to create a multi-colored pattern when you’re able to sketch in layers.

— Is there a sheet of graph paper behind each translucent sheet? And is the blank sheet secured to the interior of the back cover of the book?

The graph paper and the blank sheet of paper are secured in the back of the book. The blank sheet fold over comes over from the top of the book and the graph paper fold over comes over from the bottom of the book. We created it this way so that it allows people the ability to view their work in as many layers as they want (up to about five layers works best), and they can see their work with or without the graph paper.

— What’s your process like? Do you cut all of the paper and bind the books yourself? How long does it typically take to create one?

I work with another designer and maker of awesomeness, Stephanie Tate. We combine our efforts with a local, family-owned print shop called WonderPress. The owner (aka paper whisperer), Cy DeVilbiss, helps ensure that each Layer Book is filled with awesomeness.

Each and every book is handmade and takes about seven minutes to create.

We are still figuring out the best and most efficient process in producing the books. The current process is to digitally print “MAKE AWESOMENESS” on the slate-colored paper. This serves as the outside cover of the Layer Book. We’ve matched the color of the type to the inside color of the book. The inside cover of the book is a different piece of paper; this is how we can get such a bold pop of color. We don’t print anything on the inside cover. The next step is to adhere the slate-colored paper and the pop-of-color paper together. This step is done by hand, as well. By adhering two pieces of paper together we get the equivalent of a super-thick 200# paper. Then the super-thick paper is cut to size and punched for wire binding.

Another reason we use two different colors is to create a beautiful edge to the book. When you look at the edge of the sketchbook, you can see the two different colors. In other words, white paper does not show on the edges.

The translucent paper is cut and punched for the wire binding. Each Layer Book has 50 sheets of translucent paper. The graph paper is printed, cut, punched, and scored so it can fold over neatly. The solid blank paper is cut, punched, and scored. Then all of the pieces (the front cover, translucent pages, solid blank fold over, graph paper fold over, and back cover) are assembled and bound. We use silver wire to bind the books. Then each book is individually shrink-wrapped to make sure no moisture gets to the Layer Book during shipping.

Layer Books are a very production-heavy product. Each Layer Book is reviewed before it is shipped. We want people to feel the awesomeness as they open their package.

— Where do you get your special translucent paper from? Why is this type of paper better than standard tracing paper?

We work with WonderPress and a local xpedx paper representative, Gloria Strand, to obtain the paper. The translucent paper is more durable than tracing paper, and it doesn’t unintentionally rip like tracing paper does. However, if you wish to tear a page out of the Layer Book, you can do so easily. The translucent paper is thicker than tracing paper but is actually more transparent. Since the translucent paper is thicker than tracing paper, you can use pencil and color pencils as well as markers, sharpies, and pens without the ink bleeding trough the paper. It’s pretty amazing. We suggest that you wait a couple of seconds before touching heavy inks, though. If you want to erase pencil from the translucent paper, you can do so and it looks like a fresh piece of paper—no marks.

Interested in winning a Make Awesomeness Layer Book? Please respond to this post either by leaving a comment on this post or on the Hello Craft Facebook page explaining how you’ll use your new Make Awesomeness Layer Book if you win.

Enter both times for more chances to win! This contest will close and a winner will be chosen next Tuesday, 8/02.

You can learn more about Make Awesomeness Books here.

This giveaway is now closed.

(Photo: Lynne Harty)

Nicole McConville spends her work days thinking about decoupage and origami, sawdust firing and slab building, felting and T-shirt embroidering – even about how to combine gourd decorating and basketry. But the 35-year-old Asheville, North Carolina, resident isn’t planning the ultimate multimedia craft project. Instead, she’s overseeing the Craft Your Life line for Lark Crafts, a local publisher of art and craft books that’s been in business since the 1980s. She calls the range, which includes everything from how-to books for beginners to titles on hard-core homesteading, “a loose umbrella” covering technique, community, and lifestyle. “Our aim,” she says, “is to appeal to everyone from the curious dabbler simply seeking a creative outlet to the serious studio practitioner wishing to add techniques and inspiration to their arsenal.”

Lark has always done that. Some of its older titles include 2 x 4 Furniture, Basketry: The Shaker Tradition, and 45 Fine & Fanciful Hats to Knit. But the year-and-half-old Craft Your Life initiative is designed to respond to a new conception of craft. “Today people see crafts not just as a hobby but as part of a homegrown, handmade, do-it-yourself lifestyle choice,” says McConville, who’s been with Lark for 14 years. “With craft’s expansion – and its happy collision with self-sufficiency and community movements – lines have blurred.” So alongside Quick & Easy Paper Crafts and Big Little Felt Universe have come 2010’s Homemade Living: Canning & Preserving and Homemade Living: Keeping Chickens, as well as this year’s Homemade Living: Home Dairy and Homemade Living: Keeping Bees.

The last four are the work of Ashley English, a friend of McConville’s who’d left the rat race in Washington, D.C., for Asheville – and then left Asheville for a 12-acre organic farm in tiny Candler, North Carolina. Her timing was fortuitous. “Just as I was conceiving of the series and seeking a way to tackle such big topics,” McConville says, “Ashley was making a personal commitment to shift from an office job as a nutritional consultant to a full-time writer and homesteader. … We thought that it would provide readers with a truly sincere experience if Ashley wrote from the perspective of someone learning by doing. She learned to can, raise chickens, make cheese, and keep bees as she was researching and writing the books.”

McConville has her own “work in progress” garden, and her personal life can seem as diverse as Lark’s 35-title fall list. Besides tending to her tomatillos, she plays accordion and pursues her own art. Gathering together vintage photographs, old book pages, cast-off hardware, and the occasional dead animal, McConville creates moody, evocative boxes and encaustic collages influenced by the work of Joseph Cornell and the Brothers Quay. She’s exhibited nationwide and in Europe – and has also been featured in a Lark book, The Altered Object.

But even with all of that going on at home, McConville finds it difficult to leave her work entirely at the workplace. Homemade Living has had “a profound impact on the way in which I look at the world,” she says, “particularly the importance of food within a community. … It has been a delight to be a part of one project that has been part of a much larger paradigm shift.”

Over email, McConville chats about the business of making books for makers – and making time for yourself.

Tell us a little bit more about your job at Lark Crafts.

My days are never the same, filled with pockets of acquisitions work (seeking out trends and book ideas, discovering designers and authors, and mapping out plans for a well-balanced list), editorial and design guidance with my team, financial planning and analysis, big-picture strategies, digital programs, social media and networking, publicity and marketing, and more. Imagine someone juggling while riding a unicycle and singing and you’re getting close to a snapshot of a normal day.

As a working visual artist, I find that I am able to keep the two worlds of my day job and my creative pursuits separate. Having a full-time job does alleviate some pressure to sell my artwork, but it also leaves little time and energy for time in the studio. Finding a balance between the two is essential in maintaining my own feelings of accomplishment and satisfaction as a creative person.

Oooh! Can you really ride a unicycle?

I wish!

Can you juggle?

Just metaphorically. Don’t we all? I do dabble in the accordion, which sometimes feels like keeping a lot of balls in the air at the same time.

Signal, 2008, wooden drawer, found photos, sparrows, dictionary definition, metal tin, encaustic, nails (Photo: Steve Mann of Black Box Photography)

You mentioned “finding a balance” between your day job and your own independent artistic pursuits. What are some of the ways you do that, even if we’ve all heard them before? I want some practical advice!

One surefire trick I have found to guarantee a solid commitment to my artwork is to simply set some firm deadlines. … In order to really devote the time and energy required to not only create new work but also explore new ideas and techniques, I need a set timeline. I’ve found that participation in shows serves this function beautifully. If I know that I have a date by which I need to complete a single work or a collection of pieces, I will do everything in my power to meet those obligations. There’s certainly nothing wrong with the power of creative intention lining up with your calendar.

How did you got into assemblage?

I spent numerous years immersed in the world of correspondence art, exchanging elaborate letters and packages with friends around the world. Over time the desire to make those deliveries more and more enticing, playing with the sense of discovery of words and images being concealed and then revealed, drew me strongly towards collage and assemblage. The creative process was very much informed by the fact that each piece would eventually have an audience (of one or of many) that would interact with and explore the environment I had created. The incorporation of found objects simply seemed like such a natural fit for the medium, breathing new life into the forgotten to encourage a second look. … Over the years I have learned of the need to be discerning in my acquisition of objects. I simply listen to that inner pull that draws me to something. I may know right away that it will find its way into a piece, or (more often than not) I’ll tuck it away until the perfect moment presents itself.

What’s one of the most interesting things you’ve found that inspired you to build a piece around it?

There are too many wonderful things to spotlight just one! I can say that the photos are usually what stands out the most as a starting-off point. There is something about the face of a long-departed stranger that elicits the desire to weave a story, or at least a new home, around it. I find photos everywhere from junk shops and antique malls to the generous offerings of family and friends. I’ll be honest, though – it takes quite a bit of digging to find the one image that truly stands out.

Mask Series, 2010, vintage photos, rat skulls, toothpicks, encaustics (Photo: Steve Mann of Black Box Photography)

In your own work you do a lot with encaustic, which is one of those media that people often learn from someone else as opposed to teaching themselves. It’s not super-straightforward to work with. Lark Crafts hasn’t yet published a how-to book on encaustic, but it has done books on basketry, bookbinding, kiln-formed glass, and other potentially intimidating crafts. How does Lark ensure that its how-to books are actually how-to?

We at Lark are mindful of our curatorial role and the need for quality, dependable content. For those who need a lot of hand-holding, you-can-do-it assurances, and guidance, we rely on the experienced voices of our authors and designers, many of which have extensive teaching experience. Since the world is moving more and more toward an interactive, visual model, we often offer extensive how-to photos in our books walking folks through every step of the process. And thanks to the ease and availability of digital tools, we also offer up bonus content, including downloadable patterns/templates/motifs, exclusive interviews, and features with our authors and contributors.

You talked about “seeking out trends” in crafting for your work with Lark. What does that entail?

The online world holds a significant amount of power in so many ways. Many of the tastemakers of today are curating what they view as the hottest trends, showcasing their own passions and musings, championing and supporting the vibrant culture of their respective communities. Just like anyone who spends a good deal of time online, we as publishing professionals develop our own favorites we frequent. … That said, tapping into that world is but one tool. It’s important to also reach out to various communities through in-person events such as indie craft fairs and industry-specific trade shows. To spend all of one’s time tucked away in an office without real interaction and engagement with the community would only permit a wee peephole view into what real crafters are actually excited about and genuinely interested in. We always try to have our eyes and ears open.

What do you see as current trends in crafting? Lark has published books on seemingly everything from the very ’70s craft of macramé to the currently big craft of soap making. Have you noticed some apparently bygone crafts or media that have resurfaced in new incarnations? What hasn’t come back?

I think one of the truly exciting things about contemporary crafts is the constant reinvention of traditions and techniques that have come before. … At Lark we’re very excited about the publication of a brand new series launching this September called PUSH. The aim is to highlight individuals who are truly redefining their craft, blurring the lines between art and craft, tradition and innovation. PUSH: Paper and PUSH: Stitchery, the first books in the series, will hopefully encourage a sense of excitement to explore new territories of very established areas.

It’s hard to pinpoint any particular craft that has not come back in one way or another. Yes, even macramé! As soon as I might call out an example here, you know it’s going to start to poke its head out as the latest craze. Just like fashion, things that may cause mockery and disdain today could reappear as an eye-opening, resurgent trend tomorrow.

For someone struggling to succeed in a creative field, selling the clothes off your own back usually isn’t a sign that things are going well. But not so for R. Brooke Priddy, who in the early 2000s was striving to make it in the fashion industry, working out of her tiny New York apartment and, she says, “making custom-ordered clothing that I sold by handing out cards to anyone who liked the clothing I was wearing.” Her first big break came when someone approached her in a cafe about a faux-fur vest she had on. “I took down her number and request and made her one by the next week,” Priddy recalls. “Later I discovered that she worked at Vogue magazine! That same month I wore a ballerina-inspired tunic to yoga and sold it off my back, right then and there, to my classmate! Thankfully, I had brought a change of clothes that day.”

Back then, the now-32-year-old Tennessee native was making, besides things like the vest and the tunic, a lot of what she calls “dainties”: camisoles and bras and panties that could also be worn as swimsuits. More recently she’s created reversible and “transformational” pieces that can, for example, shuttle between skirt and dress, as well as more traditional gowns. All have a flowing look appropriate to Priddy’s sea-suggesting business name, Ship to Shore, and all are handmade by the designer in her Asheville, North Carolina, studio. And then there are Priddy’s creations for various performance pieces – fanciful, startling things like an inflatable gown, a 15-foot-high hoop skirt, and a Lycra outfit that’s also a boat. As an art student at the San Francisco Art Institute, she says, “I studied fine art and became interested in sculpture, installation, and performance art. Textiles always found their way in to my work and my sculptures were often wearable and interactive, like fashion. It wasn’t until I met my mentor, Elisa Jimenez, in New York in 2000 that I realized that art and fashion could be one and the same.”

One of the advantages of working in Asheville, Priddy says, is the easy access to a thriving “community of collaborators and co-conspirators” able to help with her more ambitious projects. But the town, where she moved in 2002, has offered more than just artistic assistance. With the help of a $7,000 loan and some education from the local small-business nonprofit Mountain BizWorks, she’s been able to grow Ship to Shore from a small space in the back of a clothing boutique to a dedicated storefront. Her current clientele comes from around the country and includes not just individuals looking for a distinctive wedding dress, but also musicians, dance companies, and a burlesque troupe.

“I create all of my work through draping,” Priddy says. “I love a fluid line that moves around the wearer like water.” For that reason, she’s never used patterns. “Each piece is custom fit to every individual’s body. It’s a truly collaborative process between me and the wearer.” She ends up devoting so much time and focus to each client and piece that she now works solely on commission – a far cry from selling the clothes off her back. “I call myself a dressmaker, a designer, and an artist,” she says. “I have attempted to create a new term for this merging of paths, but I have yet to find one.”

Over email, Priddy discusses merging, serging, and overcoming obstacles by going with the flow.

What’s it like living in Asheville? Does it impact your work?

I have never felt more at home in any of the 20-plus places where I have lived. I came to Asheville from much larger cities, and if I miss anything, it is the access to museums, stage, and culture. However, I traded that for the proximity to lush nature and open spaces, which is where I derive much of my inspiration.

Wow, 20 places?!

My family moved a lot with my father’s job in sales. We started in Tennessee and then went on to Virginia, and lots of cities in North Carolina. That must have put rabbit in my blood, because I continued to wander on my own even after leaving home, living in San Francisco and New York City and several more places before settling in Asheville.

Your work is the confluence of so many practices – fashion, art, performance. You’ve even improvised costumes for a science-fiction film from trash! What’s one of the most ambitious projects you’ve taken on?

I love to collaborate with other artists that have differing skill sets from my own. The truly ambitious projects involve many artists and voices. For The Opening, a multimedia fashion event that I co-produced in 2006, we had over 30 contributing artists including dancers, vocalists, lighting designers, and sculptors. It can be difficult to work closely and create an intimate experience with so many conspirators in on it. It can also be so very rewarding.

What are your performances about? I assume they’re more than just fashion shows.

I often approach a performance piece as a poem, or a visual interpretation of a theory or an idea. I like to work with dancers or those skilled in using the body expressively. The garments are often the focal point or the point of departure for the piece. My current project involves building a dress from clay that slowly decays throughout the run of the gallery exhibition. A dancer will wear it at the closing and “dance it to pieces.” It is somewhat a poem about impermanence.

I rarely do “fashion shows” but am more inclined to create performance events that are more experiential.

You’ve mentioned Elisa Jimenez. How closely did you work with her and what did you learn from it?

I always thought that the trends and teeth of the fashion community were not for me until I met Elisa. My close friend was interning for her in New York and helping her with this and that. When I moved there, in 1999, I was lucky enough to be called in at the last minute to help with a show that she was producing on Valentine’s Day. My job was to “imbibe” the models with flower essences and whisper little prayers to them before they hit the runway. She was doing performance art, and fashion was just a component of it all. This inspired me to no end, because I felt so close to this manner of working. I was doing a similar thing with my own creative practice and she brought me to the realization that it was all art. The line that separated my “artwork” from my sewing vanished soon after. Elisa lives her life as if everything she touches is a golden ingredient for a miracle … spending time with her really did change my life.

How long do you spend on a typical piece? How much is hand-sewn?

I like to take my time with custom work. When I start on a project I will request to see the client up to four times over a spread of two months. I do most of my work on their bodies during fittings that last from one to two hours. I do not use patterns, so I typically do all of the draping and designing on their bodies. It is a collaborative process, since I am responsive to their shape and inclinations. I would guess that on an average project 70 percent of my sewing is done by hand, with the remaining 30 percent by serger or straight stitcher. Many of the couture gowns I create are sewn completely by hand.

What materials do you like to use?

I use all types of draping fabrics that are soft to the touch. My favorite is Modal, but I also use fabrics that have spandex content because I love a good stretch.

Speaking of stretch, one of your swimwear lines featured a lot of reversible items. How come?

I adore reversibility because I like to keep ’em guessing. Lots of my gowns, even wedding gowns, can be worn inside and out. Its so fun to switch it around and rock a different look midparty.

Your dress/boat blows my mind!

I am glad you appreciate this, it is one of my favorites, too. … As you know, I make gowns for ceremonies all the time in my studio. I get to witness the personal transformations that women go through at the time of their wedding, proms, debutante balls, etc. It feeds my imagination to envision the gowns themselves as vehicles for self-awakenings. Just as a debutante dons her first ball gown, or a bride that slips on her white dress to present herself for her next life stage, it is a vestment for transformation and forward movement. The dress/boat is a ceremonial garb for passage. The photograph [on my website] is from a time-based performance piece on a small lake in southern Georgia. I am currently endeavoring to re-create this piece as a sculptural installation at the lake at the Southeastern Center for Contemporary Art in Winston-Salem for their upcoming exhibition “Out of Fashion.”

Is it true to say that your work is influenced a lot by water? If so, what about it intrigues you?

I am a Pisces and a lover of the sea. I often look to the qualities of water for guidance. Water is used as a representation of Tao because it always seeks the path of least resistance. It does not compete; it simply flows, finding the easiest path and following it, yet it will carve through rocks, run around steel or anything which resists it. Water does so simply through the power of its flowing nature.

Even the most unobservant visitor to Asheville, North Carolina, would have to notice that it’s a place where crafts are a big deal. It has the Folk Art Center, the Guild Crafts shop, and the Appalachian Craft Center. It has the Blue Spiral 1 gallery, the Grovewood Gallery, and the North Carolina Homespun Museum. On Haywood Road in West Asheville, it has the Asheville BookWorks, a “community resource” for printing and book arts, where you can pay for time on the presses, see an exhibition of zines, or take part in a Japanese bookbinding workshop. And right up the street from that, it has the DryGoods Shop, which isn’t an education center, commercial gallery, repository of craft knowledge, studio space, or community resource. Instead, it’s all of the above – and then some.

Opened in July 2010 by 30-something Leigh Anne Hilbert and her business partner, Jean Potter of Rockpile Bindery, the DryGoods Shop serves as a storefront for Hilbert’s own Overlap line – reconstructed T-shirts and simple halter dresses – and Potter’s beautifully bound journals, as well as the wares of rest of Asheville’s United Craft Front. “We have some other people doing clothes,” Hilbert says. “There is a woman who brings in vintage clothing and shoes. We have people making plush dolls. … We have sweaters. We have jewelry. We have housewares. We have quilts. We have baby stuff and kids’ stuff. It kind of runs the gamut.”

Visitors can also take classes, in everything from sewing to correspondence art. But the most intriguing aspect of the DryGoods Shop is the area it makes available for people to hang out, craft, or read books from the shop’s library. People can come in and use the space for free if they’re not charging money, so knitting groups, stitching groups that just meet as a social, they come and use the space for free,” Hilbert explains. “It’s not just a resale shop, and it’s not just classes. There’s a little bit of this and that goin’ on.” Asheville residents in need of a sturdy Singer can even purchase a membership that allows them to use the store’s sewing machines and supplies – as well as its proprietress’s vast sewing knowledge. “Yeah, people can pay monthly or yearly and use the sewing machines and use the space,” Hilbert says. “And with that membership they get advice and can ask questions when they come in and sew.”

Recently the shop has begun hosting music events, too. Cellist Ben Sollee performed in May, but his playing was just one part of the evening. “We had a lot of people printing postcard-sized block prints based on his album, and then a finished set of those prints went into a limited-release album that just came out,” Hilbert recalls. “And then he played. … We had an awesome crowd here that had a lot of fun learning how to do the block prints plus listening to music.” She credits the success of the event not only to the indie spirit of musicians like Sollee, but also to the craftcentric nature of the DryGoods Shop’s hometown. “Musicians tend to be do-it-yourself people, as well, and like finding people to do artwork for them or making it themselves,” she says. “So it seems to work well – especially in Asheville.”

Over the phone, Hilbert talks about her shop, her past, and her belief that crafting is an “analytic skill.”

Give us a virtual tour of the shop.

The whole space is about 1,400 square feet, so it’s pretty big, and the shelves take up both walls. We took down some shelves but we left most there because they were just beautiful. And there was a big long counter which is still here that was original, that was kind of built with the place. And then everything else we either built or we scrounged. We got a lot of stuff from a salvage/surplus place as far as tables and chairs and things go. There wasn’t a lot of money to do it, so. And it’s just kind of the way I am, anyway. I like working with old stuff and redoing and that kind of thing. … Even if I had a lot of money, it’s how I would have done it.

What was the space before?

Originally it was a dry-goods shop that sold sewing supplies, some clothing, and shoes. That was the majority of what she sold, the previous owner, who built this whole building in the ’40s. She had the store until she was 99! It sat empty for a long time because the family didn’t quite know what to do with it. It’s been slated to be demolished for years, but the highway construction that it would be demolished for was put on hold indefinitely. I think they were just not sure if they wanted to go ahead and rent it out, so it just kind of sat around and remained empty for years. It had stuff in here, but it was never open. And that’s kind of when I saw it, when I moved to Asheville almost three years ago and just started seeing it, and I loved the look of the place.

I have to say, I’m a little in awe. I want a place like this where I live!

It’s definitely the kind of place that could open up anywhere and do well, if you have that community of people who are interested in local and handmade, which, nowadays, there is more interest in that.

So, are you from Asheville?

I’m from the southwestern part of Virginia. It’s the mountains; it’s very rural. That’s where I grew up, but then I lived on the West Coast for about 10 years before I moved back to the Southeast. I was in Portland and then … the Bay Area for the majority of that.

What were you doing out West?

In Portland … I was doing leather work and doing some bookbinding on my own and some art and some sewing. And then in San Francisco, again, I had a lot of different jobs, most of them costume-related. I worked for a couple different places doing sewing for different theater companies. And I worked at UC Berkeley, where I taught some sewing and designed costumes for shows. For the majority of my time I worked for Creativity Explored, a center for [people with] disabilities. It’s a pretty amazing place to work, and a place to be inspired. Just a beautiful studio and full of people making art, making really good art, actually, because it makes them feel better. … And making a career for them where a lot of folks with disabilities never really have a career. They never find where to do that. That’s where I worked the five years before I moved back here to the East Coast.

So did that experience influence you when you thought about creating the DryGoods Shop?

I just didn’t want to have a resale-only space. Even though that’s where our money is coming in, generally. I definitely wanted it to be a place where people felt welcome to just come and sit and read the books that we have and meet other people.

What kinds of classes do you have?

I do a kids’ class every Friday which is a drop-in, pay-for-materials parent-and-child art class, which is really popular. We kind of have a mix of sewing classes. I’ve done some leather classes before. I’ve done a T-shirt-reconstruction class. We’ve had rug-braiding classes, and then we’ve also had some art classes, some more typically fine-art. We have a postcard group that meets, where people can come in and do postcards, collages, or draw – or whatever they want to work on, basically. And bookbinding. Teachers will come in and have an idea for a class, and I kind of work with them to get it in the schedule.

How did Ben Sollee end up playing at the DryGoods Shop?

His tour manager lives in Asheville. She came in here once and we started talking. He wanted to do something called Merch That Matters, where he was buying goods directly from artists compared to just getting T-shirts printed, the normal kind of merchandise that you find at music shows. So he was getting stuff handmade by different local artists and he planned this event here, which was free for anybody who came.

Do you think you’ll have more events like that?

We’re starting to have more music events here and also open up for private rentals. I do bridal parties, baby showers, and birthday parties where they’re basically craft parties, where people can come in with their group and I’ve already got their craft ready for them. So then the group makes whatever it is that they’re working on. We’ve had people make crafts for their wedding, or for the reception, or for the ceremony. They come in and they help the bride make the stuff that she needs and it’s social and fun, and it’s the same thing with baby showers. We’ve had people doing onesies for the mom, and there’s food and socializing. In August we have a thing coming up with a couple of local bands, and they’re kind of wanting to have a craft party, as well, where they have music and a craft table where we teach them different things.

There seems to be a really great do-it-yourself vibe in Asheville.

Yeah, a little bit. People just wanting to know how to get back to knowing how to do things with their hands again. Which for me is kind of really important, and, I feel, like something that’s been totally lost. … Women used to know how to sew, and now hardly anybody does and it’s a really valuable skill. And not only is it really valuable money-wise, but being able to make stuff, it helps you develop a different way of thinking, of seeing things, putting things together – like an analytical skill.

Like a problem-solving skill!

Yeah! You know – taking stuff that’s flat and making it into something that fits around the body. It’s a much more interesting process, and unless you do it, it’s hard to figure out. It’s the same thing with making anything – woodworking, any kind of construction technique. It’s a really big part of my life as far as I really value having the set of skills that I have, which is really varied. That’s the one thing that I wanted to try to offer – a place to try to work on that.

The auto industry has spent and made fortunes convincing us we are what we drive. But even though Bridget Elmer has a vehicle that perfectly suits her, she’s probably far from any Detroit executive’s idea of the ideal consumer. The 33-year-old resident of Asheville, North Carolina, owns a 1966 GMC flatbed truck that she doesn’t plan on replacing any time soon. “If something breaks” she says, “I can find the broken piece and replace it. It’s not like new, computerized cars.” According to Elmer, it’s more like the two century-old platen presses she also owns and maintains herself: “a really simple and empowering machine.”

Simplicity and empowerment are important ideas to Elmer. They’re behind not only what she drives and what she uses to make her art – books, letterpress ephemera – but also the organization she founded with friend and fellow artist Emily Larned in 2008: Impractical Labor in Service of the Speculative Arts, dedicated to “restor[ing] the relationship between a maker and her tools; a maker and her time; a maker and what she makes.” Its 150 or so members pay an annual fee of $12, live in 30 states and six countries, and all “make experimental or conceptual art with obsolete technology,” independently and in fairly small quantities. In addition to the union, the group organizes a yearly art swap called the Festival to Plead for Skills and maintains a “research institute” that publishes the ILSSA Quarterly – although Elmer and Larned note that it’s “published less frequently than its name would suggest.”

Indeed, the final Quarterly of 2010 is still in the works. But the one before it included, among its several “reference reports,” a hand-sewn book and a handmade button, all packaged in a letterpress envelope. “AS MANY HOURS AS IT TAKES!!!” is the ILSSA motto – and making a union publication that also happens to be a piece of mail art can take many, many hours. “All the speed, all the new, and all the constant chugging in our culture is so oriented toward the future,” says Elmer. “I’m trying to live my life more in the present” – and, through ILSSA, to encourage others to do so, by emphasizing process over product. As the group’s fittingly bare-bones website puts it, “Economy of scale goes out the window, as does the myth that time must equal money. … Impractical Labor is idealized labor: the labor of love.”

Some might wonder if ILSSA requires its members to espouse Marxist ideology or use only tools made before a certain date. But the rules are relaxed. Elmer’s own work uses open-source software; with it, she prepares digital files that eventually make their way onto plates for her presses. She points out that while some ILSSA members feel strongly about using entirely obsolete technology to produce art, others are less strict. And although many members happen to practice printing and book arts, some pursue urban gardening, local eating, or the “alchemy” of upcycling. “For me,” Elmer says, “[ILSSA is] about thinking critically. I see it as a protest against the assumption that new is better. I want to look at all our options – some older, some newer – and the creativity that exists through those options.”

Over the phone from Asheville, Elmer talks about unionizing for the good of your soul, how yoga relates to the platen press, and why Facebook isn’t in ILSSA’s future.

How did you and Emily come up with the idea for ILSSA?

It was letterpress that got us thinking about the obsolete. I have an MFA in book arts from the University of Alabama, but even more than the book form, my passion is letterpress. Emily’s, too. We asked ourselves why we enjoyed it so much, and we realized that it forces us to try on a different pace and a different value system – it’s about time and not money. ILSSA was a way for us to say, “Well, of course we have to make money and fit into the categories of work life and academic life, but we want one area where we can just do what we love.”

If ILSSA is defined as a protest against contemporary industrial practices and values, does that make it an economic movement? A social movement? A political movement?

We think of it more as a morale-boosting organization, a union for the soul. We’re there to support each other and form a community, since a lot of us are working by ourselves and are kind of isolated. I guess in that sense it’s a social movement – it’s a network about shared values and knowing there are other people out there who are as crazy as you are! But we don’t have anything like a manifesto.

Speaking of manifestos, ILSSA seems heavily influenced by Marx.

Emily and I both grew up coming from progressive and maybe even radical political positions. She got into zine making in high school to try to find like-minded people, and both of us got into Marx in undergrad one way or another. We’re not creating a labor movement, though. We’ve gotten to that point in history where [Marxist] idealism is gone. Well, it’s not that it’s gone in our hearts, but we know the limitations of its application. We’re trying to figure out ways to get at that desire, to challenge the extreme capitalism of this country. But we’re not necessarily trying to change things in a huge, overarching sense.

What kinds of noncapitalist things do ILSSA members create?

We have a member who builds adobe ovens and sees the whole act of building and cooking with the oven as an art form. We have another member who instead of sending in his annual dues traded us for them. He sent us a laser-cut loom that you can weave on, two textiles he had woven, and a typewritten letter. He calls himself Action Weaver.

Tell me more about trading with other members.

Trades happen a lot. One of my favorite times was when Emily and I were tabling for ILSSA at the Hybrid Book Fair in Philadelphia two years ago. In addition to our ILSSA materials, we displayed our own work. Book artist Scott McCarney was at the event and came by our table. He joined ILSSA and spent some time with my artist’s book We Can Go Beyond It, which explores the theory of neuroplasticity – the assertion that the human brain is capable of changing itself. The book features EEG images of my father’s brain, who suffered a traumatic brain injury in a car accident several years ago. Scott invited me to stop by his table to see his book Memory Loss, which was inspired by his brother’s brain injury. I have admired Scott’s work for years and was so touched by the connection we were making through our work. When I visited his table he proposed a trade: We Can Go Beyond It for Memory Loss. I was thrilled and didn’t hesitate for a moment to accept.

You just had your yearly Festival to Plead for Skills on July 7. What’s that about?

ILSSA’s Festival to Plead for Skills is based on the Chinese holiday of Qi Xi and the Japanese festival of Tanabata, in which celebrants wish to be better craftspeople. ILSSA’s festival is a bit of a departure from that, as it’s a day of practice for us. Members make a number of objects that are evidence of practice from that day, and one of each gets sent to participating members. People do cool things, from smushing berries between pieces of paper to prepping yarn for weaving. Last year I made tiny tablets that were printed with type. The festival is a great example of how we aren’t all in the same place but we practice at the same time, meditating on the values we share.

You sometimes use the word “meditation” when describing ILSSA members’ work. In your view, is there a connection between meditation and obsolete technology?

I practice yoga and am certified to teach it. I definitely see a connection between yoga or meditation and working with obsolete technology. Valuing process translates directly to trying to stay present and in the moment. … Emily is writing a relevant piece that will eventually make its way into the Quarterly. It’s about the lengthy process of distributing lead type in a platen press in order to print new text or images. People sort of bemoan it, but she’s writing about the value of that meditative space.

ILSSA’s website is deliberately no-frills. Would you ever do anything with social networking or other Internet-based programs as ILSSA grows?

We had an Etsy site for a while, and we had a blog briefly, but both of those things didn’t seem like a good fit for us. It wasn’t so much about using computers, but about the concern of what space that puts us in. Etsy is such a commercial space, and that didn’t feel right. And the blog was so immediate that it didn’t really work with the pace of our organization. We also didn’t feel like a social-media site was right for us. So we link to our members’ sites and they can do whatever they like – we’re not interested in imposing a structure of identity on them.

What’s in ILSSA’s future, then?

We’re going to have our first exhibition as a group in January and February of 2012 at Saint Mary’s College in Notre Dame, Indiana. The show will feature the Quarterlies and other ILSSA ephemera but will primarily focus on the processes that our members engage in by exhibiting remnants or scraps of their work. The scraps can be anything from shavings to handwritten notes to a pen that ran out of ink. We’ve also recently invited members to submit to the Quarterly. I’d love to see a discussion in it about why it is that we all value being impractical.

There are the things familiar to just about everyone who’s ever shopped a handmade marketplace: soaps in heady scents, pendants in the shapes of birds and octopuses, totes and T-shirts decorated with bicycles, turntables, and cassettes. And then there are the things Juli Sherry and Dan Somen make. When the pair does craft fairs, some people mistake what they sell “for other items,” says Sherry, “most often hookah tubes or necklaces. I have pondered making a sign that says, ‘THESE ARE NOT HOOKAH TUBES,’ because we get that question so frequently.”

Of course, the questioners are mostly nonmusicians. Those who play guitar or bass or keyboard don’t have as much trouble identifying Sherry and Somen’s products: instrument cables that have been carefully wrapped in yarn, in color combos that include Sweet Shoppe (aqua, pink, yellow, orange), Uptown (cream, brown, blue, red), and Rolling Hills (various greens). “Dan was becoming frustrated with the low quality of store-bought cables, so he decided to take matters into his own hands and make his own,” Sherry recalls. “We were also tired of seeing boring black music equipment littering our loft and practice space. Then one day I started brainstorming ways to make his carefully crafted items look as good as they sounded. So I got out my knitting yarn, started wrapping, and it went from there.”

The result is cables that both sound and look better than the cheap, mass-produced variety, and which the two Chicagoans sell under the name Cordinated. “Customers have told us how much they love the way our cables make their music sound.” Sherry says. “The clarity of each note and the tonal range provided by our cords is unparalleled.” Somen, 30, draws on his training as a mechanical engineer to construct and solder the cables from components he buys online. (“He’s amazing”, gushes Sherry, who happens to be his girlfriend. “He basically taught himself how to solder and piece them together through the Internet.”) Then Sherry, 29, wraps them in wool using a technique she picked up as an avid maker of childhood friendship bracelets. “He’s the mechanical side, while I handle all of the design. It’s a perfect fit.”

Their items can be found in the Cordinated Etsy shop, which Sherry and Somen opened in 2009, at craft fairs around Chicago, and in select retailers. But the most attention-grabbing outlet for their handiwork might be their band, Catch a Tiger, which proudly showcases the cables onstage at every show. Sherry uses one on her bass, while lead vocalist Somen connects one to his mic to make self-described “indie power rock layered in synthesizer and occasionally interrupted by French musette waltz.” “We love that our cables give us a unique look that people remember us by,” says Sherry.

They also love creating a product that improves the lives of other musicians – and not just in sound-quality department. “Wrapping the cable in yarn actually prevents them from tangling, and I have a friend who says that cats won’t eat fuzzy cables,” says Sherry. And she’s recently started to do a little for those hookah-tube-fixated nonmusicians, too, yarn-wrapping cables for headphones and iPods. “I hope that by selling headphones and iPod cables people will realize that our cords are for music,” she says, “not smoking.”

Over Etsy convos, Sherry chats about her partner’s soldering prowess, what kind of yarn best resists rock-club grime, and the satisfaction of knowing that one of her favorite bands uses her cables.

Dan handles the electrical side of the business, right?

It is funny because he went to Caltech for mechanical engineering, which is his full-time job, but his interest in music and playing guitar really sparked his new love for analog electrical engineering. He makes pedals and amps and does repair work for our musician friends. He’s taught me how to solder, too, but he’s definitely the expert.

Dan can bust out a classic cable every 15 minutes, and he prefers to do them in bulk. There are multiple steps involved, such as cutting the length, stripping the outer and inner covers, twisting the outside wires together, and a couple of more steps before the final soldering. He uses a soldering iron on all of the cables. Basically, we buy a 1,000-foot cable spool, which we cut pieces from to make the cables.

Why go through all that instead of buying cables in a store?

We like to think that our hand-soldered cables last longer than the machine-soldered store-bought versions. Hand-making them offers a level of detail that creates a truly high-quality product. … Also, it is difficult to confuse your cable with one that belongs to someone else if it is bright yellow and blue. They also last longer in that way because you won’t lose them as easily.

We make two grades of cables. One is extremely high-quality and comes with a double-braided shield to protect against the noise picked up by lesser-shielded cables. They are also low-capacitance. Basically, this means you can get a better sound from the high end of your guitar tones, although that can be dependent on the player. For our high-end Top Notch cables we also use a top-of-the-line connector, which has a plastic clutch on the inside that protects the solder joint from being pulled out. So if you pull the plug out of the jack by the cable – which you shouldn’t do anyways – this clutch will prevent the cable from breaking.

How do you decide which colors you want your cables to be?

The striped-colored cables are not hand-picked. The color changes happen on the yarn I use, so it’s kinda predetermined. When selecting yarn I choose colors that I think go with modern guitar colors and finishes. Unfortunately, some of my favorite colors were discontinued.

How long does it take to wrap a cord? How much yarn does it take?

It depends on the length of the cord I’m wrapping. The fastest I wrap is 8 feet in an hour, but that’s only if I am going full speed. Generally, I can do about 6 and a half feet per hour at a reasonable pace. Time is the thing I struggle with the most when figuring out my pricing. I envy paper-arts crafters who can make iterations so quickly! I have figured out exactly how much yarn it takes through some crazy formula that I always have to check before I begin a project. It doesn’t take that much yarn, really – definitely under a hank for my longest cables, which are 15 feet.

What kind of yarn do you use?

All of my yarn is 100 percent wool because it resists dirt the best.

What happens when you mess up a cord? Do you have to unravel all of your work?

I can hardly remember the last time I messed up. I have been doing this process for so long! But it is very easy to just undo a knot if it gets stuck in a weird place or doesn’t line up how I want it to.

What’s your favorite item to wrap?

That is hard to decide! I like making instrument cables because I’m most familiar with them. But they also take the longest, and sometimes I get discouraged. When I want to get a lot done I will work on iPod cables, because they are easy and can be made in under an hour. The headphones are pretty quick, as well, but they have more parts to wrap. They are also really thin, so it can be a little difficult to hold them while I am wrapping.

How do you keep all of your cords and yarn straight? I feel like there’s potential for major tangling!

Yes! Thankfully I am an organization nerd! I have a lot of cube shelving that holds all of my yarn. We buy cables on large spools, and they remain on them until the cords are made. Once Dan solders a bunch, I put them in labeled bins based on their length. There is a special way to wind up a cable without injuring or degrading their sound quality, so we store them like that in our bins. Basically, you just have to wind it following the natural coil the cable wants to make. You never want to force the winding or smash it into a ball because that can irreparably damage it.

When did you first become interested in music, and how big a role does it play in your noncrafting life?

I am a bass player, but I started playing clarinet in the school band when I was in third grade. Recently, I’ve started learning to sing, and to play the drums and electric piano. I also love the tambourine! Dan plays piano and guitar. … Our band, Catch a Tiger, is kinda in a strange situation right now. We were doing really well and had just played the Metro, a pretty famous 1,200-person venue in Chicago, when we lost our drummer. We hope to get going again soon, but for now we get together to practice and see each other every now and then. My bandmates are my best friends.

I have also started playing with my brother. He writes songs and plays guitar and the banjo. I started playing bass with him at the beginning of my musical career, so it’s nice to get back to that. We are called Ham Siobam, and we play folky/stripped-down indie music.

What’s the greatest compliment you’ve ever gotten about your cables?

I gave a cable to the band Maps & Atlases, who are a friend of a friend while I was selling at [the] Pitchfork [Music Festival] last year. Dave Davison, the lead singer and guitarist, has a girlfriend who saw us and remembered our cables. She said that Dave loved our cables so much because they made him sound great onstage. That was probably the best compliment I’ve received. I am a big fan of their music, and knowing that my work impacted their sound is a great connection for me.

Shannon Duffy has studied psychology in North Carolina, woodworking in Kentucky, and jewelry making in Arizona. But a bigger influence on what she does as a crafter might be the time she spent playing with dolls in Germany. “We were stationed there with the Army. We lived near Erlangen when I was 10 to 13 years old,” she recalls. “We lived off base for a year, in an apartment with German neighborhood children that we spent time playing with. I remember the toys were always wooden and natural, just more simple [than most American toys]. Mostly I remember the dolls, made of fabric with stitched faces – and I had the plastic Fisher-Price doll brought from the U.S.”

For the past four years Duffy has been creating her own simple, stitched toys: monster-y, very un-Fisher-Price-esque fabric dolls, as well as felt-and-cotton Discovery Totes, play sets that contain all the materials a child needs for some serious battery-free fun. In the Garden, for example, features a three-dimensional fabric scene that includes a house, a flower field, and a stepping-stone pathway. It comes with felt flowers and a felt-and-lace little-girl figure that can be placed into and moved around the landscape – and then put way inside it. A ribbon cinches everything together and allows it to be hung out of the way. Another set, Ants, includes a felt stick, felt clumps of grass, and five little felt insects. Campfire has flames, logs, sicks, and – best of all – marshmallows for imaginary toasting.

Duffy sells her creations at indie craft fairs and in her Etsy shop, Helicopter Studios, named in honor of her military-pilot father. “We spent a lot of time visiting the hanger and playing in and out of helicopters,” she says of her childhood, adding that the name has other connotations, too: ‘the helicopters that fall from the trees – they are like a toy from nature. I think they are beautiful and simple, much like my designs.” That Duffy finds inspiration in nature makes sense: She lives near Land Between the Lakes National Recreation Area in a Kentucky state park, where her husband is in charge of the golf course. She calls it “the perfect place,” with “bike trails, hiking, and water to take our kayaks” – as well as plenty of raw material for woodsy totes such as Owl and Nest. “The natural world has always taken a front seat to my work, whether it is woodworking, metals, or fibers,” she says. “I am an outdoorsy girl living with my perfect companion plus two.”

The two would be her 8-year-old son and her 6-year-old daughter, whom she calls her “always-available toy testers.” When Duffy started with Etsy, in 2008, she admits, “I read all the quitting-your-day-job articles and dreamed of at least making enough money to pay my student loans and cover the expenses.” But the bottom line of her business has always been being able to be a mom. “I worry about not giving enough face time to my kiddos and would never be able to focus on my store 18 hours a day,” she says. “I make my work because I am passionate about making things. I don’t really look to make a fortune. Money has never been a motivating factor for me – ask my husband!”

By e-mail from Kentucky Dam Village State Resort Park, Duffy talks about crafting for and with children, as well as her own “childlike nature.”

In addition to making your totes and raising your children, you teach at Murray State University and the Paducah School of Art. What’s your artistic background?

My [BFA] degree was officially in wood but could have been sculpture or metals. After graduating, my boyfriend (soon to be husband) and I moved to Arizona, where I got a job at an architecture firm where I made scale models. After about two years I decided to go back to school to get my master’s. I decided to apply to the metals program because I wanted to be able to fit my thesis show in a shoe box. I didn’t quite make it fit in a shoe box, but I got it all in one large plastic bin. Seriously, I loved metals and had been creating all the tiny details for the scale models, so naturally I looked to continue the small works.

I can see how making models of buildings could be similar to creating the miniature landscapes in your totes.

These models were huge, most of them measuring at least 10 by 10 feet. They were for companies like Marriott and Ritz-Carlton, to be placed in sales centers for time-shares. It was a fabulous job.

How is teaching art different from making crafts?

Not so much teaching, but making art in the real world and making art in art school are very different. When I was in school we never talked about selling your work in the real world (like Etsy). We focused on showing in galleries and juried shows. The work in school is much more “concept”-based, combined with technique. Plus there are internal influences that you don’t have when you are just making in your home studio – although I still make “crafty” stuff that has meaning. But I see a lot of work on Etsy and in the craft world that is made to be cute and pretty – words I don’t let my students use!

Your totes are pretty cute! What gave you the idea of making them?

During my thesis studies I was focused on the concept of art that interacts with the viewer. I made metal objects that could be “played with” and manipulated by the viewer. These objects were very toylike and playful. So I had already been making toys, in a sense. Now I just thought about making them for my children. Making them safe and tactile, I used wool felt and cotton instead of metal and enamel. I was motivated by the lack of toys that involved the imagination of the child and tired of all the ugly plastic toys that were on the market. I am very anti-batteries and feel children should have open-ended toys to feed their imaginations.

So your first totes were made for your own kids?

I had my son while I was finishing graduate school, and it became pretty apparent that working in metals and having a small child really didn’t mingle well. After graduating from Arizona State University with my MFA in jewelry/metals, in 2004, I became the resident artist at the Phoenix Center for the Arts, where I taught all the metals classes. Soon we decided to move back East to be closer to family. I was then pregnant with my second child. After we got settled my daughter was born and, naturally, I became a stay-at-home mom. I embraced this idea of committing myself to these two beautiful little people. Also, I realized that making things is such an important part of living a happy life, and I had to keep creating, but in a new and different way.

So while I took all those art classes in undergrad and grad school, I never took a single fibers course. I started by teaching myself to sew, making dresses and curtains and table runners at first. I began to get requests for the little-girl dresses and began to sell them locally. But it just wasn’t enough for me and my creative outlet. I needed to make something with more meaning. I made the first tote for my son, the racetrack. Then I just started getting more ideas and excited about making more totes. At the same time I had been teaching Montessori in the home and reading books about Waldorf education along with Montessori education practices. The sewing was something I could start and stop and do while my children were on my lap or running around playing.

Do you homeschool, then?

No. I homeschooled through the preschool years, but they both really wanted to go to school! … I was a bit sad at first but realized it is good for them to have some time away from me. That gives us a chance to fill in all the stuff we think is important, like hands-on learning. We have chickens, bunnies, dogs, and an organic garden that we tend together. I love the concept of unschooling, much the opposite of public school. Maybe one day!

Do you think your totes are particularly suitable to Montessori teaching?

In the sense that they are open-ended and made of natural materials. I have made some special-order totes for Montessori classrooms in the past. They were the fishing tote (not in my store right now) that was based on counting and sorting. Play and imagination are important parts of Montessori teaching.

You sometimes post your children’s craft projects on your blog, and you’re featured in a book called My Kids With My Crafts. How much time do you spend crafting with your kids?

I would say most weekends we are crafting together. I teach Art Processes in the Elementary-School Classroom, so occasionally we work on projects for my teaching.

You recently started selling dolls that look like they might have been inspired by children’s drawings. Were they?

No, those came out of my head. That’s my childlike nature!

Finally, for us urbanites: What’s it like living in a state park?

Living in a state park has some pros and cons, like anywhere, although it is the most beautiful spot in the area! It kind of reminds me of my childhood living on military bases. I miss the connection with a real city – that’s the biggest con. … It took a while to get used to living 20 minutes from anything, but now that we are going into our third summer here, I am in a new state of mind. We live on the outskirts of Land Between the Lakes, which is a national park. … Although the area lacks in culture and diversity, we just take road trips to round out our children’s experiences. My husband is the golf course superintendent here in the park, so we play golf as a family. Kentucky is a beautiful state to discover.

At the time Gibson, who’d trained at New York’s Fashion Institute of Technology and designed for such companies as Ralph Lauren and Tommy Hilfiger, was teaching people to sew at Purl Soho, a knitting and sewing store in Manhattan. One of her designs for the class, a tote bag with adjustable straps that allow it to be carried as a backpack, struck her as something she might be able to market. So she wrote out a pattern and made it available through Purl and her blog, hoping to sell perhaps 100. She ended up selling not 100 but hundreds – a “ridiculous amount,” she says. “It nearly killed me to sew all the pattern sheets together for the orders.”

The popularity of that first pattern convinced Gibson, 42, to start her own sewing-products company, Liesl + Co. Remembering her frustration when trying to sew for her niece and daughter, she launched a Liesl + Co. line of kids’ clothes patterns in 2008: Oliver + S – named, of course, for S (and a playmate). The designs were carefully made to fit a variety of sizes and have an updated-classic look – think Lilly Pulitzer with an edge. Two years later Gibson’s husband, Todd, an investment banker who’d been doing her books on the side, quit his job to work with Liesl + Co. full time. The two of them now run the growing business with the help of freelancers and interns.

Last year Gibson created the first Oliver + S line of fabrics for quilting giant Moda Fabrics, City Weekend. In April she introduced a second, Modern Workshop, whose clean geometrics and florals were inspired by famed early-20th-century design cooperative Wiener Werkstätte. Gibson’s book, Oliver + S Little Things to Sew: 20 Classic Accessories and Toys for Children, came out in March and is filled with enough charming projects to make you wonder how there was ever a shortage of good children’s patterns. “My favorite comment on the Oliver + S discussion forum is ‘I want to make everything in the book,’” Gibson says. “This is exactly what I was trying to do. Every sewing book has a tote bag in it, but I wanted to provide patterns for more special things.”

Over the phone from New York Gibson talks about what helped shape Little Things to Sew, including her grandmother’s crafting, her husband’s juggling, and her own failed attempt at stuffed-animal designing.

Did you grow up sewing? Who inspired you?

My grandmother, who’s still alive, was also trained as a fashion designer. She went to school in Chicago and then worked for a merchandiser for a women’s dress manufacturer until she got married. Later she did a segment on a local television show in which she demonstrated a different craft each week. The projects varied from sewing to woodworking and everything in between. With sewing she did a lot of detailed handwork and actually ended up teaching it all over the world. I did a lot of embroidery and stitching when I was young, largely influenced by her. And my mom also sewed for me and my four younger sisters.

So you knew all along that you wanted to become a clothing designer?

No, I actually kind of fought fashion for a long time. Remember that career counseling questionnaire we all have to do in high school – you know, when you respond to lots of questions and your answers determine what jobs appeal to you? I found mine recently, and at the top of my list was fashion design. At the time I was appalled by that. I thought fashion would be a superficial, backbiting industry and that I should do something more intellectual and serious. Though I did end up majoring in graphic arts in college, afterward I worked in publishing and on Wall Street before going to the Fashion Institute. So it took me a while to get there.

You mentioned that you decided to sell children’s clothing patterns because the market had such slim pickings. Was there anything else that influenced your decision to start your company?

When I launched Liesl + Co. I had recently left my job at Tommy Hilfiger to stay at home with S. I found that being home all day proved a major adjustment. As a stay-at-home mom, you’re changing diapers, going to the playground – you’re almost spinning your wheels. I wanted to feel that I had accomplished something at the end of the day. And for me designing and sewing was very much a part of that. Whether it was for S or myself, I loved the feeling of having made something beautiful. Also, when I was teaching at Purl, I noticed that all these knitters were coming and discovering sewing. Knitting had become so popular, so I figured sewing was on the cusp – it was clear it was going to be the next hot crafting thing. When I was young my mom sewed because she wanted to save money. But now you can go to Target and buy a dress for $10, so it’s not really about saving money anymore. It’s about creative expression and making something unique.

How did your work at Ralph Lauren and Tommy Hilfiger prepare you for Oliver + S?

Ralph Lauren was right out of school. I was assisting two designers on the company’s sports apparel line, RLX. We did clothing for activities like mountain biking and bike racing. It was a wonderful education because it taught me how to put together a detailed, technical package for textile mills. I had to explain to them how a jacket should look, for example. When I went to Tommy Hilfiger I designed men’s golf clothing. Again, it was very detailed work, and I worked closely with textile mills in Italy on the technical aspects. All this prepared me to do my sewing patterns.

Speaking of details, Little Things to Sew is full of them – the extensive glossary, the intricate instructions, the winsome illustrations.

Actually, that’s something that irritated me about sewing patterns before I started Oliver + S: You get to a certain point in a pattern where something isn’t explained, and you get stuck. It bothered me that the designers assumed you would know what to do. That’s one of the reasons why I write our sewing patterns in as detailed a way as I do, because I know the customers are often new sewers and need to be led through it. For instance, when I designed a lined raincoat, I remembered following others’ patterns and thinking, How do I finish this? The instructions didn’t make it clear. With the help of an intern, I broke it down into directions like This is how you fold up the edge of the hem and This is how you hand stitch this section. We had a much better end result.

Much of the clothing in Little Things to Sew, such as the explorer’s vest and the art smock, seems to be conducive to play. Did you have this in mind when you designed it?

I wouldn’t say we’re not designing any party dresses at Oliver + S, but I do want the clothes to be played in. A lot of it has to do with the fabric you use. In general we use a lot of quilting cottons. Because sewing was in such a decline in the 1970s, ’80s, and ’90s, if you lived in a small town or even a large-ish city, the only fabrics available to you were at Jo-Ann Fabrics or a quilt shop. I made the conscious choice to use a lot of quilting cottons because they are appropriate for kids’ clothing and are widely available. The stores don’t have to be carrying anything additional – they automatically have everything that you need for our patterns.

Through Oliver + S you’ve mainly designed clothing rather than accessories. How did the idea for a book that includes a hat, mittens, and juggling balls come about?

One of the things that defines Oliver + S is that all of our patterns come with paper dolls. You can slip the band off the pattern – it’s made of heavy card stock – and cut out the doll and the outfit. It helps identify our brand, and people love it. But it does kind of limit you. For example, we couldn’t just put the penguin backpack [from Little Things to Sew] on the band because it would be so small in relation to the size of the doll and would leave the customer with a paper doll without clothing. By putting a bunch of smaller projects together in a book, the group of illustrations on the cover – some of which can be cut out and put on a doll – highlight these projects. So it was more a function of the packaging and wanting to bring these great little things to the market.

How did you come up with the toys in Little Things to Sew?

They mainly came about through playing with S. … She has a train set that my husband and I set up on large pieces of paper on the floor and draw roads and things on the paper. We would put buildings made of blocks around the tracks, and I happened to think how fun it would be to make fabric houses instead. And my husband likes to juggle for S, so that’s where the idea for the juggling balls came about.

Was there a toy that didn’t make it into the book – something that S didn’t like?

There were a couple of projects that didn’t make it, but more because of space issues. Though there was this stuffed bunny I initially wanted to put in, but it was me who wasn’t sure I liked it rather than S. I wasn’t crazy about my design. My editor said, “If you don’t love it now, don’t put it in – because you’re going to hate it by the time the book comes out.” So I decided to leave stuffed-animal design to people who do it better!

Song/Craft is an irregular series on music and the handmade movement.

Most musicians can point to a song, album, or concert that changed their lives. Seja Vogel can point to a craft project. “I always loved making little felt presents when I was younger, but I never thought it was something special or different,” she recalls. “Then one year I overambitiously decided to make my friend’s entire recording studio out of felt.” The resulting ministudio included tiny versions of a Gibson Firebird guitar, a computer with Pro Tools open on the screen, and various synthesizers, all incredibly realistic and precisely detailed – right down to the numbers of keys and colors of wires. “When people saw them they were blown away and told me that I needed to sell them,” Vogel says. “I was totally surprised by their reactions!”

Since then, the 29-year-old veteran of the music scene of Brisbane, Australia, has sewn up felt versions of a Rogers drum kit, a Vox Mark VI teardrop bass, and a Roland RE-201 Space Echo delay unit, among many other sound-making things. Formerly a keyboardist in the electronic-rock bands Sekiden and Regurgitator, Vogel went solo in 2010, dropping her surname and composing and singing music she describes as an “analog-synth, girly-layered-vocal landscape.” At the same time, she became a brand ambassador for her craft business, creating felt stage decorations and felt capes for her entire tour crew. “I would describe myself as a musician … who happened to fall into the small-textile business,” she says.

Her first solo album, We Have Secrets but Nobody Cares, features a felt Farfisa SuperBravo on the cover and “loads of other felt synths in the inner artwork,” reflecting Vogel’s love of playing and collecting vintage tone generators, which she hunts down in secondhand shops and on eBay. “There’s an exciting unpredictability to their sound that contemporary synths don’t have,” she says. “You’re never sure what music they’re going to produce day to day.”

Vogel’s old-synth replicas remain her favorites among her felt instruments, which she’s sold in her Pul(sew)idth Etsy shop since early 2009. They’re typically only a few inches tall and wide and are stuffed with wool or foam for support. Some have brads or snaps for their little knobs and buttons; many are adorned with hand-stitched logos or model numbers. “All of my items are sewn by hand because they are too small for a machine,” she says. “The act of stitching has always come naturally to me, so it was very easy to develop a passion for it.”

The painstaking, solitary nature of Vogel’s sewing contrasts sharply with the freewheeling, collaborative process of writing music with her old bands – but it’s not so different from what she does as Seja the solo artist. “When I was in a band, I preferred bouncing ideas off bandmates and writing lyrics with a group,” she says. “It was definitely a learning curve when I started working as a solo artist. When you work alone, you don’t have anyone to validate your ideas and sounds. But now I really love working on my own in my little room – both musically and doing my craft. They both involve a similar process and a lot of patience, especially regarding detail. It’s the small melodic and vocal pieces of a song that make it special.”

Corresponding from the other side of the world via email, Vogel talks about how her early education shaped her love for sewing, her belief in the superiority of the Roland SH series of synthesizers, and the emotional attachment she sometimes develops to her miniature felt creations.

The idea of selling your felt instruments came to you after you re-created your friend’s studio. Did you have an “Aha!” moment when you realized you should be playing music?

Music has always been in my blood, since I was a little girl. I started playing the violin and piano when I was 8.

You started crafting from an early age, too.

Because of my Steiner (or Waldorf) education I always loved making little felt presents for birthdays or Christmas. At my grammar school craft was a compulsory subject through grade eight. We made a lot of things like scarves and recorder bags. I also used to create projects with my mother and grandmother, who both love to sew.

How do you choose which instruments to re-create in felt form? Are they all things that you use and own?

Initially they were mostly my own instruments, synthesizers I dreamed of owning, or my friends’ instruments. Now I just create what people want me to make. I receive a lot of custom orders for Minimoogs. I do, however, have a bit of a snobby attitude about keyboards, and I’ll refuse to make some of the more digital modern kinds.

So which synths do you prefer? Do you have a favorite?

I think initially I was obsessed with the Roland SH series. My favorite live synth is a Roland SH-101 because it is small and able to produce incredibly versatile sounds. Any of those SH synths from the mid-’80s are pretty magical. These days people don’t make as many analog versions because digital gear produces a more reliable sound. But I like the risk you take with old synths. The fact that some days they might sound a little different than the day before is exciting! These days I am a little less proactive in trying to find them in pawn shops because eBay has created a whole new market for them. That’s where I find most of mine now.

Do you take measurements or draw sketches before making a full-sized real instrument into a tiny felt one?

To be honest, I don’t really know how I do it! I never measure anything. Sometimes I’ll draw sketches and plans, but not all the time. I just look at the instrument I want to create and imagine it in my mind. I decide what size the front panel should be, how big the knobs should be, count how many keys the instrument has, which colors I need, and if it has any scratches or unique details. Then I just start to cutting and sewing!

Your work seems like it takes a lot of patience. Do you enjoy that sort of intensely focused activity?

My work really relaxes me, especially when I’m in a quiet space listening to music or podcasts. I have tried working at shows, behind the merchandise desk at a venue, or backstage, but those kinds of environments are not really conducive to concentrating on tiny things. Also, in those settings I’m paranoid that someone will spill a drink on them.

I have a studio/sewing room where I’ll work on one project at a time. If there is a deadline that I have to meet for either a craft project or a music project, I will very quickly turn my sewing room into a studio or vice versa. But mainly I’ll focus on each type of work separately. Sometimes I’ll bring a little bag of felt and thread on tour because I quite often get orders while I’m on the road. This can be tricky if I don’t have the right colors or accessories with me. It’s also tricky to find time for my projects on tour!

How long, on average, does it take you to create one piece? Have you ever have to abandon a project because of some sewing slip-up?

Most of them take me an average of five to seven hours, unless it’s especially large or if I’ve never made it before. There are a few pieces that have taken me weeks, but mostly I try not to go too overboard.

I am pretty good at saving them once I’ve made a mistake! I quite often stitch something somewhere it shouldn’t be or cut pieces I shouldn’t have cut. I don’t think I’ve ever scrapped a piece that I’ve worked on for more than an hour.

After working on an item for a long time, do you ever feel reluctant to part with it?

Sometimes I do become extremely attached to them. I feel a bit sad when they go to their new homes, especially if the piece is an instrument that I’ve never made before or if I’ve devoted a lot of creative work or thought to its creation. Once I made a Roland Jupiter 8 [synthesizer] on felt and then stretched it across a blank skateboard for a skateboard exhibition. It’s the biggest piece I have ever worked on, and it took me weeks. I still have it at home.

I think my favorite creation is the Hammond organ with Leslie cab. I made a little stool for the organ, a little expression pedal. All the drawbars go in and out, and the Leslie has a little felt speaker and tubes in it. I spent more time on that piece than any other.

Have you ever brought one of your favorite felt instruments onstage during a performance?

I never bring them onstage, but I did make myself felt banners that have my name written on them. There’s a pony on one and a keyboard on the other. Maybe for my next tour!