Dear Friends,

This week—fittingly, on Juneteenth—we’re delighted to release a new audio story to add to our growing podcast collection.

Since 2021, June 19 has been observed as a U.S. federal holiday commemorating the emancipation of enslaved African Americans, and honoring the myriad contributions that Black Americans have made—in our music, in literature and the arts, in American sports, and in numerous other aspects of our nation’s culture.

Although the Emancipation Proclamation declared enslaved people in the Confederate states free on Jan. 1, 1863, freedom did not reach many enslaved Texans until June 19, 1865, when Union troops arrived to enforce emancipation. That day is now celebrated as Juneteenth.

Today’s story, while focused on the work of contemporary Black ceramicists, also reflects on this period in history, and explores the legacy of early American artists and craftspeople who were enslaved just a few generations ago.

We hope you’ll enjoy listening to: “Black Artists Are Reshaping How We Think About American Ceramics,” written by and narrated by Chinwe Oniah. (And if you’d like to read or revisit the original story, you’ll find the full version linked below.)

While we are happy to offer this new audio story to everyone for free, we’ll include a gentle reminder here that paid subscriptions help us continue to produce thoughtful, original stories of mastery and tradition, and to pay our contributors fair market rates. So if you haven’t done so already, please consider supporting our work.

Subscribe now

If you’re new to our community, the Craftsmanship podcast includes audio versions of some of our favorite stories, as well as interviews with artisans, subject experts, and other special guests. You can listen to these recordings on our YouTube channel and many other popular streaming services, including Apple Podcasts and Spotify.

We always welcome your thoughts and suggestions, which you can offer in a comment, a Substack Note, or via email. Thank you for reading and sharing our stories, for supporting our work with a paid subscription if you can, and for being such a loyal part of the Craftsmanship community.

Sincerely,

Todd Oppenheimer

Publisher & Editor-in-Chief, Craftsmanship Magazine

ICYMI...

Explore Black Artisans

Craftsmanship Magazine focuses on master artisans and innovators whose work informs our quest: to create a world built to last. In addition to our Substack offerings, you’ll find a rich archive of stories, podcasts, photo essays, and documentary shorts on our free website—along with community resources like our Artisans’ Directory, our guide to U.S.-based craft & folk schools, and much more.

Dear Friends,

In this “short & sweet” dispatch, which is related to last week’s story on the craft of herbalism, contributing editor Jeff Greenwald offers a peek inside a Berkeley Herbal Center workshop. There, he and other aspiring DIY herbologists melted fine Belgian chocolate with cannabidiol (CBD), and contributed to a lively conversation about plant medicine, healing, and the pleasures of making things yourself.

We hope you’ll enjoy reading, “How to Make CBD Chocolates: A Berkeley Herbal Center Workshop,” by .

We always welcome your thoughts and suggestions, which you can offer in a comment, as a Substack Note, or via email. Thank you for reading and sharing our stories, for supporting our work with a paid subscription if you can, and for being such a loyal part of the Craftsmanship community.

Sincerely,

Todd Oppenheimer
Publisher & Editor-in-Chief, Craftsmanship Magazine

How to Make CBD Chocolates: A Berkeley Herbal Center Workshop

Story by

The Berkeley Herbal Center is a fragrant Brigadoon, tucked among trees and strollers on the edge of Berkeley’s Strawberry Park. Established in 1995, the Center purports to be “one of the few combined herbal schools, clinics, and plant medicine-making locations in the United States.”

As such, they offer frequent classes and workshops, including Weeds as Medicine, herb walks, and An Introduction to Herbalism. To get a hands-on sense of one aspect of the craft, I signed up for a short morning class called CBD Chocolates with Penny Barthel. “Join us to make delicious, custom-dosed CBD chocolate hearts. All equipment and ingredients are included.” What’s not to love?

Penny Barthel, based in the East Bay, is an enthusiastic, highly knowledgeable educator and the co-creator of Wondering About Weed, which she started with her business partner, writer Kaisha-Dyan McMillan. A certified cannabis horticulturist, she recently joined the board of directors for the Berkeley Herbal Center.

“Cannabis is a genuinely fascinating plant,” says Barthel. ”Though I’ve long been enamored with plants in general, I can say with confidence that cannabis is my favorite. I love introducing folks to this plant because I know it offers something to everyone—whether it’s easing pain and anxiety, drifting off to restful sleep, or helping to smooth out the everyday worries we experience. It’s also one of my favorite ingredients to experiment with in the kitchen.”

Twelve of us connected in the Center’s classroom: Barthel, myself, and a diverse group of women. Interestingly, during my five visits to the Center I never saw another man—confirming the female-forward relationship with herbology embodied by the character of Anne Hathaway-Shakespeare in the 2025 historical drama “Hamnet.”

Barthel was careful to distinguish between THC (the psychoactive molecule in cannabis) and the miracles of the cannabidiol molecule (CBD), which “offers soothing aid to the body mood without the high.” As someone who dislikes the THC high, this was a big selling point. And though I’m not one of those people whose body is “notably soothed by CBD,” I bit into the experience with that old saw I’ve relied on so very many times: It can’t hurt.

After Penny’s talk (and an exhaustive Q&A), we took our places at our individual work stations and were instructed in the use of our lab equipment—which included a Barbie-pink silicone tray with 50 small, heart-shaped molds.

Our first step was to use jewelers’ scales to precisely measure out 125 grams of dark chocolate (Callebaut 811, a high-end brand from Belgium—Penny doesn’t kid around) into a beaker, and melt it in the Center’s microwave. Next, we chose the dosing we wanted (between 5 mg and 30 mg per heart) and carefully stirred the corresponding amount of Bartel’s pre-formulated CBD concentrate into the melted chocolate.

“Since it doesn’t make you high, the difference in the CBD doses is nothing most people will notice,” says Penny. “Some people will feel calmer with a higher dose, especially if it’s taken over time. Some people will feel less pain, or get spasticity relief.” Because spasticity (bradykinesia) is a side effect of Parkinson’s medications, CBD has been researched to see if it can improve quality of life for PD patients. “And since it is an anti-inflammatory,” Barthel says, “it works very gently over time to relieve arthritis or any kind of inflammatory pain.”

We then returned to our stations and poured the mixture into the 50 pink heart molds. For me, at least, this was the most challenging part of the process: using a little metal trowel to get all those tiny hearts filled (nothing is sadder than an empty heart). Some of the students had even brought colored sprinkles, adding a party look to their hemp-adjacent confections.

Once our heart molds were filled, we transferred them into a refrigerator to cool and harden.

It was a fine introduction to the Berkeley Herbal Center, very breezy and informative. Best of all, I now have a Mason jar full of Callebaut chocolate hearts: Feeling better never tasted so good.

ICYMI…

As our writer notes in this week’s new story, herbalism may be one of humanity’s oldest crafts—some 60,000 years old, in fact. And despite the rise of modern medicine and the dizzying array of high-tech pharmaceuticals available to us today (depending on your health insurance plan, of course), the U.S. market for herbalism is projected to quadruple by 2033.

Contributing editor Jeff Greenwald takes us inside the aromatic Berkeley Herbal Center, where a new generation of herbalists is studying ancient, traditional plant knowledge and applying it to contemporary human ailments. What follows is equal parts history, botany, folk tradition, and Jeff’s personal experiment with a healing practice that has quietly persisted for millennia.

We hope you’ll enjoy reading “Herbalism: Crafting Ancient Plant Medicine for Modern Life,” by .

We always welcome your thoughts and suggestions, which you can offer in a comment, as a Substack Note, or via email. Thank you for reading and sharing our stories, for supporting our work with a paid subscription if you can, and for being such a loyal part of the Craftsmanship community.

Sincerely,

Todd Oppenheimer
Publisher & Editor-in-Chief, Craftsmanship Magazine

Herbalism: Crafting Ancient Plant Medicine for Modern Life

by

Ashley Campos was studying Rhetoric and Philosophy at U.C. Berkeley when her life took an unexpected turn.

“While I was in school I had to make money, so I started bartending,” she says. Making bitters and craft cocktails got her into molecular gastronomy, “and I fell in love with that.”

One evening, two men from the U.K. walked into the bar and struck up a conversation with her. “They asked me what I wanted to do with my life. I told them I wanted to study herbology. That same night, they looked up the name of a school, found out the amount of the deposit, and gave it to me in hundred-dollar bills: $1,800. They said, ‘We want to be a part of your dream.’ The next day, I enrolled in an apprenticeship program—and that was my gateway into herbalism.”

Amazing, but not surprising. Like all of the women I met at the Berkeley Herbal Center, Ashley’s magnetic presence drew me into her spell. Today, Campos—now the Center’s executive director—has become an expert at the process of taking histories, formulating tinctures, and helping to train and certify a growing number of herbalists (almost all female) who enroll in the Center’s two-year program.

“I love the community aspect of it,” she says, “being able to share in community with the plants, the land, the people, and watching the effects that ripple outward. It’s such a beautiful process—like a mycelium network that gets created when I make a specific medicine, and consider all of the people it’s going to affect.”

Read more

Nest at 20: Building a Future for Global Craft Communities

A warped loom awaits a replacement part that is stranded in transit. A hurricane threatens an entire season’s worth of inventory. Skyrocketing fuel costs suddenly double the cost of shipping.

Any one of these disruptions can erase months of work, and small, artisan-based businesses are especially vulnerable. Many simply don’t have the resources to weather the ongoing economic, technological, and environmental crises that dominate headlines around the world.

Nest, a global nonprofit, recognizes that resilience is not something makers can cultivate alone; it’s an ecosystem of support, shared knowledge, and meaningful connections. Part of Nest’s mission is to redefine what long-term stability looks like within the craft landscape, and build infrastructure that helps creative entrepreneurs adapt, sustain their businesses, and reach new markets. As the organization marks its 20th anniversary, it is forging ahead to prepare artisans, makers, and craft communities for a rapidly changing future. What kinds of tools, resources, and relationships will help to ensure their survival?

A fantastic example of this infrastructure is Nest’s Climate Academy. A digital learning platform developed with the Environmental Defense Fund and supported by Etsy, it helps U.S.-based makers and artisans prepare for—and recover from—climate-related disruptions. The program, which includes a disaster recovery guidebook, offers practical insights and actionable steps on topics like
”Climate Vulnerability & Exposure,” “Navigating National Recovery Resources,” and “Future-Proofing Your Craft.”

But disaster preparedness alone is not enough. Resilience also means expanding the ways handmade work moves through the economy by diversifying revenue, reaching new audiences, and finding new forms. Nest collaborates with established global brands to connect artisans to a broader network of audiences and market platforms. For International Women’s Month, Stanley 1913 partnered with Nest to launch a limited-edition collection, featuring artwork by four Guild artists printed across Stanley’s iconic silhouettes. (The featured artists are: Fabriulous from Shanghai, M.A Estudio from Mexico City, Studio 189 from Ghana, Élan Byrd from Miami).

“This collaboration honors women artisans and their stories of culture, identity, and community from around the world,” said Byrd.

By coordinating these opportunities, Nest helps artists and makers license their work, extend their reach, and operate at a scale that otherwise would have been inaccessible to them.

For Earth Month in April, Nest collaborated with beauty brand VIOLETTE_FR and Filipino lifestyle brand LIKHÂ on a limited-edition handwoven tote, made with natural seagrass by artisans in the Philippines. The proceeds supported Nest’s ongoing work with artisan communities worldwide.

Underlying much of this work is the Nest Guild, a global network of more than 3,000 artisan enterprises across 125 countries that share resources, connect as peers, and gain invaluable knowledge through Nest’s free learning platform. At a time when many makers are seeking opportunities to learn, collaborate, and gather in person, the Guild fosters relationships and exchanges across borders.

Twenty years in, Nest’s vision has only sharpened. Beyond preserving traditional craft techniques and mentoring small craft businesses, the organization is investing in the networks, education, and market access that will enable craft communities to flourish and grow amid continual change. As the handmade economy evolves, Nest is always looking ahead, developing new tools and pathways to help artisans, their families, and their communities thrive.

Learn more about Nest on their website, Instagram, and Pinterest channels. And be sure to subscribe to their newly launched Substack, Crafted Conversations, which features personal stories from their partner artisans and makers every other week.

ICYMI…

Craftsmanship Magazine focuses on master artisans and innovators whose work informs our quest: to create a world built to last. In addition to our Substack offerings, you’ll find a rich archive of stories, podcasts, photo essays, and documentary shorts on our free website—along with community resources like our Artisans’ Directory, our guide to U.S.-based craft & folk schools, and much more.

Underneath all the discouraging news we hear and read these days, there’s a movement slowly building out there that shows real promise, especially for America’s working class. As is typical with big social steps forward, this one is emerging from the ashes of what’s been destroyed.

That destruction, at least regarding the American economy, can be encapsulated in a single paradoxical sentence: As economic inequality in America has gotten worse and worse, our two major political parties have been doing less and less to solve it.

The result is widespread frustration today with both Democrats and Republicans. Not surprisingly, these sentiments coincide with a steady growth in the portion of Americans identifying as Independents—a group whose consistent issue is basic economic fairness. (It’s worth noting that 45 percent of the electorate now consider themselves Independents. That is a record high—and a serious threat to our traditional parties, which now split the remainder of the electorate, with only 27 percent apiece.)

Fortunately, a growing number of organizations in the U.S. seem to be heeding the Independents’ call. Before I introduce you to them, let’s orient this discussion politically.

There are plenty of organizations today, on both the political Left and the Right, that claim to be pushing for changes that will make the economy work better for everyone, especially the working class—a group that includes more and more people referred to as “the working poor.” As you would expect, both sides take very different approaches to inequality problems.

Those differences were summarized in a recent article in the California Post by Jesse Ramos, Senior Advisor for one of the leading conservative groups, Americans for Prosperity Action. “Conservatives generally argue for decentralization, lower taxes, lighter regulation, domestic energy production and more decision-making authority at the state, local, family and individual level,” Ramos wrote. “Liberals generally place greater trust in federal programs, centralized regulation, subsidies, mandates and national administrative solutions to social and economic problems.”

Setting aside any missing nuances here, I’d say this is a fair summary of America’s two competing political philosophies. If nothing else, it certainly reflects much of what’s so appealing about the conservative movement. After all, who wants higher taxes? Almost no one. And what business owner wants their decisions controlled by pesky regulators? Ditto.

This anti-tax, anti-government worldview has now guided our politics, and most of Washington’s legislative changes, for more than a generation. If it held true—in other words, if it produced the level of opportunity and prosperity, for everyone, that most conservative groups claim to want—the economy would be very different today. We wouldn’t have corporate executives making $20 million-salaries, then paying taxes at rates that are a fraction of what’s required of their employees. And we wouldn’t have close to 70 million people across the country—nearly half the workforce—working for less than a livable wage.1

If this level of inequality is the result of a deregulated, low-taxed society, maybe it really is time to make America great again. But wouldn’t that mean going back to the rules that governed our economy when it was great?

In the 250 years that the U.S. has been a nation, we enjoyed our greatest period of economic strength and growth—what’s often called “The Golden Age of Capitalism”— in the two to three decades that followed the Second World War. During this period, income tax rates on corporations and the wealthy were much higher than they are today—almost three times higher for the super wealthy; wages kept up with inflation; and a more aggressive regulatory system kept business competition humming, and runaway monopolies largely at bay. (We also had reasonable limits on campaign spending in those decades, so that corporate interests couldn’t treat candidates like real estate ventures, to be bought and sold for their own profit. Which is sadly the norm today due to the 2010 Supreme Court Decision infamously known as “Citizens United.”)

Thanks to the larger tax receipts collected during the post-war years, our leaders in Washington financed an entire network of programs that lifted people out of poverty, educated veterans returning from war, and built up America’s middle class. In the decades since, as labor unions have been weakened, the middle class has gradually shrunk (a trend that undoubtedly inspired the cartoon that opens this column).2

I realize the 1960s and 1970s had plenty of troubles and blind spots, but the point at issue today remains: economic growth back then was more robust—and, more important, the fruits of that growth much more widely shared—than is the case today. An updated version of that era, not the broken system we have now, is what the organizations I want to tell you about are trying to revive.

A word of warning: Most if not all of these organizations—which you will meet one at a time, starting today—are known as politically liberal. That said, and in light of the context I just laid out, I think you will see that their economic goals are anything but. So I hope you will focus on their work, not their identities.

The first organization I want to tell you about is The Working Families Party, which is one of the powerhouses in the movement to level the economic playing field in this country. Through its relatively rapid growth, the WFP is starting to fill the gaping void left by the failures of both Democrats and Republicans. To that end, the WFP recently released what they call “The Working Families Guarantee.” Not coincidentally, it promises a variety of policy changes—such as lower housing costs, universal healthcare, low-cost childcare, and strengthened unions—that have polled as widely popular, even among conservative voters.

The WFP’s agenda is light on specifics at this point, but it fits hand-and-glove with a similar set of proposals, introduced almost simultaneously, called “The New Affordability Agenda.” And this plan does include tangible ways to achieve its ends, through 10 different legislative bills, all with committed Congressional sponsors.

In the spirit of my message in this column, I should note that this agenda comes from the Congressional Progressive Caucus. While the CPC is often considered ultra-liberal (and some of its members definitely are, especially on certain social issues), the group’s economic plan is remarkably centrist. Like the Working Families Party, the CPC restricted its agenda to ideas that are widely popular—in its case, with at least 60% of Americans, on both the Left and on the Right.3 That strikes me as very promising, for all of us.

See you next month. And in the meantime, please check out the WFP’s accomplishments, and let me know what you think in our Comments section.

Publisher & Editor-in-Chief, Craftsmanship Magazine

“How to Make a Good Day”: Scott and Ene Constable on Crafting a Meaningful Life

by

Scott and Ene Constable share a vast and eclectic portfolio. Married since 1989, the artists have suspended a life-sized orca—crafted from local hardwoods—in the lobby of a Washington middle school, and built a plaza of raindrop-shaped swiveling seats for a park in a Santa Rosa, California, neighborhood once ravaged by wildfires. Their Wowhaus design team has installed a cast-bronze crane (an ancient symbol of justice) outside a Denver law center, and created furniture and other structures for Alice Waters’ Edible Schoolyard Project in Berkeley.

“Sometimes our projects start with an exercise where we pretend we just landed on Earth,” says Scott. “What are the current challenges? What’s happening in terms of culture, and nature? Where do they intersect? What are the cultural or natural forces at play in our sponsoring city, be it Nashville, Chattanooga, or Oakland? It’s almost like we’re creating a site-specific intervention that people will interact with. We want it to feel like it belongs there and is integrated deeply.”

“One of the phrases I use is ‘a catalyst for community.’ It should feel like it was there first,” says Ene, “and everything else grew up around it. Like when you go to a place like Rome, and you come across those pieces of art and architecture in the landscape.”

Though their philosophy is provocative, and their public artworks beautiful and imaginative, I was drawn to the Constables by their ongoing joint project of four decades: What Makes a Good Day?

It’s a good question. And though the answer will be different for everyone, their quest attracted me. Making good days is a craft that I, too, hope to master.

Scott and Ene met in 1988, when Ene was 23 and Scott 25, on a farm along the Hudson River. They married the following year. The origin story of their quest began in 1990, when they served as Peace Corps Volunteers in Togo. Although they were assigned to work on Guinea worm eradication and to build more efficient cookstoves for the Togolese, there was an unexpected takeaway for them.

In Togo, Scott and Ene were speaking mainly French (the official language). As is common in Africa, even informal greetings between villagers can last as long as half an hour, and often include being invited to somebody's house.

“So, your plans were always changing,” Scott says, “based on whatever conviviality there was. One of the French greetings villagers would use was, ‘On a trouvé le joie?—Have you found the joy?’ That was the priority. Whatever else was going on, it was a reminder to slow down and find the joy in each day. I think our whole thing of ‘what makes a good day’ started with that.”

What’s so appealing to Ene and Scott is the assumption of agency. “The very question ‘what makes a good day?’ implies that you can make it,” says Scott. “The plan is setting out to make the good day.” Every individual day is limited by its astronomical length and presents a distinct challenge. “We’re using that idea to frame how we collaborate and frame our practice, at the scale of the day.”

For the Constables, the armature for a good day is a series of daily rituals. In their minds, the difference between habit and ritual is intention; a habit pins you down, while a ritual opens things up.

They start every day with fermented pu-erh tea, then a period of stretching and exercise, followed by a deep encounter with nature. “We typically hike to a remote beach, or along a bird sanctuary or a farm road, depending on the weather and tide.” Sometimes they’ll do a more ambitious excursion in kayaks.

“Between nature and lunch, there’s work,” says Ene. “And a little hand-ground coffee.”

“That’s when we do the high-intensity stuff,” Scott says. “Not the dreamy stuff, but the mechanical stuff: writing the proposals, building the models, doing all the communications.”

“Which can be joyful or not,” Ene adds pointedly.

Lunch (like the beautiful salad and pizza Ene served me) is often made with produce from their garden, and followed by a short nap. “The nap has become critical,” Ene says. “I never believe it's going to happen! But as we get older, it's a complete reset. That has been our little secret weapon recently.”

“And what happens after the nap?”

“Then we work some more!” Scott says. But for this second spell, the focus is less logistical. Having put to rest the business of the day, their minds are open to more imaginative pursuits. This is when they engage in experimentation, invention, and discussing whatever new ideas may have emerged since their last creative session.

“After this late afternoon brainstorming, we wind down outside or cook. In the winters, we get the fire started in the afternoon and keep going through the night.” During the summer, they often just chill out under the changing light, enjoying the resident population of bird life.

“Do you have a closing ritual for the day,” I ask, “to wrap things up?”

“Not as much,” says Ene. “I have a kind of switch at nine o’clock; it’s over.”

“Let's say you were doing a workshop,” I ask, “with a diverse audience from all over the world. What would be the central piece of advice you might give the attendees? How do you begin a day with the right mindset?”

“It sounds almost lazy,” Scott says, “but I'd say entering each day with no expectations of outcomes.”

“The creative process is a great teacher,” Ene nods. “You're seeking, but you're not necessarily going to find what you thought you’d get. I call it ‘ambiguity tolerance.’ That muscle has been built through our work, particularly during COVID. It's a willingness to put yourself out there—in places that are challenging, or uncomfortable, or unknown—but with the knowledge that you will find the way through and find all the things you need.”

“And the corollary to the open-endedness of it,” Scott adds, “is ‘be prepared.’ So prepare yourself.”

“We set ourselves up to find the joy,” says Ene. “Sometimes it doesn't work—but you definitely want to be on the alert for the joy.”

One’s capacity for this practice, of course, depends on one’s resources and constraints. “For a working mother, for example, or someone who’s poor, the window becomes smaller. But still, if you're open to spontaneity—even if it's for five minutes—you’ll know what to do when it comes.”

“When I visit my parents, I have to drop into a whole other set of parameters related to what makes a good day for them. We may sit by a fountain and watch the birds come. We don't know which birds are going to come. We don’t know if they're going to come. But I have an idea of what’s realistic.”

At other times, Scott and Ene remind me, finding joy and ‘making a good day’ are as much about what we don’t open up to.

“We’re being blindsided by a firehose of noise and disinformation; confusion that we’re not comfortable entirely shutting out, because it's kind of worrisome to ignore,” says Scott. “So, we have one eye open, but we've been intentionally reducing the amount of exposure we have to the news. Instead, we find comfort in things that require attention—whether cooking, building, or getting back to the roots of making. Anything that requires care and has a positive outcome.”

Ultimately, of course, a “good day” is a synthesis of the magical and the mundane. “People tend to compartmentalize: They’re working or they're playing,” says Ene; you have to merge these modes. “For me, a good day is a day when I'm able to have that combination. I mean, we love going out to the farmer's market; but given the arc of our lives, a good day ultimately comes down to a little bit more.”

“It's a deeper question than is immediately apparent,” Scott says. “For a lot of people, a good day comes down to a soft-serve ice cream and a movie. It’s almost about entertainment. But when you start thinking, ‘Can I have a good day when there's so much injustice, palpable injustice,’ it becomes equally about having a sense of consequentiality. You want to know that the thing you did today made some little difference.”

ICYMI…

As industrial agriculture has narrowed both livestock genetics and textile production, many wool producers, retailers, and artists who work with fiber are working to revive an old source: heritage breeds of sheep. From all indications, these animals are well suited to building a “fiber economy” that’s more resilient, and more environmentally sustainable, than the fast-fashion market that predominates today.

For textile artist and writer Erika Zambello, a fun knitting project that started during the Covid-19 era evolved into a passion for these rare sheep, and for the variety of yarns that can be produced from them.

This week’s new story traces the growing movement around breed-specific wool, from the sheep and their shepherds to the small mills, craftspeople, and local yarn shops working to rebuild regional fiber economies from the ground up.

We hope you’ll enjoy reading “Rare Sheep, Rich Yarns,” by Erika Zambello.

We always welcome your thoughts and suggestions, which you can offer in a comment, as a Substack Note, or via email. Thank you for reading and sharing our stories, for supporting our work with a paid subscription if you can, and for being such a loyal part of the Craftsmanship community.

Sincerely,

Todd Oppenheimer
Publisher & Editor-in-Chief, Craftsmanship Magazine

Rare Sheep, Rich Yarns

by Zambello

Scribbled in the back of my knitting notebook are dozens of unusual names—not of people, but of rare breeds of sheep. There’s Gulf Coast, Icelandic, Cormo, Corriedale, Bluefaced Leicester, Orkney Boreray. In a digital album, I have even more: Barbados Blackbelly, Karakul, Shetland, Dorset Horn. I track these names because each breed offers a distinctive wool profile, and an equally distinctive history.

I first discovered heritage sheep breeds through The Livestock Conservancy’s “Shave ‘Em to Save ‘Em” program, launched in 2019 to encourage artists and craftspeople to work with wool from more than 20 breeds that are at-risk for extinction. As a fun incentive, participants receive a “passport” when they sign up for the program; they also earn a sticker every time they try a yarn from a new breed. More than 4,000 passports have been sent out to participants so far, registered to more than 1,600 fiber sellers. My own passport became much more than a fun knitting project: It led me on a fascinating journey into the history of rare breeds.

The Sheep

For millennia, as human populations spread across continents and climates, sheep traveled along with us, evolving through both husbandry and environmental pressures into a remarkable range of breeds. Together, they formed a textile vocabulary as varied as the landscapes that shaped them. Then, beginning in the 19th century, agricultural industrialization greatly narrowed that vocabulary. The result was efficiency—but also loss. Sheep diversity declined, and with it, the nuanced range of wool that was once available.

Read more

Dear Friends,

This week, we’re delighted to add a new audio story to our growing podcast collection. If you’re new to our community, the Craftsmanship podcast includes audio versions of some of our favorite stories, as well as interviews with artisans, subject experts, and other special guests. You can listen to these recordings on our YouTube channel and many other popular streaming services, including Apple Podcasts and Spotify.

We hope you’ll enjoy listening to: “The Fragility of India’s Artisan Communities.” The story was written by , narrated and produced by Pauline Bartolone. If you’d like to read the original story, you’ll find the full version linked below.

While we are happy to offer this new audio story to everyone for free, we’ll include a gentle reminder here that paid subscriptions help us continue to produce thoughtful, original stories of mastery and tradition, and pay our contributors fair market rates. So if you haven’t done so already, please consider supporting our work.

Subscribe now

We always welcome your thoughts and suggestions, which you can offer in a comment, a Substack Note, or via email. Thank you for reading and sharing our stories, for supporting our work with a paid subscription if you can, and for being such a loyal part of the Craftsmanship community.

Sincerely,

Todd Oppenheimer

Publisher & Editor-in-Chief, Craftsmanship Magazine

ICYMI...

Craftsmanship Magazine focuses on master artisans and innovators whose work informs our quest: to create a world built to last. In addition to our Substack offerings, you’ll find a rich archive of stories, podcasts, photo essays, and documentary shorts on our free website—along with community resources like our Artisans’ Directory, our guide to U.S.-based craft & folk schools, and much more.

Dear Friends,

Each year in the U.S., at least 9.5 million tons of furniture are dumped in landfills—a staggering waste, but one that doesn’t have to be inevitable.

When Cindy Feinauer took ownership of Kay Chesterfield, a century-old upholstery business in Oakland, CA, she wasn’t just preserving a legacy craft—she was determined to slow the churn of “fast furniture.” And she’s not alone: Even in a market addicted to cheap, disposable home goods, the upholstery trade is quietly thriving.

We hope you’ll enjoy reading “Fighting Fast Furniture Waste, One Reupholstered Sofa at a Time,” by .

While we are happy to offer this story to everyone for free, we’ll include a gentle reminder here that paid subscriptions help us to continue producing thoughtful, original articles like this one, and paying our contributors fair market rates. So if you haven’t done so already, please consider supporting our work.

Subscribe now

We always welcome your thoughts and suggestions, which you can offer in a comment, a Substack Note, or via email. Thank you for reading and sharing our stories, for supporting our work with a paid subscription if you can, and for being such a loyal part of the Craftsmanship community.

Sincerely,

Todd Oppenheimer
Publisher & Editor-in-Chief, Craftsmanship Magazine

Fighting Fast Furniture Waste, One Reupholstered Sofa at a Time

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Cindy Feinauer wants to talk about “fast furniture.”

More than 9.5 million tons of furniture are thrown into U.S. landfills every year, according to the most recent data available from the EPA—equal to 80% of the new furnishings being manufactured.

Rather than avoiding this intractable waste problem, Feinauer took a giant leap toward addressing it. After many years of corporate sales jobs, she says she wanted to own a local business that fit her personal values, and at the end of 2024, she bought Kay Chesterfield, a 100-year-old reupholstery business in Oakland, CA. The company reupholsters about 2,000 pieces of furniture a year, which roughly translates to 60 fewer tons of trash in the landfill annually.

“If we can work within the local community to keep furniture in use, we can actually make a major sustainable impact,” says Feinauer.

But it’s a tough business to keep going, Feinauer says. When the cost of refurbishing a piece of furniture starts at $1800, most households would instead turn to online retailers like Amazon—where they could find, for example, a knockoff, mid-century modern armchair for as little as $100.

That may be why, before Feinauer took the helm, Kay Chesterfield started booking big institutional clients like Stanford University, UC San Francisco, and San Francisco International Airport. Airports and hospitals, of course, are dense with customized furniture. And tossing those heavily used lobby couches away every few years when they become shabby would be financially unwise. So for clients like these, Kay Chesterfield can more easily pitch the benefits of rehabbing the seat cushions instead.

 Running a modern-day upholstery business has other challenges, too. Cash ebbs and flows, of course, and labor costs are understandably high. Upholstering is not exactly a core class at trade schools, so experienced craftspeople are hard to come by. If Feinauer can’t pay her mostly self-trained workers enough, she’ll be hard-pressed to find replacements.

One of Kay Chesterfield’s senior upholsterers learned the trade 30 years ago from his uncle in Mexico. Another employee, Audrey Meyers, was taught by her mother, who was a hobbyist.

“ You just learn as you go in this industry,” says Meyers, who is also the company’s operations manager.

Kay Chesterfield, which employs nine people, is unusual. Most upholsterers in the U.S. are sole proprietors, or so-called “mom-and-pop shops,” says Keaven Willa Hartt, president of the National Upholstery Association (NUA).

“ We hear often that it’s a dying trade, which I always push back on,” says Willa Hartt, who also runs her own sole proprietorship, Willa Hartt Upholstery, out of her backyard shed in Portland, Maine. “ Most of us have waitlists that exceed a year, or even two.”

Upholsterers may not be so visible these days because they don’t always have storefronts, she says. But according to the NUA, a professional association that launched just before the 2020 Covid-19 lockdowns, there are as many as 8,000 upholstery businesses nationwide, most of which have fewer than 5 employees.

The pandemic was very good for the upholstery business, apparently.

“All of a sudden, [people were] staring at furniture that they really wanted to change,” says Willa Hartt.

Since Portland’s a popular vacation destination, Willa Hartt’s clients tend to be restaurateurs and people with second homes in the area. But upholstering isn’t just for people with surplus cash. Hartt says she has customers who will save up to preserve the life of a family heirloom.

Still, “sustainability” is the top reason that customers give for having their worn-out furniture remade, Hartt says. And for shops that can handle corporate orders, like Kay Chesterfield, state or local waste management laws can help support their trade. For example, since 2012, businesses in California that produce more than 4 tons of waste per week must have a commercial recycling plan. This forces larger organizations, in particular, to pause and consider the alternatives before they send truckloads of furniture to the dump.

Despite the rollercoaster ride, Cindy Feinauer says she hopes for more competitors in the upholstery business, so that more households will choose to repair that old sofa recliner, instead of scrolling Amazon listings to replace it.

“ If we can scale this industry, we can bring [custom upholstering] costs down,” she says.

ICYMI…

Building Furniture, Rebuilding Lives

A woodworking shop is, by its nature, a place of transformation. A tree is milled into lumber; lumber is cut and reshaped into an object built to last. Look closer, and it’s also a kind of library.

Raw lumber tells a tree’s story: Woodgrain and growth rings recount dry years and damp ones, the strain of a heavy branch, marks left by beetles or fungus. Each finished piece carries evidence of the maker’s story as well: the hours invested, the decisions made, the persistence required to see it through.

Making Whole, an apprenticeship-based program in Asheville, North Carolina, leans into craft’s capacity to transform not only materials, but people. Founded in 2018 by craftsman Jeremy French, it operates as both a fine woodworking studio and a recovery program for men navigating addiction. The premise is straightforward: The disciplined, hands-on practice of making things—paired with structure and support—can help remake a life.

Over his three decades of sobriety, French noticed a pattern while working alongside others in his wood shops: People who struggled to stabilize in more conventional recovery settings often found traction through craft. The work demands focus, problem-solving, and a sustained attention to process, engaging hands and mind while gradually reshaping a person’s orientation to the world. It slows time, and creates opportunities to move with intention.

That shift depends on structure as much as it does on labor. Within a mentor–apprentice model, guidance and accountability are constants. Apprenticeships offer a sense of community, intimacy, and direction—vital forms of support often missing in lives that are disrupted by addiction.

Marcus Mitchell, a former apprentice who now serves as a mentor and point man in the concrete studio, puts it plainly: “If you’re willing to be patient with yourself and show up, really try to put in the work and you’re ready to do it, then this place can transform your life.”

Apprenticeship at Making Whole runs year-round on a rolling basis, with days split between production and custom commissions. Midday, the pace shifts. Everyone sets down their tools, and gathers to prepare and share a meal. Often, an invitation is extended to the wider community. This simple, consistent ritual offers apprentices an opportunity to build another skill while nourishing themselves and the people around them.

The studio takes on a limited number of projects, focusing on well-designed objects intended for daily use—pieces that lend meaning and shape to the spaces they inhabit. Working in wood, metal, and architectural concrete, the craftsmen produce custom furniture and other small-batch pieces, which are available through Cohab.Space in High Point, N.C.

In a documentary-style video about the program, French asks the question: “How can you be transformed into somebody you want to be? What do you have to do to become the person you were meant to be?”

At Making Whole, there are no easy answers, only practices to return to, and a framework built on consistent support and care. Change comes gradually but steadily, through the accumulation of hundreds of deliberate, thoughtful choices, each one a part of building something that will last.

To learn more about Making Whole, you can explore their website, follow along on Instagram or Facebook, or view their work online.

ICYMI…

Craftsmanship Magazine focuses on master artisans and innovators whose work informs our quest: to create a world built to last. In addition to our Substack offerings, you’ll find a rich archive of stories, podcasts, photo essays, and documentary shorts on our free website—along with community resources like our Artisans’ Directory, our guide to U.S.-based craft & folk schools, and much more.

The best political slogan I’ve ever heard of was hatched decades ago, in Texas, by Ralph Yarborough, a local judge who made his name as a country lawyer fighting big oil. During a 1958 campaign to defend his seat in the U.S. Senate, Yarborough hit the front steps of one county courthouse after another, preaching a populist message built on a simple pledge: “Let’s put the jam on the lower shelf where the little people can reach it.”

Think about this for a second. If society’s goodies are kept somewhere that’s accessible to “the little people”—meaning those without much money or social advantages—the “big people,” those blessed with society’s riches and privileges, could still reach the jam, too. What I love about this metaphor is that Yarborough wasn’t asking for special favors for anyone. He just wanted all of us to fight for life’s goodies on a level playing field.

Common sense, right? Squarely aligned with how most of us would define the principles of fairness and equality, and how we’ve long framed the American promise. Keeping that promise has always been a struggle, but these days a system of equal opportunity seems more elusive than ever.

As I laid out in the second and third installments of this monthly series, for the past four-plus decades—thanks to a steady stream of tax favors for corporations and the wealthy, paired with a series of financial insults to working Americans—we have essentially taken one jar of jam after another and put it on the top shelf. And despite all the signs that millions of Americans are screaming for solutions to today’s “affordability” problem, our representatives in Washington have, as a group, done almost nothing in response.

The reason has long been plain: Since 2010, when the U.S. Supreme Court allowed unlimited spending on elections, “Big Money” (typically corporate interests, but also wealthy donors) has increasingly dictated who wins and loses, and which legislation the victors advance, or ignore.

The good news is that, in recent months, I’ve been meeting a number of politicians—some already in office, but most running for their first national position—who seem determined to turn this trend around.

Before I tell you who I’m talking about, some full disclosure: I’ve met these candidates mostly through my volunteer work as a member of The Patriotic Millionaires, an organization that advocates for legislation to level the economic playing field, and for politicians who support that agenda. And, as I have come to know these candidates, I have sent many of them whatever financial support I can. I realize that writing about a politician that a reporter supports financially breaches journalistic norms, but I’m doing this for a reason. Although the stock market is up, most Americans are getting more and more squeezed. So when I meet up-and-comers who seem to have what it takes to confront our fundamental economic problems, I would feel negligent if I didn’t tell you about them, even if I am supporting them.

Take Brandon Riker, a first-time candidate to represent California’s 48th district, which stretches between Palm Springs and San Diego. Although Riker is an economist and has been a successful entrepreneur, he believes our financial system needs to be significantly restructured if it’s ever going to work for everyone. “This isn’t like Germany in 1945,” he told me. “It’s France in 1789!” Riker is referring to the year before the French Revolution, when the country’s feudal system had created such economic decay that the country’s debt payments consumed half of royal revenue. (Debt in the U.S. isn’t nearly that bad, but it, too, is on a runaway trajectory. This year, the national debt is already approaching $40 trillion, which is more than 120% of our entire Gross Domestic Product.)

Riker has built his campaign around what he calls “a second New Deal,” and many others aspiring to both House and Senate seats seem to be thinking along similar lines. What’s most striking is that an unprecedented number of them are working-class Americans.

I’m not referring to the types of candidates we’ve seen plenty of before—people who boast of humble origins but whose lives are now cushioned by fancy law degrees or lucrative corporate credentials; and whose campaigns are turbocharged by corporate donations as well (which typically neuters whatever they say on the stump). The candidates I’m talking about, who are mostly on the younger side, still work at regular jobs for a living—a reality that forces them to live a layer closer to the struggles that many Americans now face.

Interestingly, almost every one of these candidates has refused corporate PAC money. That commitment makes funding a race extremely challenging, especially given today’s hyper-inflated campaign costs, but it also comes with a moral pay-off: You can speak candidly, and fight for the people you come from. That’s what each one of these candidates vows to do.

Examples include teachers (like Lauren Jewett in Louisiana, and Randy Villegas in California); firefighters (like Sam Forstag, a young wildlands firefighter in Montana, and Bob Brooks, a firefighter and union leader in Pennsylvania); farmers (like Jamie Ager in western North Carolina); veterans (like Joanna Mendoza in Arizona and Dan Osborn, a mechanic in Nebraska); laborers (like Brian Poindexter, an ironworker in Ohio); dozens working in the healthcare industry (like Kimberly Hardy, a social worker and college professor in North Carolina); and labor organizers and activists in a variety of industries.1

The most high-profile candidates in this group have been Graham Platner, the oyster farmer running for the U.S. Senate in Maine; and James Talarico, the teacher and seminarian running to be a U.S. senator in Texas. On one level, these two candidates could not be more different—Talarico is clean-cut, calm, and kind, almost soothing; Platner is rough and feisty, perpetually stubbled, and a little impulsive. But they’re both being written and talked about as candidates that could open up new political frontiers, similar to how the media framed Zohran Momdani’s mayoral candidacy in NYC.2 Platner and Talarico also share the same general vision when it comes to their aims, and their enemies.

“The biggest divide in our country,” Talarico says in speech after speech, “is not left versus right. It’s top versus bottom.” Platner’s version of the problem: “The system isn’t broken. It’s functioning exactly as is intended... That money went somewhere, and it didn’t go to you. Working-class people in this country feel like they’re not being represented.” We reverse this trend, Platner argues, by “sending up fighters from the working class who are willing to fight for the working class.”

This is great stuff to sell on the stump, but exactly what changes would politicians in this mold fight for once in office? There’s good news here, too: plans are just now starting to circulate, full of tangible initiatives and groundbreaking legislative proposals that could, finally, start to level America’s economic playing field. Some would give working families a tax break; others would alleviate the costs of housing, school, and health and child care. One aims for a complete package, including a long overdue raise of the minimum wage, reviving support for innovation and research, and new rules on our financial system so that corporate profits are shared by all.3

How do we pay for all these fixes? This question is, of course, eternal. One could even say that the challenge of finding money for new initiatives, of any ideology, is the political world’s beating but forever ailing heart. Yet a cure is readily at hand. The strange upside of the economy’s steady tilt toward the rich over the last 50 years is that it created a stockpile of $79 trillion that is just waiting to be tapped. This is the amount of wealth that has been moved—since 1975, solely through changes in the tax code—from the bottom 90 percent of American earners to the top 1 percent.

These funds aren’t, of course, sitting in the U.S. Treasury; they’re spread throughout myriad corporate profits, and in the top 1 percent’s bank accounts (many of which are now offshore, and safe from taxation). No one is going to return this money without a fight, even though it was gained through what was essentially wage theft, designed and facilitated by our own government.

The fairest way to return these funds is to reform the tax system. That begins with inching up tax rates, for both corporations and the wealthy, until they approach what they were when nationwide prosperity was its height, which was in the 1950s and 1960s. (That’s when rates were 53 percent for corporate taxes, and 87 percent for personal income–double what they are today.) But the real money isn’t in higher rates; it’s in clamping down on the numerous loopholes and financial manipulations that have been stuffed into the tax code in recent decades. These tricks have allowed the ultra-wealthy to escape paying taxes almost entirely, no matter what the rate is.

Getting tax revenue from the moneyed class is, of course, never easy. But as candidates try to ride voter outrage about today’s affordability crisis, maybe they can find a model, and some hope, in Ralph Yarborough’s story. Before aiming for national office, Yarborough ran for governor in Texas three times, and lost each time. After finally being elected to the U.S. Senate, in 1956, Yarborough kept on winning for years–propelled, at least in part, by his populist call for sharing the jam. Soon known in Texas as “the People’s Senator,” Yarborough helped pass some of the 20th century’s most important legislation on issues of equality.

Putting the jam on the lower shelf, it turns out, is pretty good politics.

See you next month,

Publisher & Editor-in-Chief, Craftsmanship Magazine

In this week’s featured story, Julia Scheeres traces the history of the espadrille from its origins in Catalonia to the runways of haute couture. Along the way, she introduces us to the artisans of La Manual Alpargatera—the oldest surviving espadrille workshop in Barcelona.

We hope you’ll enjoy reading “The Espadrille: Spain’s Beloved, Timeless Shoe,” by Julia Scheeres.

While we are happy to offer this story to everyone for free, we’ll include a gentle reminder here that your paid subscriptions help us continue producing thoughtful, original articles like this one, and to continue paying our contributors fair market rates. So if you haven’t done so already, please consider supporting our work with a paid subscription.

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We always welcome your thoughts and suggestions, which you can offer in a comment, by tagging us in Substack Notes, or via email. Thank you for reading and sharing our stories, for supporting our work with a paid subscription if you can, and for being such a loyal part of the Craftsmanship community.

Sincerely,

Todd Oppenheimer
Publisher & Editor-in-Chief, Craftsmanship Magazine

The Espadrille: Spain’s Beloved, Timeless Shoe

by Julia Scheeres

Espadrilles, the rope-soled shoes that telegraph carefree summer vibes, have decidedly un-leisurely roots. Their origin is in Catalonia, in northern Spain, where farmers long prized them for their lightness and breathability in hot fields—and because they were so cheap.

But while the humble shoe has leapt over sartorial and international boundaries to become a global icon, the proud Spanish artisans who stitch canvas to jute are an endangered breed.

“The Catalan word for ‘espadrille’ is espardenye, which comes from esparto grass—the grass originally used to make the sole,” says Jordi Molinos, the master shoemaker at La Manual Alpargatera, Barcelona’s oldest espadrille shop. “English-speakers bastardized espardenye into ‘espadrille.’” (The Spanish word for “espadrille” is alpargata.)

La Manual Alpargatera opened for business at 7 d’Avinyó Street, in Barcelona’s Gothic Quarter, in 1940. In the years since, it has accrued an eclectic fanbase, with customers who have included Salvador Dali, Pope John Paul II, and the actress Penélope Cruz. The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York acquired a pair of La Manual’s espadrilles in 1955 for its costume collection. Spanish novelist Carlos Ruiz Zafon namechecks the store in his 2016 international bestseller, “The Labyrinth of Spirits.”

Molinos, a no-nonsense Barcelona native, walked into La Manual to apply for a job as an 18-year-old—25 years ago—and never left. He and his co-worker Nargis Kausar, a nine-year veteran of the shop, proudly handstitch every pair of espadrilles La Manual sells.

The showroom today looks pretty much the same as it did eight decades ago. The same long wooden bench curves around the front, for customers to try on shoes beneath floor-to-ceiling shelves of rainbow-colored espadrilles. The same giant oak table dominates the back workshop, covered in ribbons and bolts of fabric.

“Espadrilles were born from necessity,” Molinos says, speaking Spanish with a heavy Catalan accent. “Humans needed to protect their feet from sharp objects and used whatever materials they had on hand—in this case, grass.”

He points to an enlarged photo on the wall of ancient flip-flops, made of esparto grass. Scientists discovered the shoes in an Andalusian cave in 2023, and estimate that they’re more than 6,000 years old—the oldest shoes found in Europe. Yet the soles of the flip-flops were made from braided fibers, just like today’s espadrilles.

“The design worked,” says Molinos. “And it was passed down for thousands of years.”

Over the centuries, the evolution of the espadrille has woven its way through fashion history, zigging and zagging like the shoe’s signature ribbon laces.

The first written record of Spanish peasants wearing this footwear dates to the 1300s. At some point, people began stitching strips of old clothing to the braided soles, creating uppers, then adding ribbons that tied around the ankle, for a more secure and customizable fit. The shoe spread in popularity across Catalonia, Valencia, and the Balearic Islands. Each region tweaked the basic design to give it local flair, incorporating wider or different-colored ribbons, using a thicker sole, or adding a second crisscross at the ankle.

During the Carlist Wars, waged in the 19th century over succession to the Spanish throne, the song “Cálzame las Alpargatas” (“Put On My Espadrilles”) became the battle hymn of Carlos VII’s Catalan supporters. During the Spanish Civil War (1936–1939), the Republican Army, based in Catalonia, commandeered an espadrille factory to supply footwear for its fascist-fighting soldiers. Even today, the Catalan police force, the Mossos d’Esquadra, uses espadrilles tied with sky-blue ribbons as part of its dress uniform.

But it wasn’t until the mid-20th century that the Spanish slip-on gained international fame, spurred by artists and celebrities. Lauren Bacall sported a pair in the 1948 noir film “Key Largo,” while Grace Kelly and Audrey Hepburn posed for glamorous publicity shots wearing them. Dali, with his antennae mustache and proud Catalan heritage, rarely took off his regional pinxo espadrilles; he even paired their wide black ribbons that tie at the ankle with tuxedos. In the 1970s, French designer Yves Saint Laurent worked with a Catalan espadrille-maker to design a wedged-heel version, then sent models strutting down catwalks in it. In the 1980s, espadrilles reached peak sexy when actor Don Johnson paired them with linen suits on the hit TV show “Miami Vice.”

Today, luxury Italian brand Brunello Cucinelli sells its version—made of “délavé cotton canvas”—for $1,000 (though it doesn’t look that different than the $65 version sold by La Manual).

What has changed most over the years, Molinos says, is the material used to make the soles. Today, most espadrilles are made with jute, a softer and more flexible fiber than esparto.

La Manual imports the jute from Bangladesh—the world’s top grower—where farmers process the plant by soaking it in rivers to separate the fiber from the hard stalk. At the shop’s worktable, the braided jute is coiled around nails on a turntable-like device to create the ball and heel of the sole, then stitched transversally with an awl to bind the layers together. To make the shoes last longer, a layer of vulcanized rubber is fused to the soles via machine press.

Size-specific cardboard forms are then used to trace the shape of the uppers onto cotton, linen, silk, or even leather. Sitting at his worktable under bright domed lights, Molinos shows me how he sews the two parts of the shoe together. First he slips a protective leather sleeve, called a dedal, over his right index finger, then ties a round metal shield called a palmete over his palm. He pushes a thick, 3-inch needle through a piece of olive-green suede, using a blanket stitch to attach it to the jute sole. He works quickly, because the palmete allows him to pierce the tough material with little effort. Across the table from Molinos, Kausar uses the same tools to make traditional pinxo espadrilles (the kind favored by Dali).

As the artisans work, a tour group enters the shop and begins to take photos. La Manual Alpargatera has become a media magnet due to its legacy, and because it’s one of the few shops in Barcelona that still makes the shoes by hand. Barcelona is high on the list of the world’s “over-traveled places,” and mass tourism has transformed the city in recent years, with global food chains and souvenir emporiums squeezing out many mom-and-pop stores. Like other boutiques, La Manual is trying to adjust to the times by offering tourists “experiences,” such as sitting at a workbench and helping design their own shoes while sipping cava or noshing on chocolate con churros.

But the challenge of espadrilles that are mass-produced in Asia is an existential one. Today, Bangladesh isn’t just the world’s largest jute producer; it’s now the largest espadrille producer as well. As might be expected, quality hasn’t exactly followed.

Molinos says the shoes made there are cheaply constructed. The soles are glued on, he explains, which makes them less flexible and more prone to falling apart when they get wet. “They make espadrilles,” Molinos says of these inferior knockoffs, with a dismissive wave. “But they are not espadrille-makers.”

Nonetheless, the owner of another Barcelona espadrille shop recently attributed the rise of fast-fashion espadrilles and the presence of bargain-hunting tourists to his decision to close his family store this past summer, after 75 years of business. There is a heartbreaking irony in globalization killing off a small-time espadrille-maker in Catalonia—the shoes’ own birthplace.

Meanwhile, Molinos and Kausar sit at their workbench, day after day, carefully stitching shoes together at a rate of just three or four an hour.

Before I leave Barcelona, I buy my first pair of espadrilles. For whatever reason, I’d never thought to wear them before. But now, standing in their birthplace, the time seems right. I choose the most basic model: simple flats with a black canvas upper and white stitching.

Over the next few days, I start to see espadrilles everywhere: the heeled variety worn by shoppers along the upscale Paseo de Gràcia district; flats worn by locals performing the traditional Sardana dance in front of Barcelona Cathedral; pinxo espadrilles worn in old portraits at the History Museum of Catalonia.

The grassy foot-feel of the braided jute is surprisingly pleasant against my skin. It reminds me of walking barefoot over dry grass as a kid. And the airy canvas uppers keep my feet cool as I explore the stone oven that is Barcelona in August.

With each step, I think of the centuries of espadrille-wearers who have preceded me—toiling in fields, waging wars, creating surreal art, posing for movie stills on the French Riviera—all of us united by one humble shoe.

Craftsmanship Magazine focuses on master artisans and innovators whose work informs our quest: to create a world built to last. In addition to our Substack offerings, you’ll find a rich archive of stories, podcasts, photo essays, and documentary shorts on our free website—along with community resources like our Artisans’ Directory, our guide to U.S.-based craft & folk schools, and much more.

Dear Friends,

In this week’s new story, Las Vegas-based writer Oona Robertson invites us to look beyond the neon spectacle of The Strip, and into the real neighborhoods of the valley’s 3 million residents. There, you’ll meet Luis Avila Chavez, a welder and metalworker who is proudly carrying on the family trade. And when he’s not too busy building the doors and gates that safeguard Las Vegas’s private homes and communities, he uses the same tools and materials to create pieces that aren’t strictly practical, but reflect on the deeper rhythms (and vices) of the place he calls home.

We hope you’ll enjoy reading, “Forged in the Desert: The Metalwork of Luis Avila Chavez,” written by Oona Robertson.

We always welcome your thoughts and suggestions, which you can offer in a comment, as a Substack Note, or via email. Thank you for reading and sharing our stories, for supporting our work with a paid subscription if you can, and for being such a loyal part of the Craftsmanship community.

Sincerely,

Todd Oppenheimer
Publisher & Editor-in-Chief, Craftsmanship Magazine

Forged in the Desert: The Metalwork of Luis Avila Chavez

Story by Oona Robertson

In a quiet backyard on the east side of Las Vegas, Nevada, Luis Avila Chavez lays out the frame of a security door with steel tubing. After squaring the corners and MIG welding them into place, he adds a steel box that will hold the door handle, and uses calipers to measure out vertical bars with spacing he describes as “smaller than the head of a baby.”

His shop occupies a corner of the yard, its roof built around the trunk of a palm tree. As he works, a chicken pecks at the ground, the smell of caramelizing onions drifts through, and his shop dog jumps about, expertly avoiding anything sharp.

Read more

Dear Friends,

Craftsmanship survives not only in quiet workshops, but in the shared rituals of a community. In this colorful dispatch from northeastern France, Anna Richards steps inside a tradition that is literally larger than life: the centuries-old craft of building (and carrying) the region’s festival giants.

Master giant-maker Dorian Demarcq, who has arguably one of the world’s best job titles, combines simple materials like wicker, papier-mâché, and imagination to produce the towering figures that parade through town squares in northern France and Belgium each spring, linking medieval processions to modern civic pride. This delightful short piece reminds us that craft is about more than making beautiful, useful things; it’s also about sustaining the rituals and collective history that hold a culture together.

We hope you’ll enjoy reading “The Giant Makers of Flanders,” written by .

We always welcome your thoughts and suggestions, which you can offer in a comment, as a Substack Note, or via email. Thank you for reading and sharing our stories, for supporting our work with a paid subscription if you can, and for being such a loyal part of the Craftsmanship community.

Sincerely,

Todd Oppenheimer
Publisher & Editor-in-Chief, Craftsmanship Magazine

The Giant Makers of Flanders

Story by

I’m in Lille, France, and I’m standing inside a bear. The bear’s wicker frame is woven like a basket, and the not inconsiderable weight of the structure rests on wooden slats that lay across my shoulders. A pulley rope allows me to open the bear’s mouth as if it were growling—a little ‘extra’ added by its maker, Dorian Demarcq.

Unlike puppets, traditional giants from Flanders don’t have moving parts. Could I walk for miles and stand for hours at a time wearing this wicker-and-papier-mâché bear? Probably, but this is one of the smallest and lightest giants out there. The tallest are some 9 meters (30 feet) high and require a team of seven palanquin bearers; the dragons, which are the largest, can weigh up to 350 kilograms (772 pounds!).

Read more

Could employers in the U.S. afford to pay liveable wages?

In the murky waters where economics and politics mix, one question has long remained one of the cloudiest and most contested: Are higher minimum wages good or bad for the nation’s progress, and even for workers’ own prosperity?

Depending on your point of view—or, more likely, the side you live on—you might think the answer is basic common sense: Of course higher wages are good for people. Or, no, they hurt businesses, and therefore people’s job prospects. But this is one of those debates that is repeatedly conducted on the surface, where perceptions that seem obvious, but are wrong, rule the day.

To break down any delusions we might have about the minimum wage, it might help to begin with a review of the historical record.

Back in 1933, when a newly elected president named Franklin D. Roosevelt started talking about the nation’s first federal minimum wage, FDR conjured what seemed like a basic moral imperative. “No business which depends for existence on paying less than living wages to its workers has any right to continue in this country,” Roosevelt said. “By living wages,” he added, “I mean more than a bare subsistence level—I mean the wages of decent living.”1

Five years later, in 1938, Congress finally delivered—but only with crumbs, passing a minimum wage of 25 cents an hour (the equivalent of about $5/hour today). Yes, this was the Great Depression and prices were low. But still, just to cover basic daily costs in the late 1930s, you had to make more than twice that much—about 65 cents an hour, or just over $1,300 a year.

In the decades since the Depression, the federal government increased the minimum wage over and over, a total of 22 times. After each one of those raises, however, the minimum wage still fell below the cost of living at the time, usually by a wide margin.2 After 1968, the increases got so small that they amounted to a series of wage cuts—because inflation was rising more dramatically than the wage hikes. In real purchasing power, a worker today makes about $2 an hour less than someone did nearly 60 years ago.

This trend, as most of us know, hit bottom in 2009, when the federal government stopped raising the minimum wage at all. That has left this wage stuck, for the last 17 years, at $7.25, or $15,000 a year. That’s roughly a third of what an average American, with no children, has to spend just to survive from day to day. Add two children and the minimum wage covers less than a fifth of someone’s necessities.3

At this point, with a wage floor frozen at poverty wages for almost two decades, the country’s workforce has essentially been strip-mined. In 2024, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, approximately 82,000 people were paid $7.25 an hour, and 760,000 people worked for less than that. Another 40 million people, according to Oxfam America, work for less than $12 an hour. These statistics suggest that about half of all wage-earners, or a quarter of the entire workforce,4 isn’t earning enough to pay for more than 50 percent of their monthly necessities.

Given these conditions, it seems self-evident that workers would benefit from a law requiring higher pay. But every time an increase in the federal minimum wage is seriously addressed, it meets with opposition from the business community. (In fairness, the opposition is not across the board, but it’s always led by business’s most powerful voices: the lobbyists for the biggest players in each industry.) Their arguments are always the same: Higher wages will force employers to lay off workers, and raise prices to unaffordable levels; many businesses will even have to close. Some go so far as to oppose a minimum wage at any level, seeing it as a threat to America’s tradition of free enterprise.

As Ronald Reagan put it, in 1980, when he was a California governor running for president, “The minimum wage has caused more misery and unemployment since the Great Depression.” Nine years later, Penn. Congressman William Goodling chimed in with some specifics. “When the minimum wage goes up,” he said, “the very people we say we want to help—the young, the unskilled, the disadvantaged—are the first people to get laid off.” Decades later, the Cato Institute’s James A. Dorn elevated the critique, saying “Economic freedom, not minimum-wage socialism, is the key to reducing poverty.”5

None of these doomsday scenarios has ever panned out. And the captains of industry know it. The restaurant business is a prime example.

In the chart below (from a National Employment Law Project report), we see a 2007 statement from Peter Kilgore, Senior Vice President of the National Restaurant Association, predicting disaster if the minimum wage were increased; then, five years later, crowing about restaurants’ profits—which are clearly laid out in the chart—and predicting more growth to come.

What’s particularly notable about this example is that Kilgore’s first prediction was made just before the 2008 recession hit—in other words, on the expectation, presumably, of normal business in the coming years. By 2012, as Kilgore’s second statement makes clear, the restaurant industry had been forced to cope with the economic downturn as well as the new, higher wage adopted three years earlier. Despite having to pay those higher wages, the nation’s restaurants saw more than $1 billion in sales growth in those three years.

This story has played out so often over the decades—in industry after industry, and in study after study—that minimum wage increases shouldn’t even have to be debated anymore. At this point, the record is both consistent and clear: Yes, some businesses have suffered from minimum wage increases, particularly those that were struggling to begin with, but these stories are always in the minority. Most businesses have prospered by paying higher wages, especially those that were relatively stable.6 And from all indications, plenty of other companies could afford to do the same.

You can also look at the minimum wage debate through state data, which might be even more telling. After years of waiting in vain for federal action on the minimum wage, 30 states raised minimum wages on their own. And virtually every state that has done so has seen increases in its measures of well-being, including its level of economic output.

While this looks like a promising movement, it’s carrying a lot of dead weight. In the 30 states that have taken action, the new minimum wages range from $8.75 in West Virginia to $14 in Hawaii (and $17 in Washington, D.C.). Yet in every case, the new wage still falls well short of that state’s cost of living. Using the same states as examples, those costs range from $26 an hour in West Virginia to nearly $70 an hour in Hawaii.

These and other states could certainly be more generous, and that would help. But we’d still end up with a patchwork economy, with labor costs varying from region to region. This skews supply and demand dynamics, where the government actually creates advantages for one state that its neighbors can’t enjoy.

There is a good alternative, however: a solid, nationwide wage floor—in other words, a minimum wage that finally covers basic costs of living. This wouldn’t entirely eliminate the patchwork, but it would at least lessen the mismatches. It would also create a national workforce that can afford to shop for more than the bare necessities. And that boosts the economy as a whole.

The good news is that this message is starting to rise to the surface. Almost every day, there’s more news about the “affordability crisis” faced by working-class Americans. And, as we have seen in recent special elections, this issue is shaping voter turnout.

Elected officials who are now in Washington might not fully understand this trend, but a growing number of their challengers do. As part of my work with The Patriotic Millionaires, an organization that advocates for a tax cut for wage-earning Americans (paid for with higher taxes on the ultra-wealthy), I get a chance to talk to these candidates all the time. And many seem committed to making life affordable for working Americans—arguing the case with a level of seriousness and intensity that we’ve not seen in decades.

This gives me great hope. In the coming months, I will introduce you to some of these up and coming world-changers, so that you might feel hopeful too.

See you next month,

Publisher & Editor-in-Chief, Craftsmanship Magazine

Dear Friends,

Thanks to the digital revolution of the 1990s, the art and craft of photography has evolved at the speed of light, just in a few decades. There was a time, as photographers from the pre-digital era will remember, when uncertainty was an expected part of the process: The darkroom was a place of discovery, and every image carried the weight of time, serendipity, and intention.

In today’s featured story, Laura Fraser takes us behind the scenes in a largely forgotten corner of the photographic world, where a few photographers are employing 19th-century techniques (and a level of patience) that modern technology has all but edited out. What emerges from this slow process is more than nostalgia. It’s the quietly radical idea that the imperfections and unique demands of these older methods create an important level of depth that’s absent from all our ubiquitous, AI-perfected digital images.

We hope you’ll enjoy reading “What Are iPhotos Missing?”, written by Laura Fraser. The featured photographs are by Russell Monk and Daniel Borris, except where noted.

This story is free and accessible to all on the main Craftsmanship website. We hope that you’ll enjoy it greatly—and share it widely.

We always welcome your thoughts and suggestions, which you can offer in a comment, by tagging us in a Substack Note, or via email. Thank you for reading and sharing our stories, for supporting our work with a paid subscription if you can, and for being such a loyal part of the Craftsmanship community.

Sincerely,

Todd Oppenheimer
Publisher & Editor-in-Chief, Craftsmanship Magazine

Preview our new photo essay:

What Are iPhotos Missing?

written by Laura Fraser, with photography by Russell Monk and Daniel Borris, et al

Three years ago, at the Torrente Galería in San Miguel de Allende, Mexico, I noticed a photograph with an unusually sharp but unearthly quality. The photo, of nothing more than a cactus field, had the light and atmosphere of a silvery, partial lunar eclipse.

In order to create this image, the gallery owner told me, the photographer had gone back to antique photography methods. These involved using a tent as a camera; he’d even given the tent a name—Saturno. Suddenly the photo, already prickling with mysterious energy, took on another dimension.

I immediately bought the piece, and every time I look at it, I feel as if I’m wandering in an ancient, cactus-studded dream. After walking into that dream over and over, I decided last year to visit the photographer, a Spanish expat named Tomás Casademunt, who lives in Cuernavaca, a mid-sized mountain town just south of Mexico City.

Instant Gratification vs. Precision

To make sure I understood Casademunt’s work, and that I asked the right questions, I took along two veteran photographers, Daniel Borris and Russell Monk. Like me, they live part-time in Mexico, and both had tinkered themselves with antique photography. Both had also spent their careers exploring exotic places (via helicopter, pickup truck, tuk-tuk, or first-class flights) to shoot celebrities, shamans, refugees, guerrillas, and musicians for national publications ranging from Rolling Stone to The New York Times.

In those days, given the constraints of celluloid film, pros like Borris and Monk (who often work together) would leave their shoots not knowing whether their work had been brilliant or they’d blown the assignment. As wild as their adventures were, both photographers said their greatest excitement often was getting home and waiting to see how their images emerged in the darkroom.

Continue reading…

Although we are proud to be able to offer this story for free, your paid subscriptions help us continue to develop and publish unique works like this one, and continue to pay our contributors fair market rates, at a time when independent journalism is both under threat, and more important than ever. If you haven’t already done so, please consider upgrading to a paid subscription to support our work.

Subscribe now

Continue to our main website to enjoy the full version of this story at no charge.

ICYMI…

Craftsmanship Magazine focuses on master artisans and innovators whose work informs our quest: to create a world built to last. In addition to our Substack offerings, you’ll find a rich archive of stories, podcasts, photo essays, and documentary shorts on our website—along with community resources like our Artisans’ Directory, our guide to U.S.-based craft & folk schools, and much more.

The Experiment That Endures: Haystack at 75

On summer evenings in Deer Isle, Maine, the studios empty slowly at Haystack Mountain School of Crafts. Metal filings are swept from a workbench. A kiln ticks as it cools. People drift down wooden walkways toward the glinting Atlantic, still discussing the day’s work. What might a warmer colorway look like? How would a different glaze behave? What new ideas will tomorrow bring?

This spirit of experimentation has guided Haystack since its founding 75 years ago. Established in 1950, the School began with a simple premise: Invite artists and makers from different disciplines to gather for intensive studio sessions in a remote refuge, and see what might emerge from the exchange of ideas, materials, and techniques.

Named for its first location, near Haystack Mountain in Montville, Maine, the School moved to its permanent coastal campus in 1961. Over time, the striking seaside setting has become closely associated with the immersive Haystack experience, drawing artists from around the world to the creative sanctuary it offers.

Yet, Haystack’s influence has always extended beyond Deer Isle. For decades, its participants have been carrying ideas from the island back to their own studios, classrooms, and communities, weaving Haystack’s ethos into the larger story of American craft. In recognition of that legacy—and the community that sustains it—the School is launching a Distinguished Speaker Series as part of its 75th anniversary celebration.

“As Haystack celebrates this milestone, we honor the singular and resilient community that keeps us moving forward,” says Executive Director Perry Price. “From our iconic campus to the staff, participants, and faculty who reinvent the School each season, this Speaker Series will highlight those connections and strengthen our commitment to visionary craft education, both on Deer Isle and across the country.”

In partnership with craft institutions nationwide, the series will feature former faculty, staff, and participants in conversation with the broader craft community. Starting in April, ceramic artist Roberto Lugo will deliver his lecture “Village Potter” at The Clay Studio in Philadelphia, ahead of his upcoming exhibition. And Corey Pemberton will present “For the Love of Humanity” at the Museum of Arts and Design in New York, reflecting on the connections between glassmaking, painting, and community-centered nonprofit work.

The series continues on Haystack’s campus this summer, with lectures by sculptor Syd Carpenter; woodworker and RISD President Emerita Rosanne Somerson; and poet Stuart Kestenbaum, Maine’s former poet laureate and Haystack’s director for 27 years, until 2015.

Carpenter, who has been part of the Haystack community for more than two decades, is looking forward to returning.

“I’ve always appreciated how expansive Haystack is in its reach,” Carpenter says. “Not only in inviting multiple practices together—pottery, metalworking, weaving—but in welcoming the many ways we as artists express ourselves. It’s a supportive environment in a stunning location, surrounded by like-minded people. When you’re there, you’re enhanced.”

From the beginning, Haystack has encouraged artists to test ideas in the studio, push materials beyond familiar limits, and welcome unexpected outcomes as discoveries. That openness to experimentation remains central to the School’s character. Seventy-five years after its founding, Haystack continues as it began: a place where makers gather to explore what craft might become next.

ICYMI…

Craftsmanship Magazine focuses on master artisans and innovators whose work informs our quest: to create a world built to last. In addition to our Substack offerings, you’ll find a rich archive of stories, podcasts, photo essays, and documentary shorts on our free website—along with community resources like our Artisans’ Directory, our guide to U.S.-based craft & folk schools, and much more.

Dear Friends,

Diatoms, a group of single-celled, photosynthetic algae, live in almost any body of outdoor water, fresh or marine. Every parking lot puddle and public water fountain contains multitudes; the oceans teem with them, silently generating 20 to 50 percent of the Earth's oxygen and forming the base of critical aquatic food webs. Invisible to the human eye, it would not occur to most people to look for diatoms, let alone make something with them.

Nate Dube is not most people. To Nate’s practiced eye (aided by a powerful field microscope), a drop of water is a cosmos of these tiny, miraculously varied life forms, which will become the primary components of a fascinating and demanding craft.

Today’s featured story is about the patient accumulation of knowledge and toolmaking (and the slow, obsessive choreography) that turns these unseen organisms into objects of beauty and precision. It’s also a story about depth as discipline, and how art can reconfigure a whole life, reminding us that craftsmanship holds fast in places we might least expect.

This story is free and accessible to all on the main Craftsmanship website. We hope that you’ll enjoy it greatly—and share it widely.

Without further ado, we proudly present “Biology’s Unseen Craft,” written by Chris Colin and photographed by Peter Belanger (with additional images provided by Nate Dube).

We always welcome your thoughts and suggestions, which you can offer in a comment, by tagging us in a Substack Note, or via email. Thank you for reading and sharing our stories, for supporting our work with a paid subscription if you can, and for being such a loyal part of the Craftsmanship community.

Sincerely,

Todd Oppenheimer
Publisher & Editor-in-Chief, Craftsmanship Magazine

Preview our latest feature story…

Biology’s Unseen Craft

written by Chris Colin; photographed by Peter Belanger (except where noted)

Go ahead and picture a Coscinodiscus.

Picture this microscopic phytoplankton bobbing aimlessly, adrift in the frigid churn of the Pacific. Left a ways. Right a ways. That’s pretty much all you can picture; the narrative arc of this organism is limited. Drift a while, die, FIN.

Except when Nate Dube comes around.

It was a cold summer day and I’d driven to the northwest corner of San Francisco. Dube, 31, greeted me at the head of a shady trail. We ambled through eucalyptus, discussing the order of operations, until we saw sand.

Mile Rock Beach occupies a misty sliver west of the Golden Gate Bridge, where the unruly Pacific meets the more-or-less ruly bay. Gulls glided above, shrieking mindlessly. A tow-headed boy kicked at a piece of driftwood, a family spread a blanket, a woman covered her phone to call her labradoodle. A few hundred yards offshore sat a squat and battered old lighthouse, a lonesome outpost erected after the SS City of Rio de Janeiro ran into hidden rocks and sank here in 1901. This was all the visible world, soon to appear garishly large, borderline crude.

We found a secluded spot near the surf. Dube—black tactical pants, black hat, black boots, black hair—began extracting tools from a stuffed backpack: a plastic tub, a toothbrush, a tripod, some plastic canisters, a bit of machinery that looked to me like a Discman but was a mobile microscope.

“And you’re sure we’ll find some here?” I asked.

“They’re pretty much everywhere—freshwater, saltwater, even public fountains,” Dube replied. “So my approach is just go somewhere fun. A nice beach is better than a parking lot puddle.”

With that, Dube began hopping from rock to rock, out to where the surf was washing in. Into the water went a plastic canister, out it came with what I previously would’ve called water. In fact, it was teeming with the unseen ingredients of a nearly extinguished craft. For the zillionth time in my life, and for the first time knowingly, I beheld diatoms.

Found in oceans, lakes, rivers, puddles and even damp soil, diatoms are a type of almost invisible marine algae. We live in their unacknowledged debt. Scientists study them not only to understand ecosystems but also to track climate change. Diatoms produce half the world’s oxygen, rivaling the output of all the planet’s rainforests combined, and serve as a foundational food source for countless marine creatures. When diatoms die, their remains sink down to the seafloor, forming thick layers of sediment that persist for eons, an eternal graveyard.

Continue reading…

Although we are proud to be able to offer this story for free, your paid subscriptions help us continue to develop and publish unique works like this one, and continue to pay our contributors fair market rates, at a time when independent journalism is both under threat and more important than ever.

If you haven’t already done so, please consider upgrading to a paid subscription to support our work.

Subscribe now

Continue to our main website to enjoy the full version of this story at no charge.

Craftsmanship Magazine focuses on master artisans and innovators whose work informs our quest: to create a world built to last. In addition to our Substack offerings, you’ll find a rich archive of stories, podcasts, photo essays, and documentary shorts on our website—along with community resources like our Artisans’ Directory, our guide to U.S.-based craft & folk schools, and much more.

Dear Friends,

Brass, a material once prized across the Islamic world for its beauty and endurance, fell victim to industrial sameness. Now, against the tsunami of mass production, a handful of artisans are reviving the traditional designs and old techniques.

Today’s new story reminds us why craft matters: not simply for the object it yields, but for the lineage of skill it preserves. Against a rising tide of material costs and cheap knockoffs, artisanal work upholds the highest standards of quality, tradition, and the cultures that gave birth to them. The work of artisans like Noha El Qahwagy is less nostalgia than stewardship, a deliberate insistence that some things are worth making slowly.

We hope you’ll enjoy reading “Cairo’s New Brass Revivalists,” written by .

We always welcome your thoughts and suggestions, which you can offer in a comment, as a Substack Note, or via email. Thank you for reading and sharing our stories, for supporting our work with a paid subscription if you can, and for being such a loyal part of the Craftsmanship community.

Sincerely,

Todd Oppenheimer
Publisher & Editor-in-Chief, Craftsmanship Magazine

Cairo’s New Brass Revivalists

Story by

In the Islamic world, brasswork has been prized for generation upon generation. As early as the 11th century, Syrian metalsmiths favored this malleable, copper‑zinc alloy for its versatility—and because “it lasts,” says Emine Fetvaci, a professor of Islamic and Asian Art at Boston College.

By the 13th century, Cairo (along with Mosul and Damascus) had become a hub for metalwork, and the region’s wealthy filled their homes with brass objects, often inlaid with silver and gold. Fine brasswork went into everything from jewelry and housewares to the ornate basins used for ritual washing before prayers.

Read more

Dear Friends,

Today’s featured article is the final installment of a three-part “mini series” by master craftsman and teacher Gary Rogowski, which we’re now making available to our entire audience, free or paid. In this essay, he contemplates one of woodworking’s most seductive and self-defeating illusions: perfection.

This story also holds a personal touch for me. At the end, you’ll find a photo of Gary’s gorgeous gate-leg dining table, made in his signature style, which he calls “Oriental Deco.” Gary built this very table for me 35 years ago; in fact, that project is how he and I first met. The table still graces my dining room today—perfectly, in my opinion.

While we are happy to be able to offer this story to everyone for free, we’ll include a gentle reminder here that your paid subscriptions help us continue producing thoughtful, original articles like this one, and to continue paying our contributors fair market rates. So if you haven’t done so already, please consider supporting our work with a paid subscription.

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We hope you’ll enjoy “Woodworking vs. Perfection,” by . (And in case you missed the earlier installments in this series, you can find part 1 and part 2 in our free Archives.)

We always welcome your thoughts and suggestions, which you can offer in a comment, by tagging us in a Substack Note, or via email. Thank you for reading and sharing our stories, and for being such a loyal part of the Craftsmanship community.

Sincerely,

Todd Oppenheimer
Publisher & Editor-in-Chief, Craftsmanship Magazine

Woodworking vs. Perfection

Story by

It occurs to me that those of us who take on the challenge of working with wood tend to believe in the idea of striving for perfection. This, on the face of it, is utter nonsense.

Wood has a mind and a beauty of its own that is unmatched by the coldness of metal or the icy touch of stone. It has beauty because it is filled with contrast, marbled in color, producing chatoyant brilliance in its polished effects. This makes wood appealing to the eye, soothing to the touch, and completely annoying as a material for the craft worker.

Wood will also split from the blow of a chisel at the most inopportune moment. A small and lovely wooden panel will warp before your very eyes as you get ready to insert it into a groove. A table top will produce a tiny, end-grain crack after the last coat of finish has been applied. All these events have happened to me, producing at first a complaint, then a groan, and finally a sigh. It is too frequent to get upset over and yet too regular to ignore. Wood is not perfect. Yet new workers still strive in a Sisyphean attempt to make perfect something that wants nothing but an organic and varied existence.

Wood, after all, is hygroscopic. It absorbs and loses water throughout its life on the way to the compost heap. It is the true genesis of that phrase: ashes to ashes. Yet this material is elemental and no less important for our existence than water or earth or air. Without trees, civilization does not begin and then does not thrive. It handles our tools, builds us shelter, and keeps us warm. Our world is dependent on it still for our survival, and not just for building materials but for financial exchange, forest canopy cover, and mental health in cities, to name just a few of its powers. What is not to love about this material?

The answer is, wood moves, and this is my first rule of woodworking. Ignore it if you like, but at your peril. I have my first cabinet in my studio still, slowly pulling itself apart because I had an ignorant eye for wood movement when I first started. I didn’t know that I couldn’t fix a solid pine top and bottom to frame and panel sides. The frames move very little in their dimension, and their plywood panels stay relatively stable, but the solid wooden panels expand and contract over the seasons. After 40 years of existence, the cabinet may survive but it is trying to slowly shrink itself apart. I didn’t know then what I know now.

It is the artist’s job to pay attention to wood’s vagaries. Do one’s best, and try to let go of perfection, for on that path lunacy lies in wait. Embrace wood’s changes and faults like a family member who one loves wholeheartedly but at the same time drives you wild. Strive for perfection, yes, but do not fly too high in one’s pursuit of it. Perfection is a goal of great worth and value, but only with the understanding that, like the next mountaintop, it can never be reached.

ICYMI…