Here’s the next level, folks. You might be eating local and shopping local, but are you wearing local? The garments we don often come from very faraway places and seem to just appear out of nowhere; an oft-reported statistic from the American Apparel & Footwear Association states that 97 percent of the clothes sold in […]
The eight-harness loom that Andrea Korotky bought in mid-1970s New York is still a daily companion, standing in the corner of her Charlottesville studio. When the weaver sits down to the loom—which is roughly the size of an upright piano—her more than 40 years of experience are obvious in the fluidity and confidence of her […]
Stepping into Joshua Farnsworth’s Wood and Shop schoolhouse is like wrenching open a time capsule. Traditional woodworking instruments, including saws and handheld shaving tools, dangle from pegs and hug the surrounding white walls. Walking among the homemade workbenches and rustling up a rush of sawdust, you slip back a few centuries. Farnsworth began to home […]
Chris Conklin grew up in a family that liked to figure things out. He learned at an early age how to restore old cars and farmhouses, and he loved to make things from scratch. So when his photographer wife, Jen Fariello, came home one day from a photo shoot in Ivy and asked him to […]
There’s just something about leather: It’s at once rugged and polished. And always cool. Plus, it’s a material that’s easy to source in our area, thanks to local saddle shops and nearby tanneries. Here are three hand-crafters making your next favorite accessory. Stamp of approval Siberia native Daniel Foytik became fascinated with leather as a […]
One night when artist Laurel Smith was sleeping, her mind projected her future onto the backs of her eyes. She dreamt up a whirring dremel tool, a jewelry-making instrument then somewhat unfamiliar to her, and awoke with a newfound sense of purpose. A D.C.-based event planner in her 20s at the time, Smith sensed she […]
What’s not to love about a handmade piece of jewelry? Here are five local gems worth wearing. Direct from nature As a kid, Rebecca Perea-Kane would play with Fimo clay, sculpting tiny animals with her sister (“we must have made hundreds of them,” she says). No surprise, then, that her line of delicate jewelry celebrates […]
Maybe our eyes are bigger than our stomachs, but these five cooks, bakers, and concocters make an extra helping hard to resist. It’s all gravy No one knows the phrase “food is an international language” more than Yvonne Cunningham. The sauce-maker developed the recipe for her “Italian gravy” (so-called because it’s so thick) while living in […]
In a part of the Shenandoah Valley where history is prized especially deeply, just outside the village of Brownsburg, a relocated log cabin called Briar Hill is full of a special sense of the past. It embodies its own history dating back to the turn of the 18th century, when it was originally built on […]
The house, dating all the way back to 1742, didn’t need much work. But the five-acre property surrounding it did. When Sarah Van Steenburg bought a historic house near Barboursville in 2015, she appreciated the renovation work already completed on the structure, and she was attracted to what she calls the “money shot”—the view from […]