The Maker's Table

There's a small reed basket on my shelf. It's not perfect — the weave is uneven in places, and the rim required some improvisation because the instructions ran out before the basket did. I made it last summer with a friend, on one of the afternoons I used to host that I called Crafternoons. We bought a kit, spread everything out on the table, and quickly realized the instructions were more aspirational than instructional. We had to set aside our perfectionist tendencies, read the materials with our hands instead, and figure out the ending ourselves.

I am unreasonably proud of that basket.

The reason lives a few decades back. My grandparents used to attend summer workshops — a week or two away, traveling together, attending lectures and making things with their hands. One year they came home with willow baskets. I was a kid, and I stood there looking at those baskets thinking they were among the most beautiful things I'd ever seen. Not just because they were well made — though they were — but because someone I loved had made them. My grandfather was like that. He'd get an idea and just go for it. Stained glass. Rosemaling on old cast iron skillets. Watercolor, oil painting. He was a printer by trade, and I think he saw making things as continuous — the press or the brush, it was all the same impulse. I still have two of those willow baskets.

So when I bought the reed kits last summer, I knew what I was reaching for. The basket I made isn't the baskets they made. But it's connected to them, and to that kid who stood in the doorway thinking someday, with a lot of time and work.

I've been making things my whole life, in one form or another.

Calligraphy, which led me to a papermaking course in college — hand papermaking, paper marbling, simple bookbinding. Needlework and embroidery. Beading, jewelry making. Cooking, which has always been my most consistent creative outlet and the one where I feel most fluent. I tried knitting enough times to accept the truth: I am not relaxed enough as a human being to keep my stitches relaxed. Crocheting in grade school. Sewing in middle school. Needle felting (don't forget the Bactine and Band-Aids!). And on slower afternoons, the quiet satisfaction of a good coloring book, which I will defend without apology.

Ahead of me: leatherworking. Metalworking for jewelry. Woodblock printing. Wood carving. Pottery. Watercolor. More papermaking. And another attempt at crochet, because I'm not ready to concede that one yet.

What I notice, looking at that list, is that it's not a résumé. It's a record of curiosity. Some things I got good at. Some I tried once and moved on. Some I'll circle back to. The point was never mastery — it was the reaching.

Here's what I've come to believe about people who make things: they are comfortable, at some level, with being seen.

Making something and showing it to another person is an act of vulnerability. It's small-v vulnerable, usually — nobody's confessing their deepest fears over a basket kit — but it's real. You made a thing. It might be imperfect. You're showing it anyway. That requires a specific kind of courage, and I think it's the same courage that community demands.

To live in genuine proximity with other people — not just share a wall, but actually be with them — you have to be willing to let them see you trying. Trying and not quite getting it right. Trying again. Being a beginner. Making something that doesn't turn out the way you imagined and putting it on the shelf anyway because it's yours and it's real and it connects to something that matters.

The women I'm looking for in True North are women who have that in them. Not necessarily women who make things with their hands — though I suspect there will be a lot of us. But women who understand that curiosity is a practice, that failure is part of the work, and that there is something worth protecting in the willingness to try.

There's a particular pleasure I've found in making things alongside someone else. Not teaching, not performing — just two people with materials in front of them, figuring it out. The afternoon with my friend and the basket kits was like that. The instructions failed us and we had to improvise, and somewhere in the improvising we stopped worrying about whether we were doing it right and started just doing it. The baskets we ended up with were ours in a way that following perfect instructions would never have produced.

My grandfather didn't wait until he knew how. He just got an idea and went for it. That's a lesson I've only recently had the courage to practice myself — and I find that it fills my heart and rewards my brain in ways I don't want to stop. Not only do I not want to stop for myself. I want to find more opportunities to share that experience, and I want to find the women who crave creativity and community in the same breath.

Which is why True North will have a studio.

Not right away, maybe. But it's in the vision from the beginning — a dedicated maker space with real tables, real storage, and the accumulated equipment of women who have been collecting supplies and tools for decades and finally have somewhere to put them. There would be a wet area for the watery and messy work: papermaking, pottery, anything that needs a drain and doesn't apologize for it. A fabric arts corner. A space for wood and metal work. And a central worktable — the gathering point, the place where you sit down next to someone and just start.

When we use it is up to us. Maybe there's a standing weekly or monthly time. Maybe it's more organic than that — someone gets an itch, sends a group text, and whoever shows up, shows up. Maybe we host small art shows or craft sales — open to the town nearby, the one where we grocery shop and grab coffee and show up as neighbors. Maybe we make videos, our lessons learned and hard-won techniques shared with whoever wants to pull up a chair. And when we've made more than our tiny houses can hold — which will happen fast, because tiny house math is ruthless — maybe we sell through a True North shop, and what we make together funds more of what we're building together.

That's the idea, anyway. A table with materials on it, and women willing to sit down.

Someday one of my True North tribeswomen will walk into my tiny house and see it on the shelf. "Is that the basket?" Yes. That's the basket.

Photo by ZACHARY STAINES on Unsplash