Tucked into a corner on the second floor of the Fort Andross Mill in Brunswick, Catherine Fisher’s light-filled studio is an airy, contemplative oasis. With large excerpts of text hung on the walls, a dressing screen arranged behind a pleasant yellow couch, and racks of garments made from linen, hemp, and organic cotton carefully organized throughout, the converted industrial space (reminiscent of New York City artist lofts) is the sort of place where one might expect a poet-cum-clothing maker to set up shop. “I don’t think of myself so much as a fashion designer,” says Fisher, who launched her eponymous business and clothing line in October of 2021. “I don’t feel it has so much to do with fashion as it does with a creative project that wants to connect with others through text and textile.” Indeed, each piece of clothing Fisher creates starts out as a poem, which is then translated into a carefully constructed garment meant to be “completed” by whoever wears it.

Fisher guides me through the studio, where she keeps a purposely small inventory of her clothing line to prevent unnecessary waste. A rack of samples holds versions of the 12 garments currently in Fisher’s repertoire, and she tells me about the poem behind each one. The composition that kicked off her entire collection is called “Half-Light,” which draws on shadow imagery to comment on how humans impact each other’s lives in both obvious and subtle ways. The top inspired by the poem reflects this sentiment with a semi-hidden panel in the back that depicts two overlapping silhouettes hand-painted by Fisher. Near the start of her poetry career, Fisher attended an event in Brooklyn, New York, called Universe In Verse, a yearly evening of poetry with over 1,000 people. In planning out the logistics of the trip, inspiration struck. “I just had this vision of a blouse,” she says, “that would be split up the back with a sort of curtain, and down the spine would be this sexy poem printed there. And, in my self- romanticization, I imagined that somebody would ask me about it, and then we would have a conversation, and I would have an interesting connection in the city.” Much like her poems taking on physical form through garments, when she returned from the trip, the idea for Catherine Fisher Clothing began to materialize.

Fisher has had numerous careers, including innkeeper, acupressurist, and personal historian, and considers herself to be a serial reinventor. The common elements in all these occupations, she says, were storytelling and connection. Her passion for sharing stories and forming bonds with others brought Fisher into the creative community of Portland, where for many years she was an eager and engaged audience member. When she was in her 40s, she met her mentor, Maine artist Bessie Moulton, who started pulling her into different projects and art shows. Fisher has harbored a great love of poetry from the time she was young, but as a self-described “very shy person,” she didn’t have the confidence to pursue it. When she turned 50, however, Fisher took a leap of faith and enrolled in a low-residency MFA program at Vermont College of Fine Arts in Montpelier to pursue her master’s degree in poetry.

When it comes to translating her poems into physical items of clothing, the materials that Fisher chooses are of the utmost importance. In traditional clothing design, the fabric used in a garment is dictated by its function (a stiffer material will be used for an article of work clothing like overalls, while a soft batting might be used in a jacket intended for cold-weather use). For Fisher, this principle is enhanced; the chosen material also reflects the meaning of the poem that the garment derives from. If the poem is about flight or the feeling of weightlessness, for example, the garment will be made from a light, airy material. Fisher also frequently incorporates specific items into each piece to get to the essence of the poem, such as the hand-painted panel in the Junco top, which depicts tiny bird tracks; the cloth book that comes in the pocket of the In Libris tunic; and the custom-made paintbrush that accompanies the Brush duster jacket.

In addition to creating wearable pieces of art, Fisher’s top priorities for her business are to be as sustainable and ethical as possible while also focusing on giving back. The fabrics and materials that she chooses, such as linen from a 100-year-old Irish company called Baird McNutt and buttons made from corozo nuts, are sustainably sourced and produced. Fisher sends her mock-ups in to be professionally sewn and produced as close to home as possible, working with a family-run company in Scarborough called Golden Thread Designs. Plus, a portion of each purchase goes to supporting both international and local nonprofits that align with the nature of the item (for example, a portion of proceeds from the Junco top support the American Bird Conservancy and the Maine Audubon Society).

When asked why she chooses to work in a state not known for a robust fashion industry, Fisher assures me the community and the level of support in Maine are unparalleled. As for future collections, she has a few new pieces in the works but doesn’t intend to produce a new line every season. Instead, she wants to plan collaborations with other Maine artists and hold events like fashion shows in her studio that will bring people together. “Poetry is an effort towards connection,” says Fisher. “I could write poems and put them in a book. Or I could make garments. But the fact that each piece of clothing I create is imbued with an idea or a question that I hope might resonate with whoever wears the garment makes a connection where there might not typically be one.”

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The post This Sustainable Clothing Collection Translates Poems into Physical Garments appeared first on The Maine Mag.

Why sea salt is not famous for its pyramidal crystals is a mystery. They are miraculous. Given the right conditions, halite grows outward in concentric squares to create hollow pyramids. This ecstatic expression of nature, called “hopper crystals” when other minerals make it and “flake salt” when it’s halite, is highly coveted by gourmands the world over. You don’t toss flake salt in pasta water. You don’t whip it into batter. The flake is for finishing a dish. It is the proverbial cherry on top, only less proverbial and more literal. It is the zing, the wow, the powerful and, yes, salty crunch of a perfect pyramid of sodium chloride.

Lauren Mendoza, co-owner of Slack Tide Sea Salt out of York, holds a handful of these geometric wonders in her open palm. “It does not get old,” she says, referring to the process of turning seawater collected just a few miles beyond her back door into flakes of salt. “Every time I make a batch, I zone out and stare at it, lovingly,” she says. “They dance around the surface of the brine until they’re heavy enough to drop, like really fine snow.”

Not every flake is a perfect pyramid, of course. A jar of Slack Tide’s finishing salt resembles crushed ice only flatter, each piece ranging from itty-bitty to half an inch. But dump it in your own palm and you’re bound to find a few intact hoppers.

Why don’t we see salt like this all the time? Though the pyramid shape is a natural expression of sea salt, it’ll only occur given very specific conditions. In other words: anyone can make flake salt, but very few can—and very few do—make flakes like this. And the process is hard to scale. “The texture is so important,” says Mendoza. “It does distinguish it from other salts. It’s a process that takes quite a bit longer and is more hands-on.”

Mendoza grew up in York; she knows its waters and has been harvesting seawater to turn into salt for years, but it was only in 2020 that she made it a business, launching Slack Tide with her aunt, Cathy Martin, and her best friend, Sarah Caldwell. “It is 100 percent women owned,” says Mendoza. “Our family helps, but it’s run by women.” Women make the decisions, and women oversee the process from start to finish.

It begins in a Carolina Skiff, “a workhorse of a boat,” motored downriver to the ocean when the tide is high and just before it goes slack—that “peaceful transition between the tides.” Collecting at high tide is key: Mendoza believes that’s when the water is cleanest. “You’re taking this raw product and concentrating it,” she says. “One gallon [of seawater] makes three, four ounces of salt. In my mind, if we’re getting the freshest seawater, that’s going to make the difference in quality.”

Disastrously, our oceans have become dumping grounds, so it pays to be careful. When collecting seawater, says Mendoza, “I like the idea of not being in the vicinity of 150 bathers covered in sunscreen, peeing.” And, knowing where their water has been is a way to stand by the product. Starting up around Nova Scotia, water is escorted southwest by the Western Maine Coastal Current and joined along the way by all the rivers that stripe the state, making a nutrient-rich stew off the coast of southern Maine. “Each region [of salt-producing ocean]is going to have its unique flavor profile,” says Mendoza. In the industry, the term for this is merroir— replacing the ter (earth) in the terroir with mer, for the sea. For an oyster or salt, the merroir is the taste of an origin story.

Production happens year-round. Hot weather is good for evaporation, but the deep cold offers brine rejection—when ice forms in the ocean, the salt is “rejected,” or pushed into the surrounding waters, concentrating its natural brine. “We are very much at the whim of Mother Nature,” says Mendoza. If there’s no sun, if the ocean’s choppy, if it rains too much, production slows.

In the skiff, seawater is pulled up using a hose connected to a small pump, at which point it gets its first rough filter (one of three) and is collected in 55-gallon drums. Back home, it moves from drums to a series of black plastic trays two, four, or six inches deep; “four inches deep is the sweet spot” in terms of speed-to-yield ratio, says Mendoza. The filtered seawater stays in the greenhouses on Mendoza’s property until it’s reached 80 percent evaporation and has become brine. To the untrained eye, brine could pass for sea salt, albeit wet and a bit soupy, but it can taste chalky or bitter because of the calcium and magnesium that has yet to be filtered. At this point brine is given a last nudge in electrically heated metal tubs. It’s during this step that the “magnesium kicks,” and the pyramidal flakes emerge. For Slack Tide’s line of seasoned salts (with names like Upta Camp, 207, and Bold Coast, a.k.a. Bloody Mary Sea Salt), the flakes will be mixed with ingredients like freshly grated lemon zest, dill, pepper, rosemary, kelp, or blueberry. They are available for purchase on the Slack Tide website, alongside an array of brand merch, like T-shirts with the words “Salty” or “Flaky” emblazoned across the front. The flakes can also be tasted at a handful of local restaurants, such as Regards in Portland and the recently opened Fish and Whistle in Biddeford, or purchased in shops such as Browne Trading Company in Portland, Trove in Searsport, Swallowfield in Northeast Harbor, and the Blue Barren Distillery in Camden.

Slack Tide’s salt was immediately well received, says Mendoza, and three seasons in, operations are scaling up. As of this writing, Slack Tide was about to build its fifth greenhouse with the hope of hitting six by the end of the year. But they want to “grow naturally, and not too fast.” It’s all about quality, not quantity.

This is part of an overall awareness and strategy that’s cooked into Slack Tide: an aim to do good for the earth too. Slack Tide is a member of 1% for the Planet, which helps businesses give to environmentalnonprofits,andbystayingsmallSlackTidecan continue making every batch entirely by hand.

Recently, the town of York granted Mendoza a commercial mooring license, traditionally reserved for fishing and lobstering. The mooring in York Harbor will make Slack Tide’s operations more efficient, eliminating the leg of the journey between Mendoza’s property, where the boat is typically docked, and the sea, but Mendoza also views this as an important development in the perception of aquaculture. “It’s the first step in adjusting verbiage to include other forms of sustainable practices of a working waterfront,” she says.

To say it’s a labor of love is to lean on cliche, but to call Slack Tide and its crew the salt of the earth is all too apt.

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When Hannah Martin was pregnant with her son, she was sensitive to fragrances and discovered that most candles gave her headaches. She had trouble finding simple, lightly scented candles at a reasonable price point, so she decided to try making her own.

At the time, Martin was crafting her own line of jewelry and selling it at a handful of local shops. She began selling candles under her brand Near and Native at a few of the stores. She expanded to more and more businesses, and eventually she stopped making jewelry and focused entirely on home fragrances.

As Near and Native’s number of retailers grew, so did its production needs. Martin had been making the candles in the basement of her Portland home, and in June 2020 she moved into a 600-square-foot studio in Westbrook’s Dana Warp Mill. By the beginning of 2021, Near and Native had outgrown its small space in the mill and moved into a larger unit with a showroom and an expansive production studio.

Before starting Near and Native, Martin worked in corporate retail. She did buying and product development for Urban Outfitters and later moved to San Francisco to help launch the Gap’s Piperlime brand. But after 12 years of working in a corporate environment, she was ready for a change. “It was a really good thing for us for years until it didn’t serve us any longer, and it was time to move on,” she says. Martin and her husband, who worked in tech in San Francisco, had friends and family in Maine and had visited the state over the years, including for their honeymoon, so they packed up and moved east.

After arriving in Portland in 2017, Martin had an interview at another corporate retail company. The interview went so poorly that it spurred her to work on Near and Native full time. “I had such a bad interview, and I’m so glad I did because it pushed me so far into doing my own thing. I was in tears in the parking lot. I was like, ‘What am I doing,’” Martin says. “It was just a big neon sign saying, ‘This door is getting slammed in your face, do not go in that direction again.’”

In Near and Native’s Westbrook studio, warm, woodsy scents fill the space and envelop you as you walk past a white wall displaying dozens of candles. The cavernous room opens to a row of tables, where candles are in different stages of production. Martin and her team of three full-time employees and two part-time workers prep the glass containers and wooden wicks, blend fragrances with coconut wax, fill the candles, and package them for distribution.

There’s a separate station for the company’s candle-refilling program, a service Martin has been offering since she started, to reduce the waste created by candles. Customers can pay to refill any vessel, including other company’s candles, for about half the price of a new candle. Some will even send in homemade pottery to be turned into candles. The company has done 7,000 candle refills in four years, including 3,300 refills last year alone.

Near and Native candles are now sold in more than 50 stores around the country, including at L.L.Bean and on the outdoor retailer’s website. Martin also collaborates with brands to create custom candles, ranging from national companies like Danner to local boutiques like Fitz and Bennett Home in Portland. She sometimes works with businesses to create scents as part of their brand identity. “Everybody’s getting off the internet and going back to real life, and scent is a really important part of making a place feel special, giving a sense of place when you’re walking into a store, a restaurant, a brewery,” Martin says. For Après, a hard seltzer and cider tasting room in Portland, she created a cedarwood and neroli blend. “When you walk in, that smell right away creates a pathway, and you’re like, ‘That’s the Après scent,’” Martin says.

Most of Near and Native’s scents are inspired by nature and Maine, and its top-selling candle is White Pine. “It’s very bright, woodsy, fresh, kind of like after it rains and you walk in the woods,” Martin says. While her favorite scent is Cedar and Amber, the one that evokes the strongest memories for Martin is Maine Maple. “I grew up in Indiana and we grew up tapping trees and making maple syrup, and for me that scent takes me back to being eight years old in my dad’s sugar shack, watching him boil down sap,” Martin says. “It’s certainly not a top seller, but I love it. I never want to get rid of it.”

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For a decade, James Merrill worked as a contractor for the U.S. Agency for International Development and for small nongovernmental organizations in the Middle East, Africa, and Southeast Asia, helping implement initiatives ranging from protecting biodiversity to countering violence to empowering women.

During that time, the Kennebunk native saw coast-lines in developing countries being inundated with plastic water bottles that wash up on shore. He also witnessed residents in some of those very same communities being recruited for employment by terrorist groups. Merrill came up with a lofty but elegant solution: he would pay locals to collect the discarded water bottles, offering an alternative to more dangerous means of making a living, and then use the plastic from the bottles to make sunglasses that he would market. “We can prevent people from promoting violence and help people clean up their coastlines by focusing on water bottles,” he says.

But he ran into a problem when manufacturers tried to turn the salvaged water bottles into a material solid enough for use in sunglasses. Even though these manufacturers had worked with recycled plastic before, because the bottles Merrill was sourcing had been exposed to the elements, their chemical structure had broken down and the material kept falling apart.

As a result, Opolis Optics, which Merrill launched in April 2020, started with a line of sunglasses made not of bottle plastic but of environmentally friendly bio-acetate, which will biodegrade in landfills within 115 days. But Merrill’s bigger goal of providing both economic opportunities to impoverished communities and a market for ocean waste went unrealized until recently, when he connected with a composites lab at the University of Southern Maine (USM).

Merrill first learned of the university’s Composites Engineering Research Laboratory (CERL) through his membership in the New England Ocean Cluster, a Portland business development group and collaborative working space for ocean-related companies that partner with USM. CERL, which often helps companies solve production issues like Merrill’s, was able to create a composite made primarily of the recovered water bottles that was strong enough to use for sunglasses.

For an initial run of 2,400 sunglasses with the recycled material, branded Stoked Plastic, Merrill paid locals to collect more than 300,000 water bottles from the Bali coastline. A factory in Jakarta, Indonesia, cleaned the bottles and ground them into pellets, which were then shipped to China for manufacturing. Merrill says he would eventually like to move manufacturing to the United States, even Maine, but that option is at least two years out.

Opolis Optics will test-pilot its water bottle collection work in the Philippines and Kenya next. “We have a responsibility,” Merrill says. “These people didn’t ask for any of this crap, nor do they have the infrastructure to handle it.”

Asheesh Ravikumar Lanba, who is director of CERL and a professor at USM, says that, while a lot of work is being done to create sustainable polymers, a bigger issue is what to do with all the plastic waste that already exists in the ocean. “There is only one solution to that problem—other than shooting it into space,” Lanba says. “We need to recycle it.” What is unique about Opolis Optics is that it’s providing a market for this plastic bottle waste, Lanba says.

Since CERL created the recycled plastic composite for Opolis Optics, other companies and industries have reached out to Merrill to see if they can utilize the material for different applications. That was always Merrill’s hope when he started this venture: he figured if he could popularize sunglasses made with the material, it would raise awareness a lot quicker than if he used it to make an industrial part. “The sunglasses are almost a conversation starter about what we can do with this material and technology,” he says.

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Last year, during the height of the pandemic, Arielle Edelman, who had been working for a film production company in New York City for over four years, found herself stuck in her apartment with less and less work. So, she turned to the pastime that got many through quarantine: surfing the internet. “I had always wanted to learn woodworking and initially thought I’d take a class in New York while staying at my job,” says Edelman, “but once I started to do some research, so many doors of possibilities started to open.”

That’s how Edelman stumbled upon the Carpenter’s Boat Shop, which offers boatbuilding apprenticeships in Bristol, nearly 400 miles from New York City. The nonprofit organization hosts eight to ten apprentices for four-month-long semesters every fall and spring at its campus on the shores of the Pemaquid River, just a mile away from the ocean. Thanks to donations, fundraising, and revenue from selling boats the apprentices have built or restored, the program doesn’t charge students a cent. “It felt too good to be true—a tuition-free program that considers applicants regardless of woodworking experience or background,” says Edelman. “Plus, you get to live in Maine.” She immediately applied and got an interview soon after. In August she moved to the campus to start the fall semester.

The apprenticeship is designed to teach basic boatbuilding and sailing skills, with progressively more difficult tasks introduced each week. Students learn the craft of boatbuilding, mostly working on 9- and 11-foot Monhegan skiffs. They live together on the campus in two farmhouses, eat all their meals together, and take turns cooking. Outside of hours working in the shop, apprentices and staff have weekly meetings and discussions about communal living, shared chores, and community service work. Apprentices are encouraged to use their time in the program to take a step back and reflect on their lives. “In life, we’re all either paying debts back or creating debt,” says Alicia Witham, the organization’s new executive director. “This is an opportunity to join a community that gives apprentices a moment to pause and find a new path forward.” She says apprentices have ranged from widowers to teenagers on a gap year before college.

Founded in 1979, the mission of the Carpenter’s Boat Shop remains the same today: “Building boats, nurturing lives, and helping others.” This ethos was one of the biggest draws for Witham, who spent nearly 20 years working at Outward Bound’s location on Hurricane Island off Rockland, and most recently served as director of adult programs and charters for SailMaine. She joined the Carpenter’s Boat Shop in spring 2021. Now that she’s been in her role for several months, Witham’s primary goals are to grow awareness of the nonprofit and “eddy back into normal times,” post-pandemic. Most applicants learn of the apprentice program through word-of-mouth or, like Edelman, by searching online. Witham has begun hosting year-round boat-building and woodworking classes for the general public and hopes to eventually open the campus to more people by offering it as a venue for weddings or company retreats. In the meantime, the apprenticeship program and the beneficial effects it has on participants and the surrounding community remain a top priority.

For Edelman, the experience led to a new career. After a decade of working in film production, she is now a restoration carpenter in Maine. “I feel that the program provided a unique opportunity to completely change my life and work in a way that I wouldn’t have otherwise had,” Edelman says. “I would call it life-changing in a very literal sense, for me.”

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A scream-activated selfie machine, an immersive playground melding science and science fiction, a time machine, and a giant bicycle-inspired wind sculpture are some of the designs artist Rusty Lamer has brought to life. In June a rocket reading nook, which he designed and built as a cozy, imaginative space for kids, landed at the Winslow Public Library.

Lamer’s resume is as whimsical as his design projects: formally trained in sculpture and landscape architecture, he’s run the Maine College of Art’s foundry, designed large-scale sculptural installations across the country, managed a farm in Italy, and lived in a restored chicken coop in an olive grove, where he worked at odd jobs from masonry and garden design to wild boar butchering. The Cape Elizabeth native worked designing exhibits for the Chabot Space and Science Center in Oakland, California, before he returned to Maine to start a family five years ago. In 2018 he founded Field Magnet Design, an art and design studio focused on sculptural installations.

Lamer is now collaborating on a landscape project with his mentor, the sculptor Douglas Hollis, for a park in Philadelphia, but his biggest current project is designing the Children’s Discovery Museum of Central Maine, which, after almost 30 years in Augusta, will move to a larger space with a complete redesign in an old church in Waterville.

The Children’s Discovery Museum had been slowly developing ideas for a few years before connecting with Lamer, who stopped by the museum to see if they could use his help. “It was very serendipitous,” says executive director Amarinda Keys. “We were moving into the phase of trying to figure out, how do we get what we have in our heads down, and how do we build it?” Keys says Lamer picked up where they had hit a wall.

For the past three years, Lamer and the museum team have been working on hammering down and smoothing out those initial ideas, which center around the importance of learning through play, discovery through creation, and a sense of connection to the communities and environments of Maine. Slowed by the pandemic, they’ve worked through several different development phases. They’re now wrapping up final designs, refining concepts, and deciding on details like dimensions, color palettes, and materials.

The pandemic not only slowed progress but forced Lamer to change his creative process. “I think three-dimensionally,” he says. “And I like building with my hands.” Lamer makes quick miniature models out of scrap materials to help him think through a design, then builds larger models out of wood in his studio. But, what with homeschooling his son and welcoming a new baby last April, he didn’t often get that opportunity.

“I retreated into my notebooks,” says Lamer. He’s gone through seven notebooks on the project so far, usually sketching at night, working through fragments of ideas that come to him throughout the day or while rocking a child to sleep. Throughout his design process, Lamer has worked with a small team of contractors that shifts depending on the phase, including architects, a graphic designer, a content developer, and, soon, artists and makers who will help him build the exhibit pieces.

Perhaps the most important team member for this project has been Lamer’s five-year-old son, Dash, who guided the creation of key pieces of the exhibits, such as a campfire around which children can make stew and tell stories. There’s also a fishing pond whose design was inspired by little wooden fish and fishing poles Lamer and Dash made, as well as by the play of shadows on their back deck. For a pizza-making corner, the father and son cut out scraps of felt and cardboard circles and made a mock-up of a pizza oven at home. “Dash would be sort of my test subject, and we’d make pizzas, and see where he takes it,” says Lamer.

This process of play and experimentation is how the exhibits came together, and it’s one Lamer felt at home with even before he started designing for children. He says he’s always been able to tap into a child’s mindset, but still joked with his wife that they would need to have children to help him with his work.

“You’re operating in a narrow channel where you don’t want to overdesign or overprescribe, but you don’t want to underdesign so it’s sparse,” he says. “You want just enough where you’re suggesting worlds for kids to occupy, and they can expand upon their own imaginations. Then that world balloons out, and there’s little moments along the way to prompt them or spark their imagination to keep that thread going.”

Exhibit installation at the Children’s Discovery Museum will begin later this summer, and Lamer and Keys hope to invite children back to the museum for a phased opening starting this fall. They’ll collect feedback from kids as they continue to build, with completion of all the exhibits slated for next spring. Keys says she can’t picture creating the museum without Lamer. “He just has a unique skill set a lot of people need, and he’s so thoughtful about every single thing.”

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Michele Michael | Elephant Ceramics, Dresden
Michele Michael spent years working as a magazine editor and prop stylist in New York City—until 2010, when she took a class that changed everything. In a little pottery studio in Brooklyn, she found her true passion: working with clay to make porcelain and stoneware pieces. Since then, Michael has traded city life for rural, and she spends much of her time in a studio surrounded by pine and oak trees overlooking the Eastern River in Dresden. The founding owner of Elephant Ceramics, Michael creates one-of-a-kind functional tabletop wares, mostly serving dishes and vases. She starts and ends with an organic, simple form; each piece is hand-painted, and every batch of work is outfitted with a new, unique pattern. “No two pieces come out the same way,” she says. But one connective element emerges throughout her work. While each piece is uniquely its own, everything Michael creates is characterized by a shade of blue. “The color palette, patterns, smells, and sounds that come from the surrounding nature in Maine are a bottomless source of inspiration for me,” she says. Her strong connection with nature not only shapes her distinct color palette and penchant for blue; it also gives her a sense of well-being, which she hopes to reflect in her work. Maine’s coast influences everything she does.

Angela Adams | Angela Adams, Portland
Angela Adams’s eponymous home brand was born in 1998 when she and her husband, furniture designer Sherwood Hamill, braved uncertainty and set out to become full-time makers and designers. “We knew from the get-go that in order to be full-time designers and continue to live in Maine, where we both grew up, we would have to create jobs for ourselves here in Portland,” says Adams. At the time, Adams had been creating her own pattern designs and hand-painting them on walls, furniture, and other surfaces. Applying her unique patterns to area rugs felt logical, and once the Angela Adams brand was off and running with rugs and furniture, she expanded to other products such as bedding, fabrics, wallpaper, and home and life accessories. Her handcrafted contemporary pieces were met with immediate success, and her designs quickly became synonymous not only with her name but also with Maine design more broadly. She is often seen as a groundbreaker, and her enduring acclaim around the country and globe has helped elevate the local makers community as a whole. Adams says she is likewise indebted to Maine and its people for inspiration: “There’s so much beauty in the calloused hands and weathered faces that have endured short days and long winters; the fishing boats going out into sea smoke in the bitter cold; the farmers, knitters, net makers, and boatbuilders; the immigrant families that set up shops and bring traditions from other worlds to us. Maine is a constantly changing landscape and palette.”

Linda + John Meyers | Wary Meyers, Cumberland
Linda and John Meyers’s studio in Cumberland, adjacent to the house they share with their son, Fletcher, was once home to a hair salon called Judy’s Place. While any traces of hair dye or ammonia are long gone from the cutting-edge creative lab, the spirit of living and working in the same space has endured. “Coming from our apartment in New York City, it seems almost unbelievable that we can watch our son swimming in the backyard while we take calls or work on a new project in the studio,” Linda Meyers says. With a wink she adds, “We aspire to a very European way of business.” Their company, Wary Meyers, hand makes soaps, scented candles, and lip balms that can be found in over 200 stores all over the world, from Paris to Los Angeles. The pair conceives of all the whimsical scents themselves, and each item is hand-poured and packaged in small batches. Linda and John’s inspiration is myriad, ranging from the midcentury modern style and 1970s Pop Art (that’s on impeccable display in their Cumberland home) to vintage Hollywood to their backyard swimming pool, and to Maine itself. They bring these influences to life in splashy typography and packaging; in the vibrant stripes that color their soaps; and in aromatic concoctions such as Forest Primeval, Xanadu, and Mainely Manly. “Coming from a city like New York, no one has a bigger appreciation for this state than us,” says Linda, “We would never have been able to create what we have or scale the way we have anywhere else.” Echoes John: “Maine has given us the room to create.”

Terrill Waldman + Charlie Jenkins | Tandem Glass, Dresden
Charlie Jenkins and Terrill Waldman, glass-blowers for over 30 years, were sharing a studio in Oakland, California, in 2006 when they decided to move to Maine to buy their own space in which to live and work—nearly impossible to do in the East Bay, at the north end of Silicon Valley. After arriving in Dresden, they started Tandem Glass, a hand-blown glass studio that produces handmade objects both sculptural and functional. They’re widely recognized for their richly saturated colors and intricate designs. Of their signature vivid palette, Waldman says, “I think of color as my material. Our unique glass color is created in very small, limited batches. Some of the materials we’ve used are available in such tiny quantities that we’ve actually lost access to some of our favorite colors over the years.” Individuality is at the core of their ethos. No one piece they make is ever exactly replicated, from mixed-material mosaic glasses to charismatic pink and white speckled pigs, and each is intended to be interpreted differently by everyone who sees them. Jenkins emphasizes the importance of “the natural world and the color and light resonating from it.” They utilize as many natural resources as possible from their midcoast home base: cherrywood, cork, iron, and bronze help form the shapes. Beeswax prevents the tools from scratching the glass. The pair are advocates for the maker community within the state, with Jenkins having served as the president of the Maine Crafts Guild and Waldman on the board of the Maine Crafts Association. They give back with their annual FUNdraiser that typically benefits the Maine Crafts Association and the Good Shepherd Food Bank.

Jeremy Frey | Jeremy Frey Baskets, Eddington
“The thing I love most about what I do,” says Passamaquoddy basket weaver Jeremy Frey, “is starting from nothing.” When he was 20 years old, Frey’s mother taught him how to gather materials from the woods, cut them, shape them, and design their final forms. What begins as black ash, sweetgrass, cedar bark, birch bark, and spruce root becomes an intricate, detailed basket by the end of Frey’s process. In all, it takes about a month and a half to complete a large basket, but Frey says he’s sometimes spent up to six months on a piece. “It’s a meditation,” he says. “It always has been.” The tradition of basket making is deeply rooted in the history of the region’s Wabanaki people. Frey weaves a particular type of basket called a fancy basket, which is made for indoor use and display, as opposed to the Wabanaki baskets of centuries ago, which were often used during potato harvests. When Frey started to learn the tradition, the only baskets still being woven were for utilitarian purposes. “If you think about fancy baskets,” says Frey, “they have evolved because there’s a culture in Maine that encouraged that and embraced that.” Frey’s practice of the ancient art form requires substantial foresight. It can take weeks to prepare a braid and up to two days to split an ash log into fine ribbons. When so much time is invested in preparing a design, it’s imperative that the final product weave together seamlessly.

Mike Rancourt | Rancourt + Company, Lewiston
As a high schooler, Mike Rancourt did odd jobs at his father’s handsewn shoe factory in Lewiston, and remembers being mesmerized by the hand-stitchers making moccasins. At the time he didn’t expect to end up in the shoemaking industry like his father. “I remember the first time I saw a pair of calfskin loafers from Cole Haan—they had been made by a factory in Bangor—I was amazed that that kind of beauty existed in making a pair of shoes,” he says. In 1982 Rancourt and his father, David, founded Down East Casual Footwear, which made moccasins, boat shoes, and slippers. Its biggest customer, Cole Haan, later bought the company. Rancourt started another company, Maine Shoe Company, that he eventually sold to Allen Edmonds. He worked for the shoemaker for 13 years, but when Allen Edmonds decided to shut down the Lewiston factory, Rancourt and his son, Kyle, bought the business back and launched Rancourt and Company in 2009. The company produces around 400 pairs of handmade shoes and boots a week for companies such as Ralph Lauren and Sperry and its own label, ranging from hand-stitched moc-style shoes like the ones Rancourt’s father made decades earlier to boots to minimalist sneakers. A few of the hand-stitchers were even trained by Rancourt’s father in the ’80s. “We still last by hand. We still punch by hand,” Rancourt says. “We’re still doing it the same way it’s been done for over 100 years.”

Edith Armstrong | Folia, Portland
When Edith Armstrong graduated from the Rhode Island School of Design with a degree in jewelry and metalsmithing, knowing that she wanted to work for herself, she designed a pair of brass leaf-shaped earrings and pitched them to various local boutiques. She used the encouraging feedback she received as a catalyst for her craft. Raised outside of Boston, Armstrong spent her summers in Maine. “My heart is in Friendship,” she says, referring to the coastal town she and her family still escape to as much as possible. In 1993 she took over a shop on Portland’s Exchange Street, which became Folia. Her store is a showcase for several proprietary lines, including Air-Frames, where Armstrong’s signature 18-karat green gold moors sparkling diamond beads; the Gemstone Collection, precious stones framed in the same gold; and the Flora Fauna Collection, which harkens back to her early days as a postgrad, using nature and its many incarnations as inspiration for each piece. Armstrong is also known for her custom work and the relationships she’s forged over the past three decades. “I’m frequently seeing people whose wedding rings I designed come in for their own children’s rings,” she says. These bespoke designs have frequently been fonts of inspiration in their own right. “A woman came in once who was scrapping an old medallion bracelet, almost Turkish looking, that she didn’t want anymore.” Captured by the textured, somewhat baroque patterns, Armstrong developed her Cesca line, an enduring favorite at the Exchange Street store. Armstrong is a prolific patron of charitable causes. She is devoted to several local philanthropic organizations, and her pieces are frequently auctioned throughout the state to raise funds for the people and institutions of Maine.

Julie Morringello | Modernmaine, Stonington
“I’m obsessed with materials,” says designer Julie Morringello. Trained as a furniture maker and an industrial designer, she worked in both fields for some time before founding Modernmaine, a company that specializes in modern, artist-made light fixtures. By cutting, bending, and shaping wood, Morringello creates contemporary, sculptural lighting for residential and commercial use. Some processes require digital as well as manual fabrication techniques, but every piece of lighting’s final form is hand assembled by Morringello in her Stonington studio. She mainly works with laser-cut maple veneer, using paper maquettes to help with design concepts and processes. Wood is her preferred medium, but she has worked with a variety of materials ranging from paper and acrylic to Tyvek and fabric. Morringello is Modernmaine’s sole artist, and she often finds inspiration in emotions and expressions. “An entirely new piece might be inspired by something I’ve seen or experienced,” she says. “I think about things like connections, cultural references, light, color, and so on.” For Morringello, inspiration can be as simple as a gesture, a reflection, or a certain material or space. Emotive perceptions are then merged with practical concerns, such as function, hardware, and the manufacturing process. It’s this intersection of competing ideas that Morringello finds most exciting—it’s the part of the creative process that, she says, “acts as a kind of combustion that fuels the rest of the project.”

David Johansen | Neon Dave, Portland
Like many artists, David Johansen starts with a sketch. Using a torch, Johansen bends glass tubes, cutting and welding them together as needed to match the shape of his sketch. Once a piece is complete, he’ll create a vacuum and add an inert gas, like neon or argon, that illuminates when electricity is run through it. The light’s color depends on both the gas and the powder coating on the inside of the tube. Johansen plays with different combinations to create his colors, which he then manipulates further by placing tubes of differing colors next to each other. “You see right here is the whole world I work in,” Johansen says as he points to the space where light from an orange-hued tube and a purple tube meet on the backdrop of a piece. Although Johansen’s neon signs can be found around Portland, such as the neon scorpion at Downtown Lounge and the “Live Nerds” sign at Arcadia National Bar, he’s primarily an artist. “I like art that has got a lot of craftsmanship to it,” Johansen says. “I’m not a sign guy who started making art. I’m an art guy who started making neon and has made a few signs.” He says a challenge of working with neon as an artist is that, because the medium is so often associated with signs, it can be hard to see it as art. “I’m always trying to think of what has never been done,” Johansen says.

Adam Rogers | Adam Rogers Studio, Portland
Adam Rogers already had a career in corporate architecture when he decided to try his hand at woodworking. At age 28 he enrolled in a furniture design graduate program at the Rochester Institute of Technology’s School for American Crafts and spent the first semester working only with hand tools. “After that, I was hooked,” Rogers says. To turn his passion into a career, he took an entry-level custom design job at Thos. Moser in Auburn, where he learned how to scale expert craftsmanship without losing quality. “The idea of making a one-off art piece is less interesting to me,” he says. “The value of this process is the end result.” He eventually worked his way up to director of design and product development at Thos. Moser and was responsible for designing all of the furniture. After more than seven years at the company, Rogers left to become a full-time professor at the Rochester Institute of Technology and pursue another of his passions: passing on his knowledge of fine woodworking. “It’s a tradition that relies on the sharing by other people. It’s ultimately the only way it survives,” he says. After two years, Rogers returned to Maine and launched his furniture design studio, where he does work for a variety of clients, including Chilton and Radnor, and he continues to teach at other schools. With his furniture, Rogers lets craft inform the design. He tries to incorporate evidence of craft that emphasizes the transition between two pieces of wood, such as exposed pinned joints where a dining table’s legs meet the apron below the tabletop and shaped transitions at the top of a chair’s leg joinery. “In really simple but definitive terms, I think design is deciding what to turn a tree into, and craft is turning it into that,” Rogers says. “It’s that simple.”

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