Photos by John Haynes
Made in the North 2018
A certain DIY spirit informs the experience of living in the North. If you don’t have something, you make it. It could be a bed you upholster for the dog, a boat trailer you weld in the garage, a beach agate you set into a pendant. Seems simple enough. But what if you’re seized by the strange notion that you’d rather collect agates or craft dog beds for your livelihood than process payroll or write code?
Those are the stories—and the people—we’re featuring here in our second “Made in the North” issue. So what’s in it for you? Fair question. The items that fill these pages—a perfect leather satchel, a totally righteous salad dressing, a faster roller ski—have been created by local people for people they know and understand. They’re things to keep and savor, not things to wear once and then return to a distant distribution center by UPS.
Here, we get a glimpse of the process—ideas incubated in dorm rooms or written in basement bars—and the risks that go along with it. Then, the time caught on the fly to carve, thread, throw, and build. In different ways, these are the people making nothing into something. Here are those makers and the things they made.
