Recap: A Kentucky Handmade Weekend Autumn 2020

We’ve started a new tradition at my farmhouse in Kentucky called A Kentucky Handmade Weekend. For as long as I can remember I have wanted to do something with the farm/on the farm that promoted handmade, rural made, our small town, and a slower way of life. Earlier this year we had the idea to host a pop-up shop and a few workshops at the farmhouse. It felt like a nice way to celebrate our community during a very rough year. We had our first event in August. At the time that event felt like a huge success….then we had our October event and we were blown away with the support.

The concept behind these events is pretty simple…we wanted to have a weekend that celebrated handmade, American made, and local art and folk art. We wanted it to be part pop-up shop and part workshops. We created a large store area in my backyard that was filled with goods and art by locals, vintage pieces I had collected over the years, and a ton of American made goods by my maker friends from all across the US.

The workshops were to be in the side yard, but they grew bigger and bigger and just kinda ended up being wherever we had enough space. The front yard was dedicated to food and pumpkins. Over three days we welcomed so many friends and neighbors to the house. We even hosted a bake off!

For Spring 2021 we will be filling the orchard out back with vendors, adding more food out front, and bringing in a whole new group of workshops. It has been our dream to bring our love of art and handmade to our very rural western Kentucky county and we feel like we are well on our way!

We are doing a much smaller Christmas Open House in December if you are near by.

The following are a few of the images I took over the weekend. I ended up being way too busy to properly photograph it all. I think in the spring we will need a photographer.

You can find many of these items in our online shop!

My 6 Favorite Things at Earth Angels HeART of Winter Event

If you know me, you know I can often times be found in a very old ice house in Florida, New York. The ice house is the current home to Earth Angels Studios. Over the weekend Ethan and I went up for her annual Valentines event. I wanted to share a few of my favorite pieces from the weekend! We will be back in May. Stay tuned for more information.

1) Stars by Emma Mierop. 2) Anything and everything by painter and friend Laurie Meseroll. 3) Paintings by Angela Moulton. 4) Paintings, especially the dapper ones by Stephanie Ponsard. 5) How to Speak Chicken by Melissa Caughey. 6) Bears by Letty!

Below are a few other images from the weekend:

Ramblings from a Roadside Cracker Barrel

When I travel alone I love to stop at Cracker Barrels on the side of interstates. I love watching the world go by in these places. I love watching the conversations and the people. It reminds me of home and so many of the things I love in life. Often times I will sit and write while I wait for my food. In this world that is constantly filled with noise it seems to be easier to write than it is to speak.

Somewhere along the way we forgot about the American citizens. In our quest for profits, for monopolies, for share holders, and for billionaires we forgot about the folks that built this country, the folks that spread across the mountains and the plaines, the folks that rose up from poverty and oppression to create lives across the countryside, the folks that were forced out of their own homes so this empire could be built. We’ve been forgotten. We’ve been neglected. We’ve been replaced with profit margins and global media domination and foreign wars to line the pockets of a select few. 

I sit in a Cracker Barrel somewhere deep in the Maryland Appalachia lands. Here I am surrounded by a cross section of America. Statistically the folks here have long been forgotten. They’ve been forgotten regardless of their race or age or gender or orientation or origin story. They’ve been forgotten because they live in a place that lost it’s purpose decades ago. Jobs and factories shipped overseas so share holders could profit from big corporate business. The mountains stripped of its minerals and the workers left with a lifetime of health issues and the constant fear of a loss of pension. The past few decades have often felt like hard years, yes nothing like the depression, or the years long before, but this time fueled by a new type of hardship. The rust belt and the coal belt and the Bible Belt all merge here in a place that sees traffic from I 81 but benefits from little else. 

I have this dream of a new America. An America that isn’t divided by parties and politics. An America that isn’t divided by religion and hot topic issues and the constant warring media outlets. I dream of an America that puts people first, that celebrates the differences and the commonalities among us, and a government that is there to help all of us, and recognize all of us as equal. I dream of an America that spends more time supporting science, culture, infrastructure, the humanities, health, and of course communities rather than such a focus on foreign wars and economic gains. I dream of an America where we aren’t scared of insurance companies, scared of our neighbors, and scared of the lies we’re conditioned to believe. It seems to me that if we all spent more time just being neighbors, just being listeners, just treating others like we want to be treated we’d all be better off. I dream of an America that preserves its natural wonders, that champions it’s citizens to be better, to be caring, to believe in the American dream. I dream of an America where our jealousies dissolve as we all move together forward. I dream of an America that sees hate fueled by fear and ignorance dissipate as love grows. I dream of an America I fear we may never have. 

Coming Back to Life Part 2: An Essay

Friday I wrote about my own personal journey of coming back to life. Today is similar but with FOLK. Do you ever feel things lining up and coming together? Slowly, quietly, almost naturally the universe is moving in a favorable direction. Occasionally I will catch myself realizing these pieces coming together, the energy moving and the feel of it all going well, but for the most part I feel terrified to even acknowledge the shift out of fear that the universe will stop, but it seems the time is here to really lean into the energy and take the steps to dive back in and create the business I dreamt of having.

Over the years I’ve made a lot of mistakes, valuable lessons learned to get me to where I am now. But, those mistakes crippled me and I became afraid to do anything. So I went to work for others…helping them build their brands while I neglected by purely because of fear. A fear of failure, a fear of making mistakes, and most importantly a fear of not knowing how to make the business financially solvent or sustainable. Somewhere in all of that I needed to learn lessons for myself, knowing that eventually I would come back to life, just not sure when or how it would be.

One of the keys for me was really digging into why I started the business in the first place….I wanted to share stories of rural places and makers. I have an eternal love of Americana and Slow Living. The business was created to celebrate those. Over time it grew to include travel and exploration and photography, but in that shift I lost the things I love. For me, returning to FOLK meant finding ways to incorporate all of those loves into one beautiful and cohesive mission. The funny thing is…they all naturally fit together, but with my anxiety and fear they didn’t seem to fit at all. So I continued to fight it all. But over the past year I’ve kept my eyes tuned into everything I can and it seems all of them fit together naturally. So, I’ll lean into it all…and here we go….

For me it is important to return to sharing stories and beautiful images and being a community. Not just dead end q and a stories or just my personal essays. For me it is going to embody submissions, essays, travel guides, the celebration of American made makers and artisans, slow living, and an appreciation for the little things in life. How we will make this financially sustainable I am not sure….but I think it means partnering with brands and companies within that realm, doing events, doing a couple special issues a year, and most importantly driving traffic to our website and newsletters. I do know that I am ready. I am ready to get it all rolling. If you have any suggestions or want to collaborate or submit email me (editor.folk@gmail.com). 

The journey never ends….shall we get to living. 

Coming Back to Life: An Essay

Do you ever feel yourself coming back to life? Does the world around you just feel more vivid and clear? Do you feel yourself enjoying the things that ones made you so passionate and filled you will fire? Do you feel yourself eager to be around people again. For me the last few months has been that. For a very very long time I have known my passions and I have known the things that bring me the greatest joy in life. I’ve known that I love small towns, rural spaces, good food, slow living, exploration, the little things in life, history, and really stimulating conversations. To Kill a Mocking Bird very much is my favorite book, Steel Magnolias is very much my favorite movie, and Martha Stewart’s pre-Snoop era will forever have a place in my heart. I just can feel it within me when I am passionate and what really makes me feel like me. 

However the past few years I haven’t felt that at all. I’ve bounced between feeling nothing and life being generally grey and having some sort of out of body experience. The way I have described it is….I figuratively try to walk or to even stand but my legs don’t work and I can only crawl. Like in my mind I have all the cognitive ability to do what I know I’m good at, but tangibly I couldn’t seem to make it work. I became very lost in that. I felt very much hopeless and stuck. It is like I could plan my step A to B to C, knowing exactly what to do, but I never had the tools to take any of those steps. I naturally have a dominate personality, but during that time I just felt completely submissive. It was better to feel invisible than it was to feel embarrassed. 

You know we all have failures in life, we all make mistakes, and we all have periods we’d rather not remember….the important part is to let those times strengthen you and push you forward, not to cripple you. I allowed them to not only cripple me, but to instill this incredibly powerful fear in me. My voice, my talents, my passions were all gone.

Last year I began begging the universe to put the steps into motion for me to return to myself. I began constantly asking for the universe to give me not only the strength to stand, but the ability to put pride aside to ask friends for help in teaching me how to return to my passions, and to regain my own ability to feel in control of my own life. In those moments I didn’t know the steps were particularly unfolding, but 2019 allowed me to return to many of those passions and to feel like I was being given a second chance to create and speak and feel. 

It started with my love of Slow Living…you know the movement that embraces intentional living, old fashioned ways, and celebrating the little things in life. I was allowed to guest edit the Slow Living issue of Where Women Cook, a friends magazine dedicated to women in their kitchens. This simple gift from a friend reconnected me with a community that I felt like I had been kicked out of. It allowed me to relearn my passion for sharing the stories of others and for seeing rural life and kitchens and gardens in an editorial, almost poetic way. The year continued with me rediscovering my own love for my hometown by once again becoming a part of my local art guild and downtown. We ended the year with a magical American made pop up shop that brought together some of my favorite American made makers and the talents of locals in my hometown. Getting to be in the shop and work the shop made me feel like I could stand and could once again be a positive light in the community. Its funny how the little things affect us as much as they do.

For a long time I’ve felt like I didn’t have anything to add to conversations and that I really didn’t have a reason to be around people. I just had this inherent shame that I wasn’t doing much in life so why should anyone want to talk to me. Yes, I’m realizing this is coming off far more self loathing than it should. I would watch my friends build these amazing blogs and businesses, knowing full well that if they could do it, I could to, but I allowed myself to be crippled and motionless. Instead I quietly encouraged them from afar while letting my own dreams die. 

Towards the end of the year I heard a quote that was something like….only do things in life that you will be proud of. I cannot tell you how hard it hit me. It was one of those Oprah moments. Like whoa. You mean I could truly only do things that I was proud of and in ways I would be proud of. Every morning I repeat that line to myself. I immediately started making changes that would put me in line with that. I used to be a total over achiever, but even in the beginning of my business I never had the tools and skills to do things in the way they needed to be done, so I just carried this mentality of “just get it done and move on”. I even got to the point where I simply wouldn’t work on it myself because I knew I didn’t even want to be associated. I became secure in failure and subconsciously sat myself up for failure because it was an emotion I knew how to feel. I no longer knew how to feel the emotions of success. Fear had consumed me. After nearly a decade in business though I forced myself to really take inventory of my personal skills and talents and the community I had around me. With that inventory I sat down and said…what do I need to cut because it isn’t up to my true quality standards, not the standards I had allowed myself to accept. Ie…would I wear the t shirts we sell….no, they’re cheap and ill fitting… would I follow our social media…no because it feels unintentional and shallow…and the list goes on to include lots of other things and things in my personal life. Even in that first moment my spark reignited. 

It truly took finding the source of my shame or darkness or whatever you want to call it to be able to begin correcting my path. For me it was doing things I am proud of. From there we cut the shirts, we developed a real strategy for the website, the newsletters, and for social. Most importantly I knew that if I wanted to create something I (all caps ME) could be proud of I needed to be driving this long-haul trailer myself. Now I am retraining my brain and my daily habits to create the needed time to do things in the proper way, to go, very pride-lessly, to friends and peers to ask for help, and to know that if you want the results you really do have to put in ALL of the needed efforts. 

My personal journey has also included doing things that carry positive energy and treating my mind and body the way I want them to be treated. At the end of the day you want to feel good. Foods, exercise, socialization, and where we allow ourselves to go all play a part in that. Listening to the voice that says…this is what you NEED, this is where you need to be, this is what you need to do, rather than simply appeasing others and doing what is easiest has been fundamental. If you don’t value yourself, no one else will either. 

I went into 2020 knowing I wanted to set goals, not resolutions. I wanted to feel like myself and to channel my passions and talents and my community into my business. I wanted to take nearly a decades worth of lessons and fundamentally build the businesses I wanted to create when I started. I wanted to find a way I could split more time between life in New York City and my hometown in Kentucky, and how I could remember that I have agency in my own life. Every morning, after I’ve said my lines about only doing things I am proud of, I ask the universe to provide me with the tools to make those goals a reality and to put my own strengths to work in getting there. Those simple positive steps have already started a ball rolling that will hopefully allow me to achieve my goals. 

So here we are in 2020 and I am taking pride in my business, closing up old business while moving ever forward, treating myself well and good and being proud of who I am and what I do, working to have the means to split my time between the city and the country, and daily rebuilding my love of community, pastoral landscapes, and story telling.

I am excited for the year, and I am finally proud of what I am creating. I hope you’ll follow along….

My Favorite Slow Living Images of 2019

It is no secret that I love rural landscapes and slow living. 2019 was the year that allowed me to get back to that love. Over the twelve months I photographed so many beautiful moments The following are a few of my favorites. I hope you enjoy them as much as I do.

If you’d like a print of any of these please visit our online store.

A HotelTonight Pool Party in Brooklyn

If you follow me you know I love using HotelTonight. A few weeks ago we were invited to attend their pool party in Brooklyn and the Williamsburg Hotel. The views of Manhattan across the East River were just perfect. The food and music was splendid. What a wonderful way to spend a Sunday in July. I thought I’d share a few of the images I took that day. If you’re hunting for hotels I highly recommend HotelTonight.