When was it decided that bringing your kids to work was a bad idea? Separation in general seems to be a strange and unfortunate part of our culture.  At the Peg and Awl workshoppe, Søren and Silas, like Shop Kids all over the world, get to see people making things all day long.  Here they dive into piles o' trash and extract bits, confirming literally, as does Peg and Awl, the trash and treasure cliche. 

Crafted Lives: Grand and Mysterious 

Interview by Monica Moses with Margaux Kent 

Photography By Chris Crisman 

Click here to read the full article from American Craft Magazine!

I loved Colonial Williamsburg, VA, of course. 

But I never got that feeling that sometimes takes over of actually travelling back in time. (There was a time long ago that I would go to the Philadelphia and walk around for hours with Ben Franklin's autobiography (and a random assortment of Philadelphia pasts) and read and imagine (easily) that I was there, nearly 300 years prior.) (This is something I kind of do(id) whenever I wander(ed), but mostly pre children). 

I enjoyed it more in a Twilight-Zone way. 

And learned a lot a lot - shoemaking, bookbinding, business &c. My most favourite was the brick house. Insanely fascinating and the numbers (10,000 brick fired each year - enough to make a chimney!) were beyond me. I am particularly good at small things.  

The one story I was most fascinated with was the Bowden-Armistead House. Or the woman in it who, it was told, sweeps her porch every Sunday. The mystery here is, that when she was approached by a Rockefeller who wished to purchase her home, she allegedly said, "I am not impressed with your money." This was in 1926, or the project began that year anyway. So Miss Bowden-Armistead (or Mary A. Stephenson) would be 86 years old if she was exactly 0 when she was approached. So perhaps it is a daughter who sweeps. The home was built in the 19th century and endured some modernity like telephone wires that cast wobbly lines on the not dirt road, but then all was sucked back. Buildings, wires, telephones, plumbing. Everything around her into the colonial era. And she remained. And she sweeps. Or her ghost sweeps. 

I really want to know and I kind of don't want to know.

you can see the house on the left...