Finding our way home
Like a lot of people on earth today, I am looking for ways to be with my family more, to reintegrate my family's life with the natural spaces we dwell within, and to reduce our needs for industrial products that harm us and the family of beings. This shop is one small part of that journey, which began about a decade ago.
At the time, after spending some years in a farming village in Nepal, I realized I wanted to move back home to the United States and see if I could live as simply and generously as my Nepali friends lived. So my then-fiance (now husband) and I left our urban lives, and began living and working on small, organic vegetable farms. Eventually, we built a tiny house on wheels, in which we could experiment with a less industrial infrastructure: heating and cooking with wood, carrying in and out our water, composting our waste, and not wiring our home for electricity.
As we pursued these changes, we greatly reduced our need for income, earning all of what we needed from part-time work on friends' farms. Recently, however, we moved onto land with my husband's parents, and began a project restoring a log house from the 1870s. While we are committed to keeping our infrastructure simple, the cost of building has meant we've needed to find new income sources. And so....Tree Bone Arts.
This shop is our attempt to continue to live out of our values while earning what we need to get by. Over the past two years, I have been selling my goods at the local farmers' market, honing my skills and learning what is durable and what customers' like. Now, I'm trying to expand that market.
My primary materials come from what my 5-year-old daughter, my almost-two-year-old son, my husband and I find on the land. We never harm animals or trees, taking only what lies on the ground, or occasionally cutting a small branch from a standing tree. The fabrics I use come from thrift stores -- which I always heat treat -- or more often from vintage fabrics my mom has saved over the years.
I want the jewelry and clothes that I make to retain a sense of the human hands that made them, and also the elements that created them. I am not interested in machine precision, but rather the warmth encountered in skillfully and carefully handmade goods. I hope you can feel this when you hold what I make in your hands.
Gratefully,
Adrianne
