So you wanna be able to say, “I made that!”? These four spots are helping you craft something brag-worthy, from floral arrangements to beaded earrings.
Be Just 407 Monticello Rd. bejustcville.com
What do pizza, pillows, and flowers have in common? They’re all workshops held by this Belmont home goods shop. The thoughtfully curated class list focuses on learning new ways to live well and cultivate your home.
The Hive 1747 Allied St., Suite K thehivecville.com
The owners of The Hive (above)have a long list of artists and makers they admire—and many of them teach workshops and classes at the Allied Street studio. Learn the meditative art of Zentangles, or try your hand at sewing a child’s dress.
The Scrappy Elephant 165 Main St., Palmyra scrappyelephant.com
The Scrappy Elephant helps you do good and do good work. Its creative reuse program (you bring them your leftover art supplies to help keep them out of landfills) helps fuel the Palmyra shop’s events and workshops, from mosaics to macramé. (Plus: SE’s Camp Create gets young crafters started early.)
Pikasso Swig 333 Second St. SE pikassoswig.com
This downtown studio offers a class every Thursday. Look for things like sand art, pillow-making, and straight-up acrylic painting instruction, all supplies (and a beverage!) included for less than $50. Bonus: There’s a full menu available, with charcuterie, panini, and plates for the little ones.
Women supporting women isn’t just a hashtag or phrase pulled off a trendy graphic tee for members of Boss Babes Cville, an ever-growing support group of local female-identifying folks in all walks of their careers.
Started by downtown business owner and stylist Linnea Revak in 2017, the group took shape with the help of co-director Jessica Norby, a local social media strategist.
“I was a 27-year-old small business owner that needed community—to not feel like I was alone, but instead have camaraderie and support from others in my shoes,” says Revak, whom you’ve probably seen around town in flouncy pastels, or behind the counter of her stylish consignment shop, Darling Boutique, on the Downtown Mall.
Revak just opened her second storefront, Dashing Boutique, right next door, and, in part, credits her entrepreneurial success to advice she received at one of the group’s meetups from fellow Boss Babe Destinee Wright, a local writer and marketing professional: Release the need to control everything. Letting go is powerful. And so much good has come from just releasing.
That advice came from Wright in the summer of 2019, says Revak, when she was figuring out the next step for her business. “I’d just moved into our new [Darling Boutique] location, needed to hire staff and delegate, but I was still trying to control everything. It was in letting go and delegating to a team that I trust that I saw my business truly flourish.”
With a virtual Facebook group including almost 1,500 members and monthly in-person meetups, the local boss babe says she created the group to be an inclusive and safe space to exchange resources and insights, be vulnerable, to uplift, encourage, and learn from one another.
“I’m a better small business owner because of Boss Babes Cville,” Revak says. “I’m wiser, stronger, more vulnerable, teachable. Each time we’ve had a meetup over the years with guest speakers, I’ve soaked it all up like a sponge.”
The collective wisdom of the group has helped her make important decisions about everything from growth, hiring needs, systems and processes, accounting, and marketing.
“I would be googling so many things if it weren’t for this group!” she says.
Much like the term girl boss, boss babe has seen a recent shift in connotation, sometimes carrying a non-serious tone reinforcing that women in positions of power often aren’t viewed as equal to their male counterparts.
“I believe it’s still an empowering way to define our group, but I do think there’s room for growth in the language we use to talk about female-identifying individuals when it comes to entrepreneurship and business,” Revak says. “If this group’s shown me anything, we’re capable of adapting, learning, growing, and bettering ourselves—together.”
And all are welcome to join.
“The more engaged everyone is, the more sparks of magic fly in the group,” says Revak. “You get out of the group what you put into it. And we’ve seen so many beautiful things come out of it.”
Cody Lester has been a woodworker since 2012, but one day on his way into work (he keeps a day job as quality improvement analyst for the UVA Transplant Center), inspiration struck: He’d been trying to dream up a new product for his business, The Fine Grainery, that would allow him to combine mediums and add a personalized touch, and he finally got an idea. He’d make tic-tac-toe—to go.
“The thing I like most about it are the contrasting types of wood and the contrasting acrylic pieces,” Lester says. “I think the look just kind of brings everything together.”
Acrylic pieces nestle into a maple and walnut frame, with magnets to keep everything in place (good for bumpy car rides or chaotic restaurant tables). And while Lester’s 2-year-old daughter doesn’t quite understand the game yet, he hopes the pieces can become heirlooms—especially given that he can personalize them.
“My favorite was an XOXO message from a grandparent to his grandchildren,” he says. “I think that is something that will be cherished for a long time.”
Llorel Eldridge was standing in a lavender field when she had the idea to start L’Essentials, her nature-inspired skincare and décor brand.
“I always stayed at my grandparents’ house during the summer and we were always outside,” Eldridge says. “I’ve been inspired by nature my whole life.”
She launched in 2020 with hand sanitizer, floral bath salts, and rose cuticle oil, all invoking her love of the outdoors. She quickly expanded to coffee bean facial scrubs and—her favorite product—flower preservations, for which she presses anything—from forget-me-nots and baby’s breath to roses and marigolds—between two panes of glass and contains them in a gold or black frame. Those are her bestsellers and, coincidentally, her favorite things to make, especially custom orders.
“I really enjoy creating pieces inspired by nature,” she says. “I hope my work gives you a sense of calm and happiness.”
Longtime fiber artist (and communications consultant) Miriam Dickler knew her pit bull Frank was a big softy, but his serious face often said otherwise to strangers.
“I started putting him in fun bandanas I made to try and help communicate his friendly, loveable personality,” she says. “It seemed to work!” Eventually, she began to make “Frankdanas,” reversible bandanas in complementary fabrics, and sell them through her Etsy shop, Frankly Fetching.
“Obviously, we named it for Frank as he’s the inspiration and CEO (Chief Eating Officer),” she says. Find them online or at Animal Connection.
After graduating from Appalachian State University with a BFA in graphic design, Emily Wool was searching for her next step.
“Towards the end of the program, I had become pretty disenchanted with what I saw as the rigid world of graphic design and wanted to explore a more expressive way of art-making,” she says. She had an a-ha moment thanks to the school’s art therapy program and, shortly after, came upon Innisfree Village, a Crozet lifesharing community with adults who have disabilities.
She became a full-time caregiver, then worked in the gardens, and eventually started the community’s art program, which focused on block-printing.
“While I was learning and teaching that, I decided to dabble on my own and began printing lots of fabric during evenings and weekends,” she says. Soon she started Emily Ruth Prints, a line of nature-inspired pieces from tea towels to Washi tape. We asked her to tell us more about her business and her work.—CH
Photo: Courtesy Emily Wool
Made in C-VILLE: It’s obvious nature plays a big role in your work. What is it about nature that lends itself so easily to art, in your opinion?
Emily Wool: Nature is absolutely everywhere, of course, so it’s easy to see why there are endless art forms dedicated to it. You could probably argue that most art is inspired by nature in one way or another, and my work is no different. Admittedly I’ve never been a very outdoorsy person, but taking pictures of plants and just slowing down to pay attention to shape and color became a soothing and deeply creative experience for me. Nature is also both ever-changing and cyclical, so we can see new colors and shapes every day as well as familiar flowers and leaves that bring up feelings of comfort and nostalgia—therefore great inspiration for art.
What would you say is your specialty?
I think I try to create work that’s approachable. And by that I mean, I hope the pieces I make both draw people closer to nature’s possibilities and feel functional. So I guess what I most like to do is join those forces—beauty and function. I think I specialize in simple prints that highlight shapes found in nature.
What’s your bestseller? What’s your personal favorite thing to make?
Tea towels are a big hit. I think because they’re easy to gift and use and you still get a piece of the artwork. I love making the weighted eye pillows because I like imagining someone using them and being soothed the same way I am by them. They’re also fun to play with with a new stamp if I don’t want to print lots of fabric since they’re a smaller surface.
How often do you come up with new prints and designs?
Oh gosh. Daily! I always want to play with new patterns. I’ve had to develop a line of the more “tried and true” patterns to have available all the time but I’m always playing with new imagery and shapes. Prints and designs that see the light of day are less frequent, but I do put new patterns out there fairly often.
Here’s the next level, folks. You might be eating local and shopping local, but are you wearing local? The garments we don often come from very faraway places and seem to just appear out of nowhere; an oft-reported statistic from the American Apparel & Footwear Association states that 97 percent of the clothes sold in the U.S. were made overseas. “We’re so alienated from our clothes,” is how Sarah Tremaine, an Albemarle clothing maker, puts it.
But there is an antidote—locally designed and, in many cases, locally crafted clothing. It comes as no surprise that creative Charlottesville is home to a bunch of clothiers, peddling everything from streetwear to high-end handbags. Read on to meet seven of these companies.
Photo: Courtesy Vinegar Hill Vintage
Vinegar Hill Vintage Clothing
Sarad Davenport started a clothing line two years ago and named it Vinegar Hill Vintage Clothing after the Charlottesville neighborhood that was razed in the 1960s. The name is also a tribute to Vinegar Hill Magazine, which is produced by Davenport’s friend Eddie Harris: all in all, a gesture of love and respect to the local African American community and the neighborhood where Davenport has family roots.
“I have oral history about Vinegar Hill that was told to me all my life,” he says. In creating his line of T-shirts, hats, and other items, he hopes not only to create a “bridge to the younger generation,” opening conversations about the important local history embodied in the Vinegar Hill name, but also to begin recreating a culture of black entrepreneurship that was damaged when Vinegar Hill was destroyed. “We want people to know there’s precedent for [African American business ownership],” he says. “We’re normalizing that; we want people to own their economic state.”
It’s still a family affair for Davenport to produce his garments with their clean, classic logos; he gets help from his mother and children, and sells online and through the Jefferson School African American Heritage Center. But he hopes the business will grow. “One day, my hope is we could have a full-fledged factory in downtown Charlottesville,” he says.
Charlottesville Dress Company co-founder Susan Stimart. Photo: Amy Jackson Smith
Charlottesville Dress Company
A shared love of vintage styles and unusual fabrics was the genesis of Charlottesville Dress Company, founded by Susan Stimart and Carla Quenneville. In May 2017, Stimart approached Quenneville, the former owner of Les Fabriques, to ask if she could repair Stimart’s vintage silk/wool blend suit. The two got to talking about vintage patterns (Quenneville had a collection) and African wax-print cottons (Stimart had just brought some home from Paris). “I said, ‘What if we started a company?’” remembers Stimart.
A year and a half later, CDC has developed a line of women’s styles (and men’s bow ties) plus the capacity to custom-design dresses, coats, and other garments. “We’ve had a great time with customers,” says Stimart—like the time a mother of a bride ordered a sari blouse to match a sari she already owned, to be worn at her daughter’s Sri Lanka wedding.
The company promises stunning fabrics, expert design, and all-local manufacturing (CDC is partnering with the International Rescue Committee to employ refugees as sewers). With Beth Pizzichemi working the media side, CDC sells online and at pop-up events and fashion shows. Their designs will hit the runway at a D.C. fashion show December 12.
Photo: Courtesy Dreamin’ Diamonds
Dreamin’ Diamonds
Local streetwear brand Dreamin’ Diamonds first said “Hello, world” inside the sneaker boutique 89Till back in 2016. Rob Gray, co-owner of the now-defunct shop, is the brains behind Dreamin’. He sees his line of T-shirts, hoodies, hats, and jackets as a way to inspire people, especially at-risk youth, to reach for the stars. “The dream represents the abstract,” he explains, “and the diamond represents the dream manifested.”
He enjoyed a taste of success himself when one of the company’s hat designs, featuring an altered version of the “Rugrats” character Susie Carmichael, caught on online. Dreamin’ Diamonds sold more than 2,000 of that particular hat, with Susie sporting rubies for eyes. Other designs feature a black panther with the words “Free Huey,” or the logo of a certain national donut chain tweaked to read, of course, Dreamin’ Diamonds.
Gray, an Albemarle native, handles design and every other aspect of the budding company. He sells through his website, and hopes to gain a retail presence to give his products wider exposure. “I’ve always been into fashion,” he says. “Your clothes kind of speak to your identity.”
Photo: Courtesy CFK Designs
CFK Designs
When Charlotte Friese was a student at the Savannah College of Art and Design, she did a project she calls “microscapes”: small wall sculptures with laser-cut plywood frames encircling abstract compositions of silk, organza, stones, and glass. Now, two years out of school, she’s pushed the micro-scape idea in another direction: a line of high-end handbags. With laser-cut plywood bodies and hand-felted flaps, the bags are a study in contrasts.
“I love the combination of something hard with something soft,” she says. “Nature is a huge inspiration. I love moss and lichen and wood grain.”
She also aims to source her materials ethically, sustainably, and, when possible, locally. Handbag designs start with sketches, then become CAD files that go to a local laser-cutting shop. Friese assembles the wooden bodies, sands and oils the wood to make it friendly to the touch, and adds a lining made of European machined felt for durability. Then she hand-felts the outer flap, a swirl of color inspired by a specific landscape (like “Painted Desert” or “Sedona”) that makes each piece unique.
CFK Designs, her company, is just getting off the ground; Friese has three juried craft shows on her calendar and hopes to work with local boutiques to sell her bags. She’s also developing a line of clothing. “I’m working with a natural dye company in Pennsylvania, so I can have multiple natural dye colors,” she says. “I’m thinking about expanding to other accessories, and hopefully a wider range of prices.”
Hovhannes and Gohar Ayvazyan Beaver. Photo: Amy Jackson Smith
Ayvazyan & de Beauvoir
In 2007, when Gohar Ayvazyan Beaver moved from Armenia to Charlottesville to be with her new American husband, Hovhannes, she wasn’t sure that she’d be able to put her fashion design education to work here. “Is this the right place for my business?” she wondered. But she managed to
produce a casual clothing line that was sold in a couple of local boutiques.
Meanwhile, the couple noticed the burgeoning wedding industry in Charlottesville. Having made a handful of custom wedding gowns, Beaver began to think about focusing her company, Ayvazyan & de Beauvoir, on bridal fashion.
That was about two years ago, and her home studio is now geared up for brides—full of white and ivory silk and lace, and featuring a rack of sample gowns in a variety of styles from boho to modern. Brides often come with photos of a gown they like, Beaver says, and then she takes them through the process of choosing fabrics, customizing the fit, and adjusting all the details of the design. “It’s fun to see the women’s reactions when they see it being custom made,” says her husband.
Word-of-mouth, and being a featured vendor on The Knot, have helped the Beavers grow the business, and they see themselves on an upward trend. Someday, says Gohar, “It’s my dream to make high-end couture wedding gowns.”
Photo: Courtesy Rosalba Couture
Rosalba Couture
Rosalba Valentino learned to sew at her mother’s knee and, in high school, started taking old clothes apart and putting them back together just to figure out how they were constructed. By the time she finished college at VCU, she was skilled enough at clothing design and sewing that she was selling her pieces in a Richmond boutique. “I was experimenting a lot,” she says.
Today, she has at least 15 years of professional sewing behind her and, between making alterations to wedding gowns (her bread and butter), she continues to create original clothing pieces under her own label, Rosalba Couture, out of her Nelson County studio. She makes handbags, accessories, jewelry—and lots of dresses. “I have a penchant for dresses that are not formal but are fancy,” she says, adding that she sees a need especially for mother-of-the-bride or -groom dresses that aren’t “too old” in style.
Wanting to bring a bit of badly needed eco-consciousness to the fashion industry, she specializes in custom reuse and updating of vintage clothing. “Most of my things are a combination of recycled or found clothing and new elements,” she says. “That collaging is my specialty.”
Photo: Courtesy Sunset Farm Studio
Sunset Farm Studio
Sarah Tremaine worked for years as an environmental consultant, helping to remediate a Superfund site. But on the side, she was a serious crafter—knitting, quilting, basket-weaving, and painting. She began selling her work at craft shows a dozen years ago and, more recently, “decided to buckle down and make it a real business, not just a hobby,” she says. “Now I’m into it 24/7.”
As Sunset Farm Studio, she focuses on two main techniques to create artful clothing. One is Nuno felting, which results in seamless garments made of a blend of wool and silk: tops, tunics, and dresses. The other is botanical printing: laying plant materials onto silk and using a steaming process to print the shapes of leaves and stems right onto the fabric.
Tremaine’s earlier career informs her new one—she tries to source natural U.S. fabrics when she can, and uses almost exclusively natural dyes. Those include bark dyes sourced from a local woodworker, walnuts she collects herself, and goldenrod from her garden.
Having sold through The Barn Swallow for some time, she’s now trying to expand through more craft shows and into the boutique realm. “I do a lot of custom work,” she says. “People like the idea of being able to buy something from the person who made it.”
The eight-harness loom that Andrea Korotky bought in mid-1970s New York is still a daily companion, standing in the corner of her Charlottesville studio. When the weaver sits down to the loom—which is roughly the size of an upright piano—her more than 40 years of experience are obvious in the fluidity and confidence of her movements. It’s hard to imagine a time when this energetic woman was unfamiliar with her craft.
“I’ve worked with my hands all my life,” she says. Originally a knitter, she began exploring weaving to satisfy an urge to “work really big.” At the time, the native New Yorker was working at Newsweek magazine, and took weaving classes on the side, eventually studying industrial textiles at Parsons and the Fashion Institute of Technology. She bought her loom and had it shipped to her New York apartment. Next, she remembers, “I dreamed of a studio.”
A move to Long Island came with a non-winterized studio in a converted barn, but when Korotky and her husband came to Charlottesville in 2002, she finally had the chance to create a year-round studio and a full-time business—teaching, weaving, and selling looms. A. Korotky Studio occupies a ground-level space at the back of Korotky’s Charlottesville home: a wall of windows, bamboo floors, and jazz on the radio.
This piece, titled “Red Talisman,” is a miniature tapestry (2 1/2 inches wide and 4 inches tall) in a series of pieces designed to be used as a cloth to carry in your pocket.
And, of course, there is Korotky’s work and materials and tools. Shawls, scarves, and other pieces hang on racks and drape over mannequins. The large loom holds a work in progress, and conical spools of yarn stand on shelves.
“It’s physical work, and I love that,” she says—and indeed, the act of weaving is a full-body activity, like the playing of a pipe organ: rhythmic movements that involve feet along with hands. Yet she acknowledges that before the actual weaving can begin, there are many hours of planning, designing, and setup. That’s one reason she keeps several projects going at a time (on a recent day, a black-and-white houndstooth piece was taking shape on a small tabletop loom, while nearby, a tiny hand loom held Korotky’s experiment with adding raffia to a weaving).
Another reason is her sheer love for yarn. “The materials are glorious,” she says, then launches into a detailed discussion of the business of sourcing yarn, which has changed considerably since her early days as a weaver. After years of being able to buy only imported yarns, she says, “American cotton and wool have come back.” She’s also interested in newly available hemp yarn, and even the equipment has gotten better. “Portable looms have come a long way. It makes it possible to get people hooked.”
Indeed, as a teacher, Korotky has shepherded many students into a long-term relationship with weaving, starting them on smaller looms. “Always, two things come together in weaving,” she says of the basic warp-and-weft structure of her craft. “You’re building a palette on which you will then place other color. You’re designing all the time.”
Recent projects include a table-runner-and-placemat set commissioned by a customer in Brooklyn, and the preparation of short courses on color and weave. Korotky teaches at the public library and one-on-one in her studio. She continually develops new ideas about color and pattern, which come to her from sources including dreams and odd glimpses of the world, like faded newspaper boxes at a bus stop.
She says weaving, for her, holds a lifetime of interest, beginning with its most basic quality: “the element of transformation. It is extremely interesting to me that I can take yarn and transform it into cloth…to make something you want to touch and use.”
Though Andrea Korotky has worked with her hands her whole life, it was weaving that satisfied her desire to “work really big.”
Joshua Farnsworth’s Earlysville woodworking school, Wood and Shop, is the result of a reignited childhood passion. Photo: Sanjay Suchak
Stepping into Joshua Farnsworth’s Wood and Shop schoolhouse is like wrenching open a time capsule. Traditional woodworking instruments, including saws and handheld shaving tools, dangle from pegs and hug the surrounding white walls. Walking among the homemade workbenches and rustling up a rush of sawdust, you slip back a few centuries.
Farnsworth began to home in on his handyman identity as a kid. The youngest of 10 raised on a farm in rural Utah, he learned to program resourcefulness into his daily routine (an inclination that persists). In fact, he repurposed the very room he teaches craft courses in, remodeling an old RV garage into a vast makerspace boasting soaring ceilings and brimming with natural light. This Earlysville lodge, an addendum to the lot he lives on with his wife and four children, backs up to the front porch, where he often shares conversation with students over supper. The Wood and Shop experience is homegrown in more ways than one.
Farnsworth’s fascination with traditional woodworking sprang from youthful admiration: He calls his brother-in-law, also an artisan, his “childhood hero.” Farnsworth, too, was propelled by a calling to create, later tinkering with woodworking in secondary school vocational classes (“That’s what I loved about growing up in the ’80s and ’90s,” he says). Even then, though, he couldn’t imagine this passion blossoming into a profession.
Photo: Courtesy Joshua Farnsworth
Fast forward past college and into the middle years of a real estate career. “The economy crashed out West, and I still had a company that I’d started with some people [in Virginia],” he says. After returning East, the other business buckled under similar pressures, nudging him back toward carpentry. “I think I was glad because it pushed me back into what I love doing,” he says.
But Farnsworth didn’t set out to make money from woodworking exactly. His inherent enthusiasm and thirst for intellectual exploration naturally propelled him to the peak of the niche scene. He accrued introductory materials, assembled a site, launched a YouTube channel, and recorded tours of renowned furniture makers’ and tool collectors’ workshops. The money followed.
Gaining ground
Farnsworth has amassed an international following, drawing in emails from fans dotting the globe. One eager student even jetted cross-country from Colorado to take a class with him in person. Farnsworth eventually found himself in the same space as his second childhood hero, Roy Underhill of PBS’ “The Woodwright’s Shop.”
Despite his indisputable celebrity, Farnsworth oozes humility. He credits his entrepreneurial spirit and situation in the present media moment as the primary factors driving his success. “When I first started getting really interested in hand tools, there weren’t a lot of resources available, especially online,” he says. “I jumped in at the right time.”
He also uses his platform to shine a light on other talented artisans who lack marketing and/or digital media skills. He offers other experts teaching slots at his school, features them on his site, and is expanding a digital marketplace to connect them with potential customers. “There are a lot of unsung heroes out there,” he says.
Farnsworth reflects on how his professional journey—though at times turbulent—resulted in this gorgeously unexpected outcome. “I guess everybody over time is kind of making a tapestry,” he says. “There [are] some dark threads—hard times in your life or struggles—but then at the end, I hope you look back and say, ‘The tapestry wouldn’t have been this beautiful without those times.’” He underscores the joy of teaching—of pushing people past fears of failure and granting them temporary refuge from the dizziness of the digitized world.
To Farnsworth, artistic integrity means simplicity, and beauty equals imperfection. He mainly focuses on Shaker furniture, highlighting how neutral designs transcend time and constantly oscillating trends. It is this trade he works to sustain, an act of cultural and environmental influence. Although only one man, he recognizes his ability to have an enduring influence—to usher in continued artistry, in-craft connectivity, and furniture functionality for years to come.
Chris Conklin’s Vintage Swings are made from double-planed white oak and hand-spliced rope. In other words, they’re handmade to last. Photo: Jen Fariello
Chris Conklin grew up in a family that liked to figure things out. He learned at an early age how to restore old cars and farmhouses, and he loved to make things from scratch. So when his photographer wife, Jen Fariello, came home one day from a photo shoot in Ivy and asked him to make her an old-fashioned swing like the wooden one she’d used as a prop at the shoot, he immediately began his research.
“I came up with my own design,” says Conklin. “I wanted nice wood and nice ropes, something that looked good and lasted a long time.” He built a swing and hung it from one of the 200-year-old oak trees in the island of their driveway, and an interesting thing happened. “Everyone who came over would gravitate toward the swing,” he says. “A lot of people don’t have a swing, and it turns out they really like the feeling.”
So Conklin, whose day job is art director at the Daily Progress, developed a prototype and made a jig, and began constructing swings in batches of a dozen. They take two to three weeks to make from start to finish (given time-consuming steps like varnishing, which takes one day per side per coat), but the end result is smooth, strong, and gorgeous. He offers single and toddler versions plus a tire swing, and sells them on his own website as well as on Etsy under the name Vintage Swings.
Photo: Jen Fariello
Conklin’s swings feature some unique elements, starting with their length. “Modern swings are very short,” he says, “but the ones I sell have really long ropes [he has had customers special-order 100-foot lengths], so you can swing high.” The wood is white oak, double-planked for strength, and the rope, which resembles old-fashioned Manila but is synthetic to resist weather and rot, is hand-spliced.
Conklin’s 9-year-old can attest to the enduring joy of a great swing. “My son loves giant pushes,” he says. “I run at top speed and time it so I can push him up over my head, and he goes so high.” Conklin and his son will never forget those moments, and neither will those Ivy homeowners, whose original swing rotted away two years after Conklin’s wife spotted it. “They called me and I made a new one for them,” he says. This time, it’ll be an heirloom.
