Makers of the USA

"I am a pastry chef, classically trained. I've been in food now for 14 years. I will say I've been cooking and baking since I was very little I grew up on a farm in Florida and always had really fresh produce and meat as well to use to cook with. And a lot of time with my mother in the kitchen," said Chef Tara Cannaday, head chef of Pot + Pan, "I was born in Florida and stayed there until I was 12...

"My craft is currently a collection of sustainable clothing, where each design springs from the meaning of a particular poem. I did an MFA in poetry. I went back to doing that when I turned 50. After my experience there I just started to see some of the poems in physical form as garments," said Catherine Fisher , poet and fashion designer who is located in Brunswick, Maine. Catherine is originally...

"We probably owe it to the Portland music scene as an entity, mostly, you know, we all knew each other. It's a tight, tight-knit scene. It's a very supportive scene. There were a lot of great clubs that we all knew when we were getting started and we'd all been playing in the clubs and working in the clubs and spending every free second in places like Big Easy. So the scene was a great place to pu...

"We run the Red River Camps up in Northern Maine, it's a traditional sporting camp. But that kind of means that our craft is sort of twofold threefold, actually, when we throw Gloria into the mix. The first is that we tried to craft the northern Maine experience for people, you know, maybe new people who haven't fly fish before, or new people who haven't even been to Maine before. We had some folk...

"I love burning candles. I've always got one going and then I kind of you know started doing some research into how to live like a healthier lifestyle and how to kind of clean up your life. One of the articles that I read was like, oh, you know, candles that have paraffin in them are bad for you. So I never realized that and then I got down a rabbit hole. And this was, mind you at the beginning of...

“I started through studio art and just being creative and wanting to spend some time outdoors and allow for that to be done in a very grounded and observational way. So I have studio art practice and I'm also a Maine guide. I've been an angler for a long time. But mostly that's a way again to be outside and be looking around and feeling very innately human surrounded by nature. So I guide people f...

We've been in business for over four years and honestly, the craft of it has kind of progressed over time. When my husband and I started, it was literally just in our backyard. We had a bunch of pallets laying around and we were like, oh, we could make something cool with that. So he was like, just give me a little, you know, an afternoon and he used the jigsaw and he cut out a bunch of Maine sign...

“I build rods for Maine Fly Company and I definitely fell out of touch with the outdoor industry through my late teenage years. Now that I've kind of settled down in Maine for a while and have a passion for fly fishing, I really wanted to get back into that community,” said Izzy Hutnak, rod smith for Maine Fly Company. Izzy grew up fly fishing as she was taught by her father and had gone across Ma...

When I first heard of fly fishing I always thought of it to be a man’s sport but when I looked into the history of the sport a bit I discovered that women have been involved in fly fishing since 1496 —the way anglers tie their streamer fliers is attributed to a woman and the ‘bait and switch’ method anglers use to catch billfish on the fly came from a woman. And a woman was one of the most promine...

"Well, I grew up in Auburn, Maine, and at 10 years old, I announced to my mother, I was going to the Rhode Island School of Design to be a fashion designer. I have no idea where I'd ever even heard of Rhode Island School of Design. But anyway, I did. And then, growing up in Maine, in those years, there was no art after sixth grade. So I took classes wherever I could. And anything in school from me...

"We are jewelers and hand engravers. Well, more specifically, Matt is the jeweler and we're both hand engravers. He actually found his start in high school," said Lauren Tuggle. "Yeah, I was lucky to have a cool jewelry program in high school. We were fortunate to learn just a bunch of different techniques, we have a class where you would pick a different technique like enameling, piercing, or jus...

"I had an amazing geology teacher that took us mining for crystals in Herkimer, New York for Herkimer diamonds, and fluorescent stones in Franklin, New Jersey, and this sparked a lifelong love of gemstones. I started collecting and mining all over the place including Maine, New Hampshire, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, Pennsylvania, kind of everywhere on the East Coast, even over to Ar...

"I wanted to be an artist so I went to school to study art, primarily painting those years ago. Then, over the course of my career as a student. Eventually, things started to change, and then I just sort of fell in love with the process of making miniature sculptures eventually leading into jewelry, which is what I currently try to make, I consider them miniature wearable sculptures," said Gerardo...

"I started making jewelry about 10 years ago, I'm 30 now, so I started around 19. A friend of mine, I had no idea that I would be led down the jewelry path. I don't have any family that's really ever done jewelry. I have some family that maybe have done some art stuff, but nothing really as a full-time job always as a hobby. A friend of mine brought home a wire-wrapped piece of jewelry from a musi...

"I was actually going to school for marine biology at College of the Atlantic, in Bar Harbor and I was kind of not feeling the classes I was taking. I wasn't really interested anymore. I just got burned out with the sciences. I started just kind of looking at things and so I went to a gem show down in Massachusetts and I walked in and I was like, oh my goodness, I was just blown away by all of the...

“As a child, I collected costume jewelry, and I would put it in ice cream cone boxes because they were festive and colorful. When I continued on in my education, all of my teachers recognized my talent and my gift and they kept coming to my parents saying we think this child needs art lessons. My mother's friend has her master's degree in painting and she said that I can teach Paula. I started ini...

"Not only am I an artist, but I'm a psychoanalyst and a medical hypnotist and in psychoanalysis, your earliest memories are considered very important. My earliest memory is making something with clay with my hands and as I was making this little thing, a little horsey or a cow or whatever it was. I was maybe four years old and I, I was thinking to myself, this is wonderful. It wasn't that I though...

"I would consider myself an artist before a jeweler but my medium is obviously metal. I started as a means to travel around with these bands that I like and make money on the side. That's when I was still doing wire wraps and everything like that. The main band I traveled around with was Phish. I did a bunch of years on tour with them and sold my wire wraps and just slowly transition into what I d...

"The Maine Mineral & Gem Museum is a fabulous place nestled in one of the most gorgeous little parts of Maine. We are a small town that focuses on a very particular part of Maine's history. Maine has had mining happen here since the early 1800s and we tell the story of that particular part of Maine's history and also a little bit about Maine's place in the universe as well. We are probably the onl...

“David Dorr, the Executive Director at Somerset Career and Technical Prep, approached myself along with the other surrounding schools to the tech center, and just asked, does anybody have any space and I happen to be in my office. I quickly responded and said, we have some space come on up. And I think within 24 hours, Dave and I were meeting in this area here, which was a combination of a little...

"I'd never heard of Smith Island, I'd always heard of Tangier Island. And when my kids were little, my husband said let's take the kids to Smith Island. And I was like, well, where's that? So he brought me here and I fell in love with the place," said Kathey Jones, owner and baker at the Smith Island Bakery .  Kathey Jones grew up in Baltimore and always had a passion for baking. She didn't think...

"My Dad took it to the commercial level. He grew up doing a more fun way to crab which is called trout lining. My Dad worked for the gas company, Baltimore Gas and Electric for years, and then he started taking into commercial with the pots. He’s being crabbing since the 90s. But growing up, he took both myself and my sister out. He used to supply other crab houses as we have now. We always talked...

"We were actually founded by two folks out of the engineering department of Digital Equipment. They were phenomenally big in computers early on, and had a very large manufacturing facility in Augusta just 10 miles from here. Throughout our history, we have had one big event that really moved us along, and early on at AMI was Stanley Toolworks. They're the Stanley tools that we still hear about and...

“First off I love that you're using that word, craft because it has to do with both the art and creativity, but also the intention and the precision behind it as well. So kudos to you for using that word. So I am a chef cook and I alternate back and forth between those two. But sometimes say I'm a cook that just makes good food. I'm also a writer and I write cookbooks. I also write my blog and I u...

"Whether you're a writer, a runner, a gardener, whatever it is, you have to have somewhere to put those things so that they don't stay inside of you and for me, whether I want it or not, it was music. It just saved me along the way and it still does. I find it really interesting and then I was trying to do other things, which were fine, but then other things kept coming from me musically. Even if...