Scott and I both wrote “Who are we?” posts around the same time and at different computers. After multiple games of Rock, Paper, Scissor to see whose we would go with, we are going to start with Scott’s. Enjoy. I’ll be back later.
Kristin
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Welcome!
We’re glad you made it here, our names are Kristin and Scott. We are a couple living in a 100 year old house in Tacoma, Washington with our three cats, a dog, and about a million tools, craft supplies, and books.
Welcome to our home.
This is our story.
The Artisan Couple
Professionally, we’re pretty easy to pin down: Kristin is an engineer with an MBA, and Scott is an author who helps run a writing center at a local college. That’s all sounds very focused and career-driven, but in our lives outside of work, we are what you might call serial skills collectors, with a focus on reviving or keeping alive the hand-made crafting skills that our ancestors took for granted.
We met back in college when Kristin was an engineering major at the University of Denver and Scott was studying graphic design at the Colorado Institute of Art. On paper, those are two people with nothing in common, but college is that weird time when the Venn Diagram of artists and engineers overlap, and we bonded over our love of crafts, the outdoors, and a shared unwillingness to be Just Our Job Title.
Kristin was more in touch with the design aspects of engineering, the space where science overlaps art, and Scott had a deep sense of the science and math that underpins design. In many ways, though we were puzzles to our classmates, we were perfectly suited for each other.
You see, from childhood, we have both been people who refused to be put into a specific box. Our role models were the so-called “Renaissance Men” who weren’t tied down to a single craft, who bridged the divide between the arts and sciences, who were devotees of all the sciences, crafts, and arts. Kristin stepped out of the mechanical engineering classroom and unwound with her sewing and fiber arts she learned from her mother and grandmothers, and Scott put away the paints and pencils to do applied geometry, better known to the layman as woodworking. From there, we overlapped and branched out into ever more new and diverse crafts.
When we finally settled down in the Pacific Northwest (a return home for Kristin, a new adventure for midwesterner Scott) we finally had the space to set up workshops and really devote some energy to this and after years of people asking us to share how we do some of the things we do, we decided to start this blog.
Put another way: We have ideas and we needed a place to put them, so here we are.
Kristin, the Engineer
- knitting/crochet
- spinning
- quilting
- costuming/sewing
- metalworking
- photography
Scott, the Writer
- Author of Howard Carter Saves the World,
- graphic design
- woodworking
- metalworking
- book arts
- food
- costuming/sewing
- amateur historian
The Artisan Residence 