9 Northern New England makers with exquisite creations

Maine

As a young boy growing up in Ghana, Ebenezer Akakpo found lines fascinating. At first, he thought that intrigue would lead him to follow in his architect father’s footsteps. His dad, however, had another idea. “He said that if I was interested in design, it was best for me to go into jewelry making,” says Akakpo. “In Ghana, we believe our elders are wiser, so we tend to take their advice.”

Akakpo’s studies took him from Florence, Italy, to the United States, where he eventually landed in Maine. Along the way, he discovered his adinkra—muse—traditional Ghanian symbols that represent universal values like bravery, abundance, hope, loyalty, and friendship. Using these symbols, Akakpo creates intricate, symmetrical designs for his distinctive jewelry.

More recently, Akakpo launched Maine Culture, which features tote bags, clothing, and home goods adorned with traditional Maine iconography. “I started asking friends, ‘What’s the first thing that comes to mind when you think of Maine?’ ” Akakpo recalls. “Now those symbols of Maine culture have become another part of my storytelling.”

For Maine maker Eric McIntyre, a woodcarving hobby that began in middle school has blossomed into a livelihood. In 2018, McIntyre interned at the Maine Coast Craft School in Bristol, where he tried his hand at heritage handcrafts like leatherwork, basket weaving, and chair making. That experience pushed him to set out on his own, and in the fall of 2021, he opened Village Handcraft in charming Wiscasset.

In his snug studio-meets-gallery, McIntyre creates and sells beautiful, useful items such as hand-carved bowls, wooden bud vases, and whimsical brooms with handles made from tree saplings that look like something you’d find in a fairy-tale cottage.

“I like to think of the shop as an experiment in experiential craft,” McIntyre says. “Whenever someone selects an item from the shelf, they’re standing 10 feet from where it was made. And they get to talk to the human who made it.” McIntyre also hosts visiting makers throughout the year to demonstrate their craft and sell their goods.

In 2012, Steve Ferguson set out to purchase a Maine-made axe as a gift for his forestry school–bound godson. To Ferguson’s chagrin, no such tool existed. Although the Pine Tree State was once home to upward of 300 axe-making outfits, the decline of the logging industry rendered the factories obsolete, with the last one closing in 1964.

To restore that tradition, Steve launched Brant & Cochran with his brother, Mark, and their buddy, Barry Worthing. The trio began restoring vintage American axes while researching historic axe patterns and working on a design for an axe of their own—a 2.5-pound carbon steel camp axe called the Allagash Cruiser.

Beyond making beautiful, Maine wedge pattern axes, Brant & Cochran continues to restore vintage axes while teaching safe axe use and sharing Maine’s axe-making heritage. “We’re trying to follow in the footsteps of the Maine axe makers that came before us,” says Mark Ferguson. “I think people are hungry to be connected to something real and tangible—something that’s going to last.”

New Hampshire

The heady aromas of leather and boot grease fill the air at Peter Limmer & Sons in Intervale, accompanied by tapping hammers and whirring power tools. On the walls, photographs show happy customers sporting Limmer boots on hiking trails around the world.

“Looking around, you just get a sense that there’s something bigger than boots that happens here,” says Adam Lane-Olsen, a former bank manager who apprenticed with owner Peter Limmer for 6 years before taking the helm in 2021.

Limmer’s grandfather, master shoemaker Peter Limmer Sr., came to the United States from Germany after World War I. In 1939, he was awarded the first U.S. patent for a “ski boot,” a design that evolved into the sturdy, custom hiking boots made by 3 generations of Limmers and still made by Lane-Olsen today.

Purchasing a pair of Limmer custom boots is a commitment—the backlog is 3 years long and when your number comes up, you travel to Intervale to get measured. But it’s all worth it. “Our business is multigenerational,” says Lane-Olsen. “We can go into our archives and pull out your grandfather’s foot tracing. Sometimes there are handwritten notes. It really connects people with their family members in a special way.”

Self-proclaimed Hot Glass Mama Jordana Korsen has been blowing glass professionally since 1992. After teaching glassblowing for more than 2 decades, Korsen opened the Hot Glass Art Center, glassblowing studio, gallery, and educational hub, in 2015 in New Hampshire’s Monadnock region.

Working with her husband, Nate Mastro, and fellow glassblower, Joey Adio DiBiccari, Korsen creates whimsical bowls, vases, and glasses that exude color and light. “I make work for people to use, not just to look at,” says Korsen. “The pieces I make are very approachable—very much for everyday use for the everyday person.”

The studio space, where Korsen works at a 2,100-degree furnace, is open to the public. She and her team are happy to share their process with visitors.

“Glass is interactive,” says Korsen. “It’s social. There’s a physicality to it. More important than the product is the process because it’s like a magic show.” The center also offers glassblowing workshops for individuals and groups, teaching glassblowing techniques humans have been using for thousands of years.

Spoon carver Suzanne Isabelle never considered herself a crafter. Then one day she watched her wife, Lisa Laughy, a professional artist and woodcarver, make a spoon out of applewood and thought, I betcha I could do that. Following that instinct, Isabelle picked up a piece of wood and gave it a try. “I loved it,” she says. “The feel, the smell—right away it just resonated with me.”

Today, Isabelle carves spoons from cherry and walnut but from also less traditional species like pussy willow, plum, and lilac, all of which she gathers around central New Hampshire. She’s even been known to dart across busy streets to procure spoon-worthy fallen limbs after a storm.

Because she carves from dry wood, Isabelle stores branches for a year before transforming them into her signature, silky-smooth spoons. “I never have a preconceived notion of what a spoon is going to look like,” she says. “It’s all kind of magical to me. Even after 10 years, I’m always surprised that I’ve been able to make something beautiful out of a stick.”

Vermont

When Ken Freeman took over for a local master wood turner in 2007, he started out crafting architectural pieces like balusters and porch posts. But when the economy tanked in 2008, a construction lull followed. Ken and his wife, Cyndi, got creative, pivoting from building elements to rolling pins. “Ken had made a few pins as gifts and people really liked them,” says Cyndi. “So we said, ‘Well, this seems like a good fit!’ ”

Freeman began by turning out traditional Shaker-style pins. The couple has since added 14 additional designs as well as a smaller version of the Shaker, perfect for a child. “We just started playing around,” says Cyndi. “The key is to make sure that the pin feels good in the hands.”

Ken hand-selects solid blocks of maple, cherry, and walnut from a local millworker and designs each pin according to the wood’s color and grain. The pins are then sanded smooth and burnished to gleaming finish with a beeswax–mineral oil blend.

Peter Dixon began making cheese in 1982, focusing on French styles like Brie and Camembert. Drawing on Dixon’s experience, he and his wife, Rachel Fritz Schall, founded their boutique creamery in 2013. “I said to Peter, ‘If you could do anything, what would you do?’ ” says Fritz Schall. “And he said, ‘I’d make small-batch, raw milk cheese from a single herd.’ ”

That herd, made up of Holsteins, Jerseys, and a couple of brown Swiss, graze on rugged pastureland at Elm Lea Farm, down the road from the creamery at the Putney School. Parish Hill produces cheese exclusively during grazing season, ensuring that the milk it uses is rich, fresh, and packed with a diversity of microbes. “Our milk comes from cows that dance in the grass,” says Fritz Schall. “We want it to be as lively as possible.”

Dixon and Fritz Schall are passionate advocates for natural cheese and the slow food movement. When they’re not making cheese, the couple offer workshops in farmstead cheese production at Westminster Artisan Cheese, the only place in the U.S. where professional cheesemakers can learn how to use natural methods for commercial production.

9. Mestiza Pottery, Marlboro

For dancer-turned artist Mucuy Bolles, pottery is a way to connect to her past. Born in Mexico, Bolles draws inspiration from her mother’s Mayan heritage and her father’s work as an ethnolinguist and archaeologist.

At first, she replicated pottery unearthed during archeological digs, incorporating ancient Mayan hieroglyphs and motifs into her pieces. Then she realized she could read the hieroglyphs with her father’s help.

“Now I create my own sentences and bring those symbols into the present,” Bolles says. “My work has become sculptural and abstract. I feel like I’m standing on the edge of a cenote (a natural sinkhole found throughout Mexico’s Yucatán peninsula)—you never know how deep those might be.”

To her delight, Bolles has found pottery to be as rewarding as dance. “It feels very exciting,” she says. “After dance, I was worried that I wasn’t going to find something as inspiring to me. But there’s something about clay—it has movement and motion, but then, when it’s finished, it’s caught in time.”