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View ProfilesPublished July 26, 2023 at 10:00 a.m.
In the aftermath of the July floods, as Vermonters cleaned up wrecked shops and homes and looked for ways to help their devastated neighbors, artisans across the state thought about ways they could contribute.
Beyond lending a hand and donating their own money, they realized they had something special to offer: unique ideas that they could transform into creative objects.
Dozens of Vermont makers have crafted limited-edition works that they are selling to raise money for flood-related funds. You'll find them at fundraising events, weekend markets, maker fairs and, of course, on social media.
We decided to profile items from seven of those artists, who spoke of their desire to document Vermonters' remarkable dedication to community and willingness to step up and help others.
"It's so Vermont, just the fact that we all want to come together and contribute to make change," said Katie Babic, a printmaker who lives and works in Waitsfield.
So shop away — and do some good for our flooded communities in the process.
After the floodwaters subsided earlier this month, Steve Hadeka, who calls himself a "birdhouse architect," wanted to help. "I don't just have a lot of cash lying around," he said, "but what I do have are my birdhouses." He's raffling off a special edition of one of his more popular designs — the Palm Canyon Birdhouse, which would normally go for about $250.
Roughly half of the birdhouses Hadeka sells are custom-made, with price tags of $200 to $500 and materials worthy of a human abode — including Western red cedar, one of the most expensive woods. It takes about 10 minutes for him to craft each perch from little dowels, he said, so he speeds up the process by making several at a time.
Hadeka, who lives in Burlington, plans to select the raffle winner on Tuesday, August 1. At the end of last week, he had collected $500 with 50 bids.
"What is different about it is the color scheme and the plantings," he said of the Palm Canyon Vermont Birdhouse, which has green tones and yellow accents. Beside the birds' entrance and perch stand two potted palms. Like most of Hadeka's birdhouses, it looks like a cool place to live.
Ceramicist Kate Butt said she expected most sales of her Brave Little State mugs to come from out-of-state customers looking to support a flood-ravaged Vermont. Instead, Vermonters wanting to help Vermonters have been buying them — often four at a time, Butt said.
Butt had collected about $3,000 in proceeds as of late last week for the Farmer Emergency Fund of the Northeast Organic Farming Association of Vermont. Farmers are the backbone of the state, she noted, and she'll keep making the mugs as long as people purchase them.
"We all have talents. We all have something to offer," said Butt, a Burlington native who has molded clay since age 15. "And this is just what I could do."
The mugs come in three background colors: rose (lavender pink), mist (pale blue) and lichen (mossy green). In the foreground is the shape of Vermont with a red heart in the center. Each is handmade; Butt shapes the clay at her studio in Putney, fires it once, sketches and hand-paints the design, coats the design in wax to preserve it, dips the mug in glaze twice, and then fires it at a high temperature.
"I'm just going to keep throwing," Butt said of the effort. "I just think it's a long haul, what we're facing."
Jennifer Kahn and her husband were living in Johnson in 2011 when Tropical Storm Irene flooded the town. To raise funds for recovery, the jewelry maker created the sterling silver Repairing Vermont pendant, shaped like the state with a vertical gash down the middle, burnished in black. Across the divide, Kahn laid several tiny rectangles to suggest bandages or stitches.
After the July 10 floods, she went to her archives and posted the Repairing Vermont design on her Instagram, asking if she should resurrect the pendant. The response was overwhelmingly positive.
As of Monday, preorders of the pendant — which comes on an oxidized sterling silver chain — totaled more than $13,000. Kahn is channeling the proceeds to multiple funds, with the biggest chunk going to the Vermont Community Foundation's statewide VT Flood Response and Recovery Fund and smaller amounts to several grassroots campaigns.
To Kahn's eye, the bandages on the pendant resemble railroad tracks, calling attention to the marriage of the industrial and the organic that she sees at the heart of her metalwork — and the state's character. "In a crisis mode," she said, "Vermonters come together in such a beautiful way."
Katie Babic has designed many prints using the cut cross-section of a felled 100-year-old tree in her backyard. The center of the concentric rings in the cut, known as the heartwood, splits in three directions like a lightning bolt, which has special meaning to Babic. Her sister was killed by a lightning strike when she was 17 and Babic was 15.
Within that image of adversity lies beauty, Babic said, and the strength of a living thing that weathered many storms, as Vermonters have.
"It's a representative of Vermont and its essence," Babic said of the woodcut. "Each tree ring symbolizes the various layers of community that are coming together."
Her signature design with that woodcut is an outline of Vermont in black ink on cream paper. Babic is selling a 7-by-10-inch version — smaller than the usual sizes she makes — to raise money for two businesses. Both are owned by her friends and were decimated in the floods this month: Vermont Dog Eats, a local dog-treat bakery that opened its first retail shop in May in downtown Montpelier; and Southpaw Imaging, a small etching and engraving company in Barre.
As of last week, Babic had sold 95 prints, raising $4,000 for their recovery efforts.
Fruit and vegetable lovers may not be able to procure as much produce as usual from their local farmers whose fields flooded this summer. But they can collect artist Mellisa Heather Cain's watercolor depictions of vibrant purple beets, sumptuous carrots and voluptuous garlic bulbs and know they're helping some of those farmers get back on their feet.
Cain has designated the proceeds from sales of her 4-by-6-inch postcards for Diggers' Mirth Collective Farm, whose fields in Burlington's Intervale were fully flooded, and the Ishtar Collective, which supports sex workers and survivors of human trafficking, including those in the LGBTQ community. Ishtar grows crops on donated land and stocks a free community refrigerator in Montpelier for low-income people who have limited access to fresh food. Flooding trashed the contents of that fridge.
Cain's fundraising effort started the week of the floods with a floral-printed Vermont-shaped sticker for $10, which is still available toward the fundraiser. She's selling a postcard with a watercolor Vermont image, too. Each postcard comes with a couple of fruit- or veggie-printed stickers.
"People can show their Vermont love," Cain said.
The verdant tones of Rachel Browdy's watercolor of the Green Mountains offer a soothing, serene antidote to flood-related aggravation and turmoil. It's a scene that the artist re-created from a photo of a Stowe landscape in an effort to help fellow Vermonters.
"I wanted to represent the beauty of Vermont with our wide-open spaces," she said.
Browdy is a web and stationery designer who creates many wedding invitations. She works as a partner and shares studio space with Shelburne Gift, a consulting center for weddings and events.
Her fundraising print is the first artwork of her own that she has sold, she said. It's a way to generate funds "faster than I would be able to by myself" for the Vermont Community Foundation's fund and the NOFA-VT Farmer Emergency Fund.
By this past weekend, Browdy had sold about 30 of the 8-by-10 prints, which she will continue offering through Tuesday, August 1.
Artist Sunniva Dutcher came up with the funky-yet-sweet VT Love design years ago: a black silhouette of Vermont with red line drawings of hearts strewn across it. Since then, she has applied it to postcards and other objects, but now it bedecks a wearable canvas.
Besides supporting their struggling neighbors, Vermonters want to put their love of their state right out there on their chests, Dutcher said. The money from sales of her T-shirt will go to the Vermont Community Foundation's fund and the NOFA-VT Farmer Emergency Fund.
Dutcher raised almost $2,500 with her first run of shirts, then transferred her production to local screen printer Amalgamated Culture Works on Burlington's Pine Street.
The new run of shirts should ship in early August to those who preorder, she said. A few retailers, including the Joy Shop in Vergennes and Barrio Bakery in Burlington, will carry them, too.
The design sits on the backdrop of a natural-colored cotton tee. "I think it conveys the message in a really clean, simple way," she said. That message is "We've got connection. We've got community here."
The original print version of this article was headlined "Making Good | Seven Vermont artisan-crafted items for flood relief"
Tags: Arts News, 2023 Flood, flood relief, Pleasant Ranch, K.B. Ceramics, Jennifer Kahn Jewelry, Katie Babic Designs, HoneyBee Heather, RH Design, Sunniva Dutcher
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