This week's tapestry segment gives us a look at the creative process behind an item.

All of us have in our homes a Broome Son House craft and Berea is a craft production house keeping the art of Appalachian broom making alive.

The owners say the artisan broom business is booming.

I tell people to think of us more like a bakery, like a really good French bakery.

Except what we're making in this case is usually brooms.

So the handle goes in here.

This gets attached to it with this wire here, and you kind of stand here and slowly wind this with your feet with the wire.

So that's what attaches the head to the broom.

And then this dries for a couple of days.

Wetting it just kind of helps it cinch down really tightly on to the head.

We make a lot of craft.

We focus on brooms and brushes in traditional Appalachian style, but we make everything by hand here in-house and are really focused on our sourcing and our quality.

Basically, the broom goes in here, the string gets wound around it, and then these two needles pass back and forth through the broom, stitching it back and forth while the broom slowly kind of manually gets kicked out of place.

So most of the brooms we use are made out of a type of sorghum.

It's called broom corn.

It was a craft that was really commonly grown here, but it pretty much left the U.S. due to a series of whether it's trade agreements or labor.

It had mostly moved to Mexico.

So we've been working the last four years with the Lizzie Stock Farm and Brice Baumann over there to bring back broom corn growing to the US.

And we're hoping by the end of next year to grow all our broom corn locally.

You can think of traditional craft as being made with natural materials, but I think a lot of people found when they started getting into craft that, you know, the plastics and those sorts of things had kind of infiltrated even traditional craft, filling in the gaps and finding the pieces and figuring out what you need to change in the process to bring back to being a natural material is something that our shop is really known for, and something that I obsess over.

That is just a really fun avenue of research that we do in our products.

This is called a turkey wing, and this solid weave like this is actually, kind of based off of the Kentucky Shaker's, did a solid weave in hemp.

This one is actually made out of recycled t shirts, fibers.

So that's the original colors of the shirts woven into a fiber.

So it's 100% recycled cotton.

We use kind of in the traditional style.

People are so excited right now about handcraft, and I think it's an echo of what people saw in the 1920s, just as technology at the time was surging.

You saw the Arts and Crafts movement.

So here we see technology taking a big role in people's lives and a real desire to feel connection again and work that resonates a handmade thing, as most of us hopefully have gotten to experience, feels a little different than something completely made by machine.

And that quality is something that's hard to put your finger on.

But I find people are really drawn to it, and I think there's a really strong craft legacy here in Kentucky and here in Berea especially.

And I think there is a place where you can have a successful shop that is American made, American sourced or American grown from here that can thrive and pay people well and kind of do all the things.

And it's kind of an open question mark, like, can we pull this off?

Can we pay people above living wage but still make handcraft?

And I think the answer is yes.

But the mission is to connect people to the land through craft, through our work, and kind of see where we can go from there.

Son.

House craft is primarily an online retailer, but the storefront will be open for the summer very soon.