*** This story appeared in the Bristol Herald Courier on Sunday, Dec 23, 2007. ***
ABINGDON, Va. ? The artisan center planned for Exit 14 will be the area'sbiggest, but it won't be the first.
The Cave House has been helping local artisans market their works since1971, said Donna Price, who manages the craft shop in a Victorian house onAbingdon's Main Street.
"You don't have to wait for the artisan center," Price said. "We're alreadyhere."
Headquarters for the Holston Mountain Arts and Crafts Cooperative, the CaveHouse Craft Shop was opened to help local artisans get a fair price for theitems they produce.
"It was started out of necessity, making quilts and making your own dolls,"Price explained ? and at that time quilts sold for as little as $25.
"You couldn't go to Wal-Mart and buy a doll or buy a quilt, and people inthis area didn't realize that people from outside the area would pay themgood money for what they'd been doing, what they'd learned to do aschildren."
Now, the shop sells the work of 123 artisans, many of whom do their craftsfull time. Price said she's not sure what effect the artisan center willhave on the Cave House, but she's hopeful it will be positive.
"We're hoping that we can work hand in hand and when folks want to see moreof what's at the artisan center, they can come and see us," she said.
These are a few of the area artisans who are already selling their work atthe Cave House.
AN HISTORIC CHAIR
Ashley Stephenson is a former construction foreman with a master's degreein Ancient Near Eastern and Judaic Studies ? and he makes chairs.
His workshop at his Abingdon home is still full of power tools used incarpentry, but he uses traditional hand tools to carve furniture fromhand-split logs.
"I was impressed when they said that they had draft horses that hauled themout of the woods," he said of the logs he uses.
He said it takes about two weeks to make a chair from start to finish -first shaping and baking each piece, then shaping the joints and finallyfitting together the pieces and covering it with three coats of atraditional finish.
"You can see drawknife marks in it ... it beckons people to touch it," hesaid of the finished product. "The seat is just, it flows, it's got a verynice shape that really a machine couldn't get."
Hand-drilling a hole at the correct angle is a challenge, but Stephensonsaid a chair's legs are the most difficult part; because the parts arebaked, they absorb moisture, creating a permanent joint without glue.
"Once you hammer them together they're not coming apart," he said, "so ifyou make a mistake it's irreparable."
ANCIENT SECRETS
James Lang says he used the Internet to first learn about a craft that wasdone in ancient Egypt and later guarded from the world on a secret Italianisland. It's glass-blowing.
"I've always liked to play with fire when I was a little kid," Lang said."I saw online how they were offering a class in lampworking [a type ofglass-blowing] in Santa Cruz, Calif., and I flew out and took the class."
Now, after a few more classes and seven years of practice, he sells hisproducts wholesale to shops around the country and makes a living shapingglass with his lungs in a studio at his Johnson City, Tenn., home.
"Basically, I have a big torch on a table ... basically what it consists ofis me using the torch to manipulate rods and tubes of solid or silicateglass," Lang explained.
"I do a lot of Christmas ornaments, a lot of earrings and jewelry,pendants. I do some wine glasses and champagne flutes. I do kind of wildbottles and different vessels, marbles, tons of things really ... justabout anything glass you can really think of."
RED-HOT POTS
Phil Holmes makes pottery with a process he says was popularized byBuddhist monks in Medieval Japan.
What distinguishes raku from other pottery is the firing process. Insteadof being allowed to cool slowly in the kiln, the pots are removed red-hotand placed in with combustible materials that react to change the color ofthe pottery as it cools.
"You can take the same glaze and get a whole range of colors by what you doto it after you take it out of the kiln," Holmes said.
A retired college professor, Holmes has been doing raku pottery for morethan 40 years and first used it as a teaching tool.
"When I first started teaching, I would always build a raku kiln becausethere's a certain immediacy to it," he said. "There was a sense of giving astudent the total process in a very short period of time ... so when Istarted teaching is when I really started doing raku on a regular basis."
He says the process results in cracks in the glaze that makes the surfacevisually interesting.
"The flaws, or cracks, are really kind of a record of the process," Holmessaid. "More and more, the mark of the process or some record of how it wasmade is left to show because it gives the piece in particular a veryspecific character."
TRADITION WITH A TWIST
Lin Dutton uses wood-burning tools to carve designs into gourds, which shesays she started carving and painting because they're cheap and available.
"My mom always had them around when I was a kid, and in this part of thecountry, a lot of people grow them for birdhouses and stuff," Dutton said."They're plentiful and they're cheap, and it's kind of nature's canvas. Youjust pick out one that looks good and go to town on it."
She says imagination is what turns a simple gourd into a work of art.
"I do pretty good, but it's not really about the money; it's the fact thatI really enjoy doing it, and if I didn't sell them, there'd just be toomany cluttering the place up," Dutton said. "What I find fascinating withit is that you can do so many different things with it, and it's such ahumble little thing to begin with, just a little gourd."
REVIVING HISTORY
Marty Dunn began weaving baskets in 1992, when she returned to the areaafter 40 years away.
"It's just something from the past that died down for a little while, andnow it's coming along real good just like some of the other crafts," Dunnsaid of basket making. "People like to keep a traditional type thing going."
She said she uses patterns to make her baskets, just as in knitting orcrocheting.
"It's important because people are getting so far away from that timeframe, everybody's so busy and so rushed nowadays," Dunn said oftraditional crafts. "It's nice to sit down sometimes and do a craft orsomething and bring back what our forefathers did."
