Made by Hand

Left to right: Judith Hain, Bethany Formica, Betsy Hinsey, Martha Perkins, and Susan Smythe (standing).

Later this week, in a pretty Victorian house on Park Avenue in Swarthmore, a group of six women artists and makers will carry half the furniture upstairs. They’ll move the remaining tables and cabinets around until they’ve created just the right backdrop. Then they’ll begin arranging their work: jewelry, handbags, photographs, candles shaped like pinecones and beehives. Hat stands, tea towels, bowls made from salvaged wood. By Thursday evening, they’ll be ready to pour the wine, set out the cookies, and welcome the public. The fifth annual Handmade Holiday Home Sale will have begun.

Five of these women recently sat down with me around the dining room table at 322 Park Avenue to talk about their lives and their passions. Most of them are making things in the evenings after getting home from more conventional jobs, but the joy of using hands, tools, and imagination to create something new drives them to find the energy and the time. 

The work they’re making is lovely and often surprising. So are the stories behind the work. 

Not Ephemeral

Bethany Formica is one of the originators of the sale, which takes place in the house she shares with her husband, Conrad Bender, and their bearded collie, Gus. Formica is a modern dancer, choreographer, and teacher who has been performing for thirty years. More recently, she has become a woodworker, too. “The amazing thing about working with wood is that it’s not ephemeral,” she says. “At the end of the day, I can say, I made this.” 

Formica and Bender make bowls, boards, benches, and their signature “sawdust sirens”: acoustic amplifiers for cell phones made out of wood and old-fashioned phonograph horns. Years ago, Formica saw a similar amplifier in a magazine and figured out how to make one. She kept it around the house for years until the other sale originator, Martha Perkins, convinced her that other people would want them too. “Then we got obsessed,” Formica says. They get help from friends and neighbors who come by with horns they’ve found, or pieces of old trees. “We have a lot of wood fairies that drop things off for us. Everything [we use] is reclaimed or a gift.”

Bethany Formica, Conrad Bender, and Gus. Photo: Stacy Levy

The Elephant Lady

Judith Hain with an orphaned baby elephant at the Sheldrick Wildlife Trust.

Judith Hain has always loved elephants. “I’m known as the Elephant Lady,” she says. She takes wildlife photographs and also makes T-shirts and bags silk-screened with images from her pictures. 

Twenty years ago, Hain went to Kenya on an Earthwatch trip and got hooked. “I cried about coming home,” she says. She started going back to Africa every year. She made friends with people working there, and with elephants, too. On one trip to Nairobi she visited the Sheldrick Wildlife Trust (SWT), where orphaned baby elephants are rescued. Hain was told to watch for the orphaned elephants coming out of the bush. “You will see one little baby elephant. She’s seven months old and the self-appointed matriarch of the orphan group.” The other elephants waited until this individual, named Wendi, signaled them to come out for their milk.

Elephants are curious animals. The orphans at SWT would wind their trunks around the humans and try to get people’s hands into their mouths. The project manager told Hain to blow into Wendi’s trunk. “‘Then she will always remember you,’ he said.” So Hain did just that.

“18 years later, I was in Tsavo National Park,” she recalls. “I was standing on this ledge, and I saw this huge elephant start running toward me...I stood my ground. And the elephant came right up to me. It took its trunk and started with my face and smelled my whole body, all the way down to my feet. It was Wendi. She was saying hello.”

Unexpected Twists

Betsy Hinsey ran a successful jewelry-making business until the births of her two daughters. She assumed she’d resume the work once her girls were in school, but the children both lost their hearing by the time they were ready for kindergarten. “The creativity all went into raising them,” Hinsey recalls.

Later, Hinsey moved to Swarthmore and worked at the List Gallery at Swarthmore College. It was only when she retired from that job that she was able to immerse herself in making jewelry again — at least until the next surprise. A debilitating case of Lyme disease left her unable to focus in the way making jewelry requires. Undeterred, she found a class in wire-basket making. This new skill led to a fresh enterprise, and now Hinsey is making egg baskets, hat stands, and other elegant wire creations. 

A Different Part of My Brain

Susan Smythe

Susan Smythe learned sewing from her mother. As children, she and her sister sewed and made greeting cards from old stamps. One summer they made jewelry out of tiny brass plumbing washers. “It was funny when you kept going back to the hardware store to buy boxes of those things, and [the people who worked there] would be like: ‘People use two of those at a time.’” 

Later, Smythe started sewing costumes. She brought her sewing machine with her to college, and a couple of years after graduating got a job running the costume shop at People’s Light and Theater in Malvern. When her husband started his own theater company, they decided Smythe better get a “real” job: “So I ended up at Swarthmore College in the first of my careers, in student activities.” Eventually she became the resident designer for theater and dance. 

Then came the January day, a decade and a half in, when she realized she couldn’t do it anymore. “The thing about dance [costuming],” she says, “is that you’re making like fifteen of the same thing.” After she quit, she started Crooked Dog Designs and spent a few years traveling and experimenting. Now she’s back at Swarthmore College, as the Americans with Disabilities Act Coordinator, but she’s still making things. “It’s very much an outlet,” she says. “It’s a different part of my brain.”

Something More Her Own

Martha Perkins studied fine arts in college, but she was “always, always, always” making things on the side. Then she had children, which consumed her for a while. When she moved to Swarthmore, her energy went into her house. She taught herself to build and renovate: “I built the fence, and I built the deck. That was my outlet.” Eventually she worked for a company making jewelry, but she wanted to do something more her own. That’s how the holiday sale got started. 

Last year, Perkins opened a retail shop, Gallery on Park, in Swarthmore, selling the work of local artists. “What’s great,” she says, “is that I can decide I want to macramé a plant holder and put little air plants in it. If they sell, I’ll make more. And if they don’t, then I won’t.”

Making it New

Over the course of the years they’ve put on the sale, the women have launched new products and collaborations. They suggest ideas to each other and rearrange one another’s displays. “It’s very sweet,” Formica says, adding, “And slightly passive aggressive.” 

Everybody around the table laughs. None of them is wedded to keeping things the way they are. Reinvention, after all, is what got them here. 

Amanda Todaro, who was not available the day of this conversation, will also have work in the sale. She makes holiday pajamas, scarves, and knitting-needle holders.

The Handmade Holiday Home Sale runs from Thursday, Dec. 12, through Sunday, Dec. 15, at 322 Park Ave., in Swarthmore. For more information, look for the sale on Facebook.