Brooms

There are some traditions that are universal. Here, we highlight a single craft — and how it’s being adapted, rethought and remade for the 21st century.

- Deborah Needleman

I NEVER IMAGINED a scenario where I’d be sitting in an Appalachian folk school with a half a dozen strangers handcrafting brooms for a week. Consider how often you think about brooms (probably never), subtract a bit, and that is how often I had thought about brooms before a crisp week in February last year that turned out to be one of the most satisfying of my life.

I had been struck hard by the desire to make things. Not just any things, but simple, useful things fashioned from the materials of nature. I wanted to trade scattershot multitasking for a way into engaging with the physical world. But brooms? Negligible items, best handled by someone other than me. Unlike pottery or basketry, a broom never struck me as a particularly beautiful utilitarian object. A weeklong course, however, was on offer at a place called the John C. Campbell Folk School in North Carolina. So I went.

Each morning, the mist rising over the mountains, I walked from my cabin to the studio where my cohorts and I spent the day. Sometimes talking easily and intimately, other times working in contented silence, we sorted and soaked broom corn (a species of sorghum), sanded branches for handles and attached the grass stems, one sheath at a time, to the handle.With string released from a manual treadle at our feet, we bound the grass at the point where the tasselled part meets the stem, by pulling the string taut and rotating the broom toward ourselves to secure each piece before adding the next. We sewed the finished heads flat, and plaited the stems in a motion that, like building the broom up, felt awkward and compelling.