There are, apparently, plenty of reasons to head to a coworking space on a Friday night. Makeshift Collective, a brand-new crafting space, is the latest.
The makerspace is housed in ReCity, a nonprofit-focused coworking space off Durham’s Broadway Street. At a soft launch party in early October, the knitters, quilters, and sewists of the Bull City showed up, taking over coworking tables and mingling among new stalls in the adjoining ReCity Market, another new initiative that will give local artists vendor space to sell their work.
Samantha Lazar, a middle school art teacher and multimedia artist, found out about the space through social media and word of mouth. It was exactly what she’d been looking for.
“I’ve even been lighting candles and wishing for a place to teach near my house,” said Lazar, who said she has wanted a teaching space to share her knowledge with peers—and also just to craft somewhere other than her own bedroom.
“It’s a community builder,” she said of the makerspace. “It’s a place that we can all just escape from the chaos and do something with our hands.”
Makeshift is hard to summarize succinctly. The brainchild of Sharon Brener, Allison Dupuis, Katie Hatfield, Camille Barot, and Gabs Taccir, the initiative is a fiber-arts-first but all-crafts-welcome makerspace in which anyone can bring in a project to work on, join a class, or use the specialized tools and materials on hand. The space will be open Wednesday through Friday evenings from 5 to 9 p.m. through the end of January. After that, the founders aren’t yet sure where Makeshift will live, but plan to carry the collective forward.
The makerspace will host ticketed classes, free events, and open crafting hours on a pay-what-you-can model, with a $15 per day suggested donation, or unlimited access for $125 per month.
Makerspaces, or hackerspaces, emerged from the outsider-ish overlap of the tech and art worlds. Schools, libraries, and independent groups all over have invested in makerspaces, many focused on specific, equipment-heavy crafts, like tech, pottery, or woodworking. Triangle ArtWorks lists more than a dozen such spaces around the Triangle, though Makeshift will be the only fiber-arts-focused one on the list.
The point of makerspaces is collaboration and access, and that’s an ethos that unifies the Makeshift crew. Hatfield comes from the world of fine arts, where “crafting” was denigrated, and she is excited to break down divisions between academic knowledge and traditional craft.
“One of the main things about Durham that drew me here was the diversity of the area and the collaborative feel of the creative community here,” Hatfield said of her move to Durham 14 years ago. “I was coming from art school, where things didn’t feel so collaborative all the time. … To be in a space where people wanted to create together and uplift each other was really a wonderful thing to see.”
The group behind Makeshift met working at Freeman’s Creative, a Lakewood crafting shop that carries sewing and fiber arts supplies. All five founders are artists or crafters; with Makeshift Collective, their collaboration is a good synecdoche for the breadth and vitality of the Durham art scene.
Hatfield makes fiber-based fine art pieces for everyone from Durham neighbors to international hotel chains. Barot, originally from Paris, France, moved to the Triangle to pursue a Ph.D. in computer science before pivoting to a career in patternmaking for sewists and building a stained glass practice.
Dupuis, whose parents and daughter joined her at the soft launch, recently moved back to the Triangle after decades away and immediately began teaching needle felting. (Felt stabbing, she says, “takes rage from you and creates something else.”) Californian Taccir trained in medical and scientific illustration and now runs an independent graphic design studio.
Brener, the final founding member, is a weaver and product designer. She’s newer to Durham than the other members, having moved here from Austin, Texas, early last year, but they agree that it was her energy that brought them together. When she began floating the idea of a collective to her new Freeman’s colleagues, Dupuis said, they realized they all wanted the same kind of thing.
“It was a little mantra of sorts: We don’t want to craft alone,” Brener said. The group wanted somewhere to go after work—and after craft stores closed—to try new crafts without investing in expensive equipment; they also wanted to share their knowledge and learn from others. Chances were, they figured, that other people might want that kind of environment, too.
The crew came together around April, held their first tabling session at the Durham Farmers Market in July, and have been hosting crafting sessions and lessons all over Durham ever since.
In our conversation, a few core pillars of the project emerged: Building a crafting habit is good for people, especially in a time of increasing tech interventions, but it can also be lonely. Picking up new crafts can require expensive equipment or high material costs, and people need the barrier to entry lowered. Crafting is part of our cultural history, and we are at risk of losing some of those skills. Finally: Sometimes, when crafting, you run into a knowledge barrier that not even a YouTube tutorial can overcome. The group sees crafting as one antidote to overreliance on “digital, intellectual lives,” as Barot said.
“Right now, people feel very disconnected from what they’re making,” Barot said. “I think for us, giving people more control of what they’re creating, giving visibility into how things are made, and then having this human element back into it … Those are the three things that are really missing from just the creating process in general. We just really want to do something about that.”
“Over and over again [we’re] hearing from folks who are wanting to connect with others, even if they are introverted,” said Hatfield, adding that she has talked to many people who love to make things to decompress but don’t necessarily want to do it alone. “That’s what you can do here, and I think that folks are really excited about that.”
And any serial hobbyist can tell you that the delight of learning a new skill can quickly be eclipsed by the attendant material costs. The Makeshift team is addressing the material barrier to entry with donated supplies, as well as ones they’ve collected over decades. They have a loom, several sewing machines, tools for knitting, crochet, and other kinds of needlecraft. Rug-tufting guns, a Cricut, a 3D printer, a laser cutter, and an embroidery machine are already on the way.
“Over and over again [we’re] hearing from folks who are wanting to connect with others, even if they are introverted. That’s what you can do here, and I think that folks are really excited about that.”
katie hatfield, artist
Whenever Makeshift is open, they plan to have a founder member or volunteer present to help crafters understand how to push a Cricut to its limits or add a new stitch into their fiber-work arsenal. (“Sometimes you can’t get help digitally,” Dupuis said. “You can’t just ask AI to fix something for you when you’re knitting.”)
They’re also hoping the community itself is a self-perpetuating source of knowledge. Skills that aren’t passed down can easily die out. Brener spends a lot of time with the Triangle Weavers Guild, and is clearly bothered by the fact that she’s usually the youngest one there.
“My mom was never doing any kind of craft,” Brener said. “My grandmother did all of these things, and we’re starting to lose that generational knowledge.”
With that in mind, the Makeshift team is excited to see people bring traditional knowledge from anywhere and everywhere. They hope to welcome teachers who can bring years of skill, whether they have fancy credentials or not.
“Who gets to teach things and what are deemed as acceptable subjects for teaching incredibly limits and narrows the field of acceptable crafts,” Taccir adds.
At the end of the day, this is all an experiment for the Makeshift crew. And while they’re not sure what next steps are for the space, after January, they want to invite as many people as possible in to help them figure that out.
“We don’t have all the answers, but we’re gonna try our darndest to find a method to make this sustainable,” Brener said. “We think about this four-month residency as an invitation to the rest of Durham. We’ve got the space. The doors are open. Come and hang out with us. Come and craft. And if people show up, we will figure out how to make it real and permanent.”
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