Who Are We?
The Future Craft Collective is brought to you by Kathie Sever and Bernadette Noll with help from their good buddy and design consultant, Shannon Lowry.
Kathie is an accomplished seamstress, creator of Ramonsterwear Custom Western Wear, artist and mother of two who left the world of fashion mass production to pursue the more sustainable idea of creating custom western wear, each fabricated after extensive interviews and artistic consult with each client. Her journey from custom western wear into the world of art is beginning…now.
Bernadette is a writer, teacher, co-found of the Slow Family Movement and mother of four. She resisted most inclinations towards sewing until her mid thirties when she took a sewing class from a neighbor. It changed her life completely.
Shannon Lowry is the creator of Round Robin Press, artist, story writer, mother of two boys, creative visionary and photographer for Future Craft Collective.
It is a goal of theirs to nurture a love of handmade in their own children, and to encourage them to scrape, scrounge, dig, build and tread lightly on this earth by valuing second hand, and appreciating the materials presented to them.
Our Mission…
The Future Craft Collective is about inspiring children to become makers and create beauty, while simultaneously teaching them ways of minimizing our impact on this earth. We want kids to discover ways to create a world in which the belief in handmade looms larger than the messages of the marketing machine.The time has come to infuse our children with the message of appreciation, creativity and sustainability. It is our belief that this message can instill a great feeling of self worth and save a kid from a lifetime of seeking contentment through mindless consumption.
Future Craft Collective wants kids to understand the thrill of being a maker. We want them to enjoy the process as well as the finished project. We want to show them how to view materials through a new lens, seeing the supplies all around them as raw goods for their creative pursuits; scraping, scrounging, digging, building and creating. No matter what materials are utilized, we want them to appreciate the value in each piece.
Future Craft Collective hopes to offer families ways to build sustainable family connection through the process of sustainable crafting. By offering parents the tools and lessons towards appreciating both the process and the projects, and attuning both to their own needs and limits and those of their children, Future Craft endeavors to help families connect and truly enjoy their crafting time together.
From the idea, to the completion of a project, to showing it off in public, we want to teach children to recognize the value and pride and indeed the thrill in saying “Thanks, I made it myself.”*
*Thanks to Leslie Bonnell for that line!
