Sam Tannenbaum

Hands To Work

“HANDS TO WORK, HEARTS TO GOD,” read an embroidery on my mother’s dining room hutch, tucked behind her spools of thread and stacks of phone messages scrawled out in hurried script. My mother always admired the dedication to quality and craftsmanship in Shaker design. Many of the furniture pieces in her home were Shaker style. Simplistic, yet functional, this made for a wise choice when raising seven children. As the youngest of the bunch, I got to stick around while everyone else headed off for their miscellaneous endeavors. I spent a lot of time in that dining room looking over the items that represented my mother’s love for crafts. This embroidery she made years before I was born with the saying synonymous with the Shaker lifestyle proved to me that there’s a rich history in craft practices. One that I was only beginning to discover…