Our State’s Made in NC Awards celebrate the talent and creativity of North Carolinians. Click here to check out all of 2023’s winners!
Luthier Matt Schiemann transforms old tobacco barn wood into objects whose beauty you can see — and hear. photograph by Charles Harris
Towering stacks of wood, rescued from old tobacco barns, are piled high against the walls of Matt Schiemann’s garage shop. With the dexterity of a craftsman who works with his hands for a living, the self-taught luthier carries a slab of reclaimed pine to his worktable. He can use this wood for the body of a Telecaster-style guitar, he says, and maple for the neck. The son of a potter, Schiemann worked in the ceramics industry for 20 years in Florida before switching gears. After the pandemic, he left his job at a pottery studio and moved to Fuquay-Varina. “I was ready to start something new,” he says. “I play guitar, but I realized that I enjoy and spend more time painting and customizing them.” As he constructed one guitar and then the next, he found that he had a passion for building the instruments by hand. Today, he produces guitars from the recycled bones of tobacco barns around the state. The Buckaroo T-Style Electric Guitar, made using pine from the rafters of an 80-year-old barn taken down in Kipling, is paired with a quarter-sawn roasted curly maple neck. “Each guitar gives the wood a second life,” Schiemann says, “and preserves a rich piece of our state’s history.”
Photography courtesy of Carved by Jeff
When Jeff Lewis stands at the wood lathe in his basement workshop, he thinks of the generations of woodworkers who came before him. He thinks of his late father, who ran a workshop in Henderson, and of the award-winning woodturners whose work influenced Lewis’s style. Lewis, who worked as an accountant for more than 30 years, started making furniture in his spare time. After retiring in 2022, he expanded his skills with wood turning and learned about segmented turning, the art of creating varicolored geometric designs on wooden vessels. For the vase, Lewis chose a mix of sapele, bloodwood, wenge, and maple woods from a supplier in Gibsonville, incorporating turquoise-colored diamonds — made with a colored resin epoxy — to imitate jade.
Photography courtesy of Traditions Pottery
On a 200-year-old farm in Caldwell County, Janet Bolick-Calhoun and Michael Calhoun handcraft ceramic wares as Janet’s family has done for six generations. “I learned to throw when I was 5 years old,” she says. “It’s my family’s livelihood, and as I grew, I wanted to do it even more.” Her husband, Michael, though new to pottery, quickly picked it up and started making face jugs after they married in 1986. Together, they practice Bolick family techniques, including digging and pulverizing their own clay through an old brick mill. “Having our own clay recipe gives us colors you may not see everywhere,” Janet says. Most of their pottery is fired in electric kilns, but some pieces, like the Santa jug, are wood-fired, making the glaze colors appear more vibrant.
print it
North Carolina is known for many things, but nothing more important this week than the qualities of endurance, resilience, and hope.
By day, this adventure park in the Triad is a fall festival to die for. By night, the undead come alive for Halloween tricks. Welcome to one man’s vision of year-round merrymaking.
North Carolina’s border dances across the mountains as it traces four different states. Life here can be more remote, but good neighbors are never far away.
The Blue Ridge Parkway stands out among America’s national parks: Unfurling across six Appalachian mountain chains, it connects dozens of rural communities and binds together generations of families through shared memories.
