The birth of AmaranthineCraft
We’ve been friends since Gwyn stopped at the Montpelier, Vermont pizza shop where Larissa worked as a waitress in college. Gwyn and her crew finished that pizza faster than Larissa had ever seen anyone eat a pizza before!
The next day when Gwyn visited and enrolled at Goddard College, we were ready made friends.
The next time we both needed to move, we became roommates, and the rest as they say, is history. Life took us to opposite coasts, but children’s births and life events provided us with plenty of opportunities to visit back and forth and I think we adopted Skype early on just so we could talk like the Jetsons. : )
One evening at a burlesque show in New York City we ran into our good friend, a seasoned drag queen we knew from college. As we admired the gorgeous beading on their costume and headdress, they scribbled an address to a secret warehouse on the back of an envelope for us, saying we had to go check it out we would love it.
The next day we had some time in the city, so we decided to check it out, with no idea what we might encounter. A fashion industry veteran and his sharp witted daughter have teamed up to use their contacts to fill a warehouse with vintage deadstock of the highest quality. As we talked our way in, watching the eagle-eyed daughter deny access to several people, we started to get a feel for the vibrant personalities of the proprietors. We enjoyed listening to them banter with the intimacy of family and knew that these were people we could work with.
Wandering into the labyrinth of rooms, we were awed by the helter-skelter appearance, cardboard boxes seemingly oozing out of the walls. Items were well organized by type, so it was easier to find what we were looking for than we’d initially feared, but the all over the map appearance of the rooms made us feel like we were discovering buried treasure as we unearthed special boxes of unique finds.
After several fruitful hours of quality picking we spent another hour or so listening to the patriarch’s stories about some of the beads and embellishments we’d dug out of the haphazardly piled boxes. He remembers esoteric details about the use or acquisition of many of the items, and we love to pass these stories on to you with the selections we make for each months’ box.
We way over-shopped and had to hire a car back to our sublet, because it was too heavy to carry. We looked at
each other with the realization of what we’d done and AmaranthineCraft was born!
