We are a mother-daughter team of creative minds passionate about family, sustainability, and all things crafty. I’ve spent the last 11 years doing biomedical research and teaching science to students ranging from middle school age all the way up to PhD students. I love to nerd out about the latest scientific discoveries and to encourage a love of learning in others. Mom recently retired from a 31
year career serving our country in a variety of capacities, and she enjoys volunteering with local community theaters and high schools creating costumes for their productions and teaching youngsters to sew. In 2020, just before the Covid-19 shutdown, I was blessed to become the mother of beautiful twin girls. Although there has been such a dark side to the pandemic, our time in quarantine had a silver lining. I had the opportunity to spend a lot of time with my babies, and realized that I love being a mother and want to continue being able to focus on helping them grow into the best humans they can be. Mom also had the chance to take care of the girls full time and fell in love with being a grandma. I guess you can say we just got a reminder that family is everything. It didn’t take long for discussions of working for ourselves to begin. We tossed around several ideas but ultimately decided that we wanted to be able to work from home so that I can be with my kids. We also wanted to create a business that not only cared about sustainability from the perspective of looking out for our planet, but also that was sustainable itself and could be eventually passed down to my girls. Thus Needle and Brush Studio was born. Then we discovered cork leather. Mom and I have both always loved all sorts of crafty things, but she is a particularly skilled seamstress so fabrics are a favorite medium around here. Cork leather is soft, lightweight, durable, unique, versatile and what’s better is that it is an incredibly sustainable material. We have fallen in love with it, and we think you will too! Some of the products you see in our store are 100% handmade by us, while some are items that we’ve purchased. Still others are items the manufacturer considered defective (i.e. a purse missing a zipper or strap, a torn seam, or a hole in the lining, etc.) or they are the last of a line. Many of these items would have otherwise been discarded and ended up in a landfill. Given our goal of sustainability and our sewing skills, we buy these items and repair or modify them in some way to make them beautiful and functional again while also diverting them away from the landfills! We continue to explore our love of crafting and working with different media, so if cork isn’t your thing or if you have an idea for using it in a different way, contact us for custom orders! Also, be sure to check back often as we will continue to grow our collections (free standing lace for the holidays, anyone?).
