Brooms
Pot Scrubber
The Pot Scrubber broom is the perfect broom or brush for scrubbing your cast iron skillets and dutch ovens. They’re about 4 inches in length, bound tightly with wire and wrapped with jute or sisal twine to give you a good grip. They also work great for scrubbing spots in carpets or scrubbing the dirt from a pair of boots or shoes. Great for the kitchen at home or to pack with your camp cookware when you go to the deep woods. You can get these wet, but they must be hung up to dry after.
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Cake Tester
The traditional way to tell if a cake is done. How do I know this? My grandmother did it. Not enough proof for you? I’ve got a cookbook (Ideal Cooking) published in 1902 that specifically says to test a cake, insert a broom straw. If the straw comes out clean the cake is done. If it’s sticky, keep on baking. My cake testers are about 6 inches in length, bound with wire and plaited with stalk or reed. Why so long? So you can test cornbread or muffins and not burn your fingertips! Even if you never break a piece off to use as a cake tester, it’s a wonderful, unique, functional decoration to add to your kitchen.
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Silker
Several years ago an elderly lady came into the shop and requested a custom broom. She said her mother used a broom to clean the silk off of the sweet corn and she described it as being smaller than a whisk with a longer handle that could be held like a fat paintbrush. She watched me make a couple brooms until we found one that would work for her and the Silker was born. I’ve since added a scrubber to the other end so you can also use it on your taters! These are about 10 inches long with an inch of scrubbee at the top, a 3 inch plaited handle and a 5 inch sweep. These small whisk-like brooms are also great at getting crumbs off countertops and tables. I’ve also been told that some folks use ‘em for picking up threads when quilting. Beautiful, unique and functional! It’s bound with wire, plaited with stalk or reed and twine, and stitched once with twine.
Whisks
The perfect broom to keep in the car, with the dustpan or on the workbench. My whisks are typically about 12-inches in length. They weigh about 5 ounces and are bound with wire, plaited with stalk or reed and twine, and stitched once with twine.
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Turkey Wings
Turkey Wings are great brooms! Not just because they look nice. Not just because they sweep nice. They also have a great story behind them! For centuries brooms were round. They were also made out of twigs and sticks. It wasn’t until the late 18th century that someone got around to trying to make brooms out of broomcorn (which, of course, wasn’t called broomcorn at that time). Prior to broomcorn brooms, getting small stuff off of counter tops and tables and around fireplaces was a chore and then some unless you were lucky enough to have a feather broom – like the preserved wing of a turkey. When broomcorn brooms became popular, one of the first styles was made to mimic the turkey wing – bound down one side like a wingbone and fluffed on the other like the feathers. Very versatile, pretty and durable, my Turkey Wing brooms are bound with either wire, strong twine or leather and plaited with reed, stalk or leather and fanned forward to offer two sweeping profiles – the flat like a whish and the point for corner, crevices and the like.
Tom Turkey Wings
Since the Turkey Wing broom (above) is flipped forward and left unstitched, I thought it only fair to make things gender balanced by tying a Tom Turkey Wing. This broom is bound just like the Turkey Wing, but is flipped back, is a little larger, has a longer handle and can be gripped from above like a brush. The single row of stitching helps this unique broom keep its shape. Sometimes, I’ll even tie a Tom Turkey Wing on a stick creating a one-of-a-kind hearth broom or a broom useful for sweeping crown moldings. Of course, as is the case with all my brooms, if you don’t want to use it, that’s OK. It doubles as a work of art hanging on the wall.
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Hearth Brooms
You’ve seen the sets that go with fireplaces. If you’ve got a fireplace, you probably have a set. You know… the tongs, the small shovel, the poker, the stand, and that awful thing that almost, but not quite, fails to sweep up any ashes at all and smells terrible when it singes and lasts about 3 months before it’s worn down to the nubbins. It wasn’t always that way and it doesn’t need to be that way. I make hearth brooms to match any set of fireplace tools*, or you can choose something unique – perhaps with a carved face on the handle or a custom iron handle from our local blacksmith. Once the handle is selected, the colors can be selected, too. That way your broom can be proudly displayed next to your fireplace in your living room or den as an accent instead of being hidden in a corner somewhere. The broom is made by tightly binding the broomcorn to the handle using wire and then plaiting over the wire with reed or stalk or leather and twine. The broom also receives two rows of stitching and a leather thong to hang by unless the hook is built in which is often the case with an iron handled broom).
*If you want an exact match, you can supply the handle and I’ll tie a new broom on the old handle
Kids Brooms and Parlor Brooms and Kitchen Brooms, oh my
These brooms are the easiest to recognize. Their shape is what most people think of when they think of a broom. that is to say a triangle of brush at the bottom of a long stick. But there’s so much more to a broom than a brush a stick. First, consider the length of the stick. Perhaps you want a small broom you can tuck out of the way in an RV or something your child or grandchild can use alongside of you while you sweep. A long heavy broom won’t work real well, will it? For those times, I make Kids Brooms with a 24-inch long handle and about 10 ounces of broomcorn. Or maybe you’re a traditional kind of person and want a pretty, medium duty broom in the parlor (when I first started making these, people got confused – seems no one knows what a parlor is anymore, so I called ‘em standard kitchen brooms) to supplement the big, heavy duty broom in the kitchen. What about a broom on the porch and another in the workshop. Don’t worry, I’ve got you covered! The parlor broom is made with a 36-inch handle and a full pound of broomcorn. Finally, the full-sized broom is made with a 42-inch long handle and around 24 ounces of broomcorn. All of them are bound tightly on the inside with wire and plaited on the outside with twine and stalk or reed. the full size kitchen broom, shop broom or porch broom gets plaited with full pieces of raw broomcorn instead of split pieces of stalk. The handles are almost always selected from a bunch of wild, sustainable harvested Ozarks hardwood saplings with the traditional favorite being Sassafras! Sometimes, I find a handle with a twist, but look at the picture with the Besom below for more on that.
Cobweb Brooms
I frequently tell people that I most enjoy making the Turkey Wing brooms because I can get creative with them. But when it comes to using a broom, I like the cob web broom because it’s fun! The cob web broom is often very long and light and designed to reach way up into the corners or up to the rafters in those high ceilings. But don’t stop there! It’s also great, due to its flexibility, for reaching up under the sofa, the chair and the bed to grab those dust bunnies. Does it work? We have three dogs and three cats at home and we’re fiber artists with lots of wool and mohair and angora and cotton fiber lying about, so we don’t have dust bunnies – we have dust mastodons – and the broom gets every bit of it.
Besom
The flat broom that most folks have nowadays is a relatively new invention. Prior to around 1835 (give or take a decade or two – odd that there weren’t more broom historians keeping track of such things), people used round brooms. Why? Pressing the broom flat and holding it there while stitching it just wasn’t that easy or fun. What changed? In the mid 19th century, the Shakers developed a broom press – like a large woodworker’s vise – to hold the broom flat while it was stitched. For a long time a flat broom was called a Shaker broom. Why do I call a round broom a besom? Cause it’s easier than calling it a round broom and there’s a bit of history behind it. Is it accurate? Not really. A true besom would be made of twigs and bound with leather or white oak or hickory bark. How is it pronounced? Depending on who you talk to and where they came from, it has a half dozen pronunciations ranging from “beesum” to “bayzum.” I generally stick with the “bayzum” pronunciation ever since I was visited by a German immigrant that was quite irate that I should pronounce is the other way. What’s it used for? Why, it’s used for sweeping. However, since it’s generally a lot longer than a regular broom – it’s left untrimmed (I used to trim ‘em, but was corrected by an Irish immigrant) – it tends to work better when the side is used. Grreat for getting into those hard to reach spaces, too… sort of like the cob web broom.
Care and feeding of a Laffing Horse Broom
All the brooms I make (except the besom) come with a strap or loop or hook to hang up the broom. That’s probably the most important piece of advice I can give: Hang up your broom! Keeping the broom dry will help, too. But keeping it too dry can be a bad thing and lead to a broom with a brittle sweep. If you live in a place with little or no humidity, wipe the broom down every once in a while with a damp cloth. If, on the other hand, you live in a place with high humidity, keep it in a dry place. Brooms are made out of broomcorn and, as such, can get a little moldy or mildewed when they get wet and are left that way. If your broom has already developed some mold or mildew, wipe it down with some water mixed about one-to-one with white vinegar and get it dried out. Try to sweep with the brush square to the floor. Not only will this give you a wider sweep, but it will prevent that angled broom look. Also, flip the broom over every once in a while to keep the broom from getting bent or warped in one direction or another. Some folks think that rinsing a broom in boiling salt water and drying it afterwards will make the broom last longer. I dunno, but as I dye a lot of the broomcorn in salted water, that step can probably be skipped. A properly made broom, that’s properly cared for, will last a long long long time – If one of my brooms doesn’t last 19 years (why 19 years? It used to be 20 years, but I got to retire some day! Next year, I reckon it’ll be an 18 year warranty), bring it back and I’ll tie a new sweep on the old handle!
As with any of my products, if you don’t see what you want here or if I haven’t answered all you questions, drop me a line. If I don’t know the answer, I’ll make something up!