Gone green – A hand-dyed and -tied kitchen broom

Going green? This kitchen broom is just the thing. Featuring a smooth standard hardwood handle, hand-dyed green broomcorn, matching hand-dyed green split and trimmed broomcorn stalk plait (the weave at the top of the sweep), and a fancy green over white pattern band of stitching, this is one very functional, very artistic broom. Great for work or decoration.

Stitching a broom does two things for the broom. The stitching keeps the broom from looking like an inverted dandelion about to go poof, and helps the broom hold its shape. in this case, what you’re seeing is a standard flat broom or Shaker broom. It’s called a Shaker broom after the Shaker sect that was so instrumental to broom making in the US. In fact, without the Shakers, you’d likely be using a besom or round broom just as was used from the medieval times until about 1850.

In the early 1800 the Shakers began dabbling in broom making and one of their developments was a broom press. It looks kinda like a great big vise, and in fact I’ve seen these at auctions being sold as antique wood workering vises.

Any full size broom you see is likely tied round, or oval, and then made flat by placing into a press and stitching. Without the stitching, a broom could sit in the press for hours and would still fluff right back to its original shap in a while.

Normally, I do about 3 rows of stitching on a broom this size. Once in a while, though, whimsy strikes… or maybe it’s inspiration. Regardless, the result is always something unusual. This time, I felt like putting a band of twine around the broom and then stitching through the band of twine in a pattern, kinda like a Navajo rug (although, this is nowhere near that level… I gots lots of work to do there).

So there you have it. Functional, beautiful, durable and one of a kind!

[artpal=insert]