COLRAIN — Ken Noyes sparked up a conversation with everyone that came into his wood shop Sunday afternoon as they looked over his handmade, locally sourced crafts.
The scene was familiar for Noyes, who welcomed strangers into his workshop on Greenfield Road over the weekend as he has every year for the annual Crafts of Colrain studio tour, which returned to an in-person format after hosting online sales last year.
“I don’t do it for the money, I do it for the people,” Noyes said in between customers. “I enjoy doing (Crafts of Colrain), but it’s a lot of work to set up.”
Noyes held spirited conversations with people browsing his wooden crafts ranging from stools to paper towel holders and pens.
He said he had decent success Saturday and he was seeing a steady stream of customers Sunday, despite his lack of advertising.
“(Saturday) wasn’t too bad, it wasn’t my best day ever,” Noyes said. “I don’t advertise and all that, I had one sign and that was it.”
Greenfield resident Steve Harris said Crafts of Colrain is a great opportunity to shop for locally made, hand-crafted items made by passionate people, rather than shopping at a big-box store.
“I like seeing folks doing what they like,” Harris said inside Noyes’ shop. “People doing things that are the fabrics of their lives.”
Further west in town on Foundry Village Road, Kevin French was selling more wooden crafts, but these were made out of wine and whiskey barrels. French works with Wood and Barrel Co. in Shelburne Falls, where he takes the leftover barrel materials from projects there and repurposes it into his own crafts.
“Hey, it’s fun,” French said standing outside his studio. “It’s fun designing things … we’re trying to find ways for not turning them into firewood.”
French was selling a wide range of crafts Sunday afternoon with small objects like cigar holders to hanging lanterns made out of the rings from the tops of the wine barrels.
He said the tour’s return to normal operations from its remote edition last year was helpful to him and the town as a whole. He added he had customers from all over New England and New York.
“We didn’t do anything last year, I’m a little social media-challenged and with Etsy, I backed out,” French said. “We did very well yesterday … It’s good for Colrain to bring in a lot of people from Connecticut and Eastern Mass.”
After the pandemic dashed plans of expanding Stoneman Brewery’s operations to the Warfield House Inn in Charlemont, owner Justin Korby had to go back to the drawing board.
After planning for several months, Korby, who describes his business as a “one-man show plus family,” decided to expand the brewery’s operations on his own property in the hills of Colrain. With a new fermenter, bottling system and other “odds and ends,” Stoneman Brewery has returned to normal operations.
“This is my relaunch basically,” Korby said standing inside his back shed with all of his equipment Sunday morning. “It’s been a bumpy road for all small businesses.”
And Korby is celebrating the relaunch with a classic, New England-style IPA called the “Return of Stoneman IPA,” which is brewed with 100% local ingredients.
“I just had to come back,” Korby said.
He said the relaunch was going smoothly as a steady stream of customers appeared throughout the day Saturday. He joked that the new road signs placed for Crafts of Colrain were helpful in directing people around town.
“Everyone gets lost. This year we have street signs, it’s the joke (each year), but it’s also true,” Korby said. “(Saturday) was pretty packed, it was pretty successful.”
Chris Larabee can be reached at clarabee@recorder.com or 413-930-4081.