- I tend to feel like there're a lot of people
who maybe are not comfortable seeing
a woman in a shop getting dirty.
It just sometimes makes me feel like why am I doing
what I'm doing if no one understands it
and what can I do better to make what I'm doing understood?
This is my journey and no one can do it better than me
and also this is my life.
My name is Chelsea Miller and I am a knife maker.
(calm music)
Hello.
Hi.
Buddy, hi!
Hi, good how are you?
Good to see you.
- [Man] Likewise.
- Come on.
Oh this one is nice.
Straight.
Oh that's nice.
I love when there's a knot in it.
That's really pretty.
Wow.
So for me making knives, my intention is to open
your mind a little bit and to think bigger
and to dig deeper about all the things that are mundane.
I grew up in a very very rural area
called the Northeast Kingdom, Vermont.
We raised all our own vegetables and animals.
We were very self reliant and my father built houses
and was a blacksmith his entire life
and as children my siblings and I were apprentice to him,
sweeping the shop, making small hinges and boxes.
It was pretty idyllic.
It was a lovely, lovely, very creative, very free childhood.
I've always been incredibly close with my dad
and he got sick in the year of 2011.
So I went home to rehabilitate him in his shop
and help him try and figure out new ways of doing things.
He was quite handicapped after that.
Knife making saved me in the sense that
it gave me a way to process what was going on
in my relationship to my dad.
I was working in my dad's workshop
playing with wood, carving wood, and I noticed I really
started to miss working with my hands.
I had absorbed all these things that I like in the world
and I wanted to figure out how it is that I give back,
what it is that I have to offer
and so working for myself really just allows me
to absorb whatever is going on in my life
and express my feelings on that through my work.
They're very different than your typical knife.
They're made entirely from recycled material.
I use horseshoe rasp, has these big teeth that come out
of the side and so I started working with that material
and keeping those interesting little knife bits
sticking out and then all the handles I collect
from Vermont where I grew up, the wood there,
and also from local furniture makers in Brooklyn.
It reminds you that this piece came from somewhere else,
that it had another life entirely before it became a knife.
When a knife came out of that I felt sort of attached
to this piece and drawn into it and so I started making
more and more of them and giving them away
to other friends and other family
and their encouragement was so strong
to start selling them or offering them to people
outside my immediate family and friends.
(calm music)
I often find myself chasing this naive quality
that my knives first had.
They weren't as good in function as they are today
but there's something so pure and raw about them.
The less you know sometimes the more
magical something can be.
There's certainly been days where I feel like there are
enough people that don't get it
but then always it's just an opportunity for me
to go back and think okay how can I say this more clearly?
How can I do something in a way that really represents
what I mean in a way that's very clear and simple?
So it really gives me ultimate freedom to be the best
kind of person that I can be and really learn a lot
about what it is to be alive.
My name is Chelsea Miller and I'm a boss.