What do guayaberas, banjos, engraved guns, and handbags have in common? They’re just a few of the items being lovingly and skillfully produced by hand in Texas today. And as the craftspeople featured here prove, you can embrace cutting-edge design while still remaining true to the spirit of the frontier.

Folk Fibers

Principal: Maura Ambrose | Location: Bastrop

Mention quilters, and people often imagine an old-fashioned, gray-haired sewing guild. But Maura Ambrose isn’t old-fashioned and she doesn’t have gray hair. What she does have is a background in organic farming (she worked at Johnson’s Backyard Garden after moving to Austin from Philadelphia in 2010) and a degree from the Savannah College of Art and Design, which together led her to take quilting in a sustainable and fine-art-driven direction. Each abstractly designed blanket is made of natural (and sometimes vintage) fabrics and takes her a month to dye, piece, and stitch. Ambrose adds to the laborious process by making most of her own dyes, foraging for raw materials—cochineal, onion skins, acorns, and pecan, walnut, and Osage wood—anywhere she can find them, including the ten-acre Bastrop property near the Colorado River where she and her husband recently moved. folkfibers.com

How did you start quilting? 

It’s funny now, but it wasn’t funny at the time. My sophomore year I decided to major in furniture design. I was in woodshop making my first coffee table, and for some reason the table saw kept kicking back. You should really fear a table saw. So the third time it kicked back, a shop tech monitoring the class came over and hit the emergency stop button. Another student was working on an elaborate cabinet right behind the saw, and the cabinet broke in half and hit the shop tech in the head. He sternly told me to get out. Which I took literally, so I left the major. 

Bottom line: you got into quilting because woodshop scared the crap out of you? 

Yes, pretty much. 

You eventually majored in fibers. Didn’t quilting seem too “grandma” to you?

My professors were always very conceptual. Denyse Schmidt, a leader in modern quilting, came and taught a workshop one evening, and she introduced us to improv quilting—blindly picking out fabrics from a scrap bag and making something. It was so liberating. It was a game-changer for me. 

You piece your patterns by machine but quilt by hand. Why don’t you do the entire thing by machine? 

A machine takes it in a direction I don’t like. What’s two days compared to two weeks? This is something that’s passed down—it’s an heirloom. Why wouldn’t you spend the extra time to do it right?

You lived in East Austin for a while. Why did you move to Bastrop?

Moving out here had so much to do with my farming background; we wanted space and privacy, and I want to provide workshops. We had to get outside the city to get what we wanted for our money. Everything around that river is so fertile. It’s the most personally valuable land in my eyes because I can use the land and the soil for my work. 

Cobra Rock Boot Company

Principals: Colt Miller and Logan Caldbeck | Location: Marfa

Since opening their retail space and workshop in November 2011, Colt Miller and Logan Caldbeck have developed a cult following, from Los Angeles to New York, with their South Highland boot, a made-to-order lace-up that eager customers—men and women—now wait half a year to receive. The design and execution are a collaborative effort between Miller, a fifth-generation Texas rancher, and Caldbeck, a photographer, and almost every day you can find the couple in their Dean Street shop cutting patterns, shaping leather, and stitching the boots on a sewing machine dating from 1939. The style of the South Highland falls somewhere between classic and contemporary, with a silhouette akin to a heeled Cuban boot, a forties-inspired Western square toe, and oil-tanned leather suggestive of a worn-in favorite. Cobra Rock will debut a second shoe design at the end of the year. cobrarock.com

How did you meet? 

Logan Caldbeck: We met in 2006 in Lubbock. I was down from Canada visiting family friends, and Colt had been making boots out of his garage. I’d never met anyone who made boots before, and I was amazed. Afterward, he’d make a pair of boots one month, sell them, and come stay with me in Montreal for a month. We always wanted to have a boot shop and live together. 

Colt, how did you begin making boots? 

Colt Miller: I’d just graduated from Texas Tech, and I was in a band, looking for a job, when I saw a pair of boots my grandfather had made for himself. I was blown away. [Boot maker] Jeff Blaylock, in Post, took me on as an apprentice for seven months. 

How did you end up in Marfa?  

LC: I had an internship at the Chinati Foundation, which led to a staff position. But one of the first trips we ever made together was to Marfa, and we had this wonderful, romantic trip.   

What’s a day in the shop like?  

LC: We’ve got NPR on. I’m usually at the cutting tables, and Colt may be sewing. It’s just the two of us running the business, so we’ve been working with a few boot makers in West Texas who help finish the boots. 

Do you live close to the shop?  

LC: We live up the street and ride our bikes to work. This is actually part of the old Borunda’s, which some people say was the first Tex-Mex place in the state.