My sweeping fixation with brooms

I collect brooms and I won't deny it. Yesterday, I made my own thanks to WildCraft Studio School in Portland.

I started this blog with a subject I found fascinating: Brooms! Chalk it up to my witchy nature, but I have been drawn to brooms, picking up unusual ones in antique stores, handmade creations from Berea College in Kentucky and a hand-crafted one made from French straw by a Cajun craftsman at Festivals Acadiens et Créole. My 2022 blog post listed Southern superstitions around brooms, which I compiled from research and listening to friends relating what they heard growing up, everything from “Company’s coming” when a broom falls to “Never sweep out the door after dark!” Read the comments for readers sent in quite a few of their own.

I always wanted to create a broom, sifting through the John C. Campbell Folk School catalog for their broom-making weekends. Located in Brasstown, N.C., Campbell specializes in traditional Appalachian and Southern folk art and crafts. Unfortunately, a weekend never materialized.

This past week, I got to satisfy my broom obsession. I took an all-day broom-making workshop with Dan at WildCraft Studio School of Portland, Ore. It’s not the straightest sewing I’ve ever done or the cleanest weave. The handle isn’t as circular as I wanted but I’m digging the grooves and indentations. I also had the opportunity to trim its length but somehow having a broom this tall felt right. What do you think?

As for those superstitions, my newly created broom slipped out of my hands in class and fell to the floor.

Company’s coming!

Broom History

Throughout history, two items were always found in a woman's kitchen: a large pot for cooking and a broom to keep the space clean.

Even though brooms used to sweep out dust and dirt date back centuries, "From the beginning, brooms and besoms were associated primarily with women, and this ubiquitous household object became a powerful symbol of female domesticity," according to an article on brooms and witchcraft on History.com.

There are several theories as to why the cauldron and the broom became symbols of the evil witch, but it's easy to make the connection when women were targets of men who set to control them in the witch hunts that occured throughout Europe and within the American colonies. Most of these women rounded up as witches were healers and midwives, the elderly who were a financial drag on their communities and those who stood up to the establishment. A great book on the topic is "Witches, Midwives, and Nurses: A History of Women Healers" by Barbara Ehrenreich and Deirdre English.