Before Making existed as a magazine, it existed as a feeling — the particular satisfaction of finishing a row, turning a heel, pulling thread through cloth. Carrie Bostick Hoge knew that feeling well. A Parsons-trained photographer who had spent years shooting knitwear for Quince & Co. from her barn studio in Falmouth, Maine, Hoge launched the first issue of Making in May 2016 under her own brand, Madder. The debut, themed FLORA, arrived with ten knitting patterns, cross-stitch hoops shaped like wildflowers, needle-felted vegetables, and a quiet conviction that craft deserved to be treated not as hobby content, but as culture. Within days, yarn shops across the United States were scrambling to stock it.
What set the tone from that very first issue was Hoge's insistence on treating Making as a multi-craft publication. Knitting sat at the heart, yes — her own designs, plus contributions from names like Susan B. Anderson, Hannah Fettig, and Mary Jane Mucklestone — but every issue folded in sewing, quilting, embroidery, dyeing, weaving, block printing, even recipes. When Ashley Yousling, the fiber rancher and podcast host behind Woolful, joined as co-editor, the scope expanded further. Yousling brought her own world: Idaho sheep pastures, hand-dyed cormo wool, and a deep belief in ethical fiber sourcing. Together, they built something that felt less like a magazine and more like a gathering of people who care about where their materials come from and what their hands can do with them.
Each of Making's fourteen print issues carried a single-word theme — FAUNA, COLOR, LINES, BLACK & WHITE, DESERT, FOREST, SIMPLE, INTRICATE, DAWN, DUSK, OUTSIDE, INSIDE — and that constraint became a kind of creative engine. The DESERT issue brought sun-bleached palettes and open stitch patterns; FOREST wrapped readers in sturdy boot socks, layerable cardigans, and earthy tones drawn from moss and bark. The photography, all shot by Hoge herself, had a distinctive warmth: natural light, uncoated paper, garments photographed on real people in real landscapes rather than on blank studio backdrops. You could feel the Maine seasons turning through the pages.
Printed and published in Maine, Making was part of a wave of independent craft publications — alongside Pom Pom Quarterly, Laine, Amirisu, and Taproot — that proved readers would pay for ad-free, beautifully produced print in an era of free online patterns. But the economics of small-run publishing are unforgiving. After fourteen numbered issues, Making pivoted: the print magazine gave way to the BRIGHT Collective, a monthly membership delivering a sixty-page digital zine with audio features, craft projects, essays, and members-only events. The team also launched the Making App, a social marketplace connecting makers directly. It was a bold shift, but one rooted in the same impulse that drove the magazine from the start — building a community around the act of making, not just selling patterns.
Making remains, at its core, what Hoge described when she announced that first issue: a place where craft connects us to the past through skills practiced out of necessity for generations, to the present through the meditative focus of working with our hands, and to the future through the heirlooms we leave behind. For anyone who believes that a well-made thing carries meaning beyond its function, that philosophy still holds.
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