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Ashley Farland slid her hand across the smooth edge of a bread box she designed in her studio in Hinesburg. It still needed a handle but was otherwise finished in sleek, textured cherry wood with mitered corners.
Soon, Farland would add that bread box to her lineup of handmade goods in DandyLion, her new Hinesburg store and studio. The bread box sits among a collection of salami slicers, cutting boards and other wooden products crafted by Farland, a former professional chef-turned-designer who now specializes in woodwork and textiles for home goods.
“This will be rolled out for the holidays,” Farland said earlier in the fall of her new bread box. “It’s done. We just need to figure out what we’re doing with the handle.”
The space in the commercial center of Hinesburg, off of Route 116, is DandyLion’s first store. Farland’s products cover shelves near the front entrance, while she set up her workshop in the back to tie into the retail environment. The concept allows customers to browse the products and, while she fabricates nearby, see exactly where they come from.
Those products include textiles such as pillows and blankets, made from recycled materials from the United States and Europe. A dedication to sustainable sourcing and ethical production is fundamental to Farland’s business, as is the transparency that encourages customers to understand the process of creating new products out of materials that otherwise would get discarded.
The wood that Farland turns into bread boxes and cutting boards is harvested mostly from local maple and cherry trees on nearby farms. Farland imports walnut wood from Ohio. She disperses any scraps to locals for firewood or converts them into shavings for farms in the area to use for bedding.
For her textiles, she selects material from surplus men’s suits, with specialty fabrics and patterns that she turns into unique, artisan pillows and blankets while maintaining the studio’s mantra of sustainably.
Before COVID-19 struck, Farland was working as a chef in New York in some of the most prestigious kitchens, including Michelin-starred Gramercy Tavern. Such illustrious
establishments “needed to have soul,” she said, to connect customers to the painstakingly created food.
During the pandemic, Farland decided to take a step back and reboot. That’s when DandyLion was born. The pandemic was a perfect time to switch careers, and she channeled her creative juices into designs of textiles and wood. She started in a small in-home studio in Stowe until she developed enough business to move into the Hinesburg shop. Having a retail space allows Farland to connect with her customers on a more fundamental level and demonstrate her work up close, she said.
The physical space helps her develop trust with customers, Farland added. She’d also like to have some influence on other businesses in the region to do the same — step up their efforts to reduce waste, improve their sustainability and make products in a curated manner.
For Farland, it’s about building value for what artisans do — here in Vermont and anywhere in the world, she said. “We really need to remind ourselves what fair labor looks like.”