Step inside our workshop as Wheeler makes a run of the Ultimate Gardening Sheath for Joe Gardener, and shares the thinking behind the design.
“We don’t design around what’s quick and easy. We design for what’s most functional, durable, and beautiful, so you get a tool sheath that’s a pleasure to use and built to last for many years of gardening.”
As a gardener and craftsperson, I am acutely aware of the importance of having specific tools close at hand when moving through a work space. It’s all too easy to set down a tool while focused on a task, only to come up for air later with no idea where I left it.
As a designer, I am prone to designing a thing as it should be—the best possible version of itself. Which often means my designs are layered and complicated. I’m not looking for the simplest solutions. I am designing towards what is going to be the most functional, durable, and beautiful. So often in the world, when I look at the endless array of products we are faced with buying, what I see again and again is the shortest, cheapest path by which a thing can be made. I see planned obsolescence—cheap materials that are bound to break and fail. I see things that are flashy, but are unpleasant to use and will soon be discarded. My work stands in the face of that. I am trying to make something that is really worth having, is a pleasure to use, and will last a long time.
I designed this Ultimate Gardening Sheath in collaboration with Joe Lamp’l, known to many gardeners as Joe Gardener ,who wanted a custom tool sheath to offer his community. Each of my designs comes from very specific groupings of tools for very specific work. When making a tool belt, I consider which tools are to be carried, the ergonomics of carrying them, and then carefully problem-solve how the pockets can be layered and sewn in a way that is first possible, and then feasible for production sewing. It is easy to think in generalities going into a design, like, oh, I want to carry a, b, c, x, y, z with me, but when you drill down into how the tools might actually stack, and the order of operations for bringing layers of pockets together, it becomes quite the puzzle.
From the start, Joe was really clear about the primary tools he wanted to carry- a soil knife, pruner, and floral snip. The thing that makes this design really tricky and interesting is that he also wanted the tools to be carried in the ultra-compact space of a stand-alone sheath, rather than a full tool belt. That’s not an easy thing to do. I went through at least a dozen versions of this design on my path to the final product, each iteration of the design receiving adjustments as I reworked and refined the layout and placement of each of the parts—and the way and order in which they all came together. This compact design is dense with layers of pockets, seams with tight tolerances, rivets, and hardware. It’s relatively easy to make two pockets stack, but this design has a stack of three pockets for tools of relatively similar sizes, but different shapes, and making that work is a tall order with leather.
One of my mentors in the world of craft, Michael Burns, had a motto. It was “Be happy in your work.” I think that as gardeners, craftspeople, hell, just humans, there is an innate desire to feel joy and satisfaction in our daily lives. We want to enjoy how we spend our time and enjoy the work that we do, and the people who surround us while we do it. That’s no secret. But in the busy swirl of life, in the tensioned balance between our responsibilities and our desires, we can sometimes find ourselves in places we didn’t expect to be.
To some extent, we must tirelessly work towards the goal of shaping our professional lives with intention and direction so we end up in a place where we want to be- in job that we actually like. On the other hand, being happy in your work is a meditation. Wherever we find ourselves, on good days and bad, it is part of our personal work in the world to enjoy what we have, to find ways to be in the present moment, and to enjoy what we’ve got. The idea runs parallel to something my grandmother used to say: “There will always be people who have more than you. And there will always be people who have less. You need to learn to be happy with what you’ve got.”
I enjoy my work of designing and making things with leather. And it makes some kind of sense to me that when my work goes out into the world, it becomes part of the working lives of others. I hope that my tool belts and tool sheaths help the people wearing them to tap into the present moment, and tap into being happy in their work.