Small business owners across Vermont are racing to send out those final packages to arrive on time for the holidays.
Like Isaac Shoulderblade. The 33-year-old runs his namesake wood ring business, Shoulderblade Designs, from his South Burlington basement.
Since launching his online store in 2021, he’s sold around 900 rings — usually made from walnut wood, with intricate inlays.
And he was finishing his latest creation, his final order before Christmas, this week.
“It’ll have turquoise powder and then a string of braided sweetgrass,” Shoulderblade said. “I am Native American, so a lot of my rings are incorporated with Native American work.”
Shoulderblade is an enrolled member of the Northern Cheyenne Tribe, in what is now southeastern Montana, and he says the majority of his buyers are Indigenous, too.
“It does bring me a lot of joy to be able to offer that for people,” Shoulderblade said. “It is a type of jewelry that isn’t necessarily seen around.”
Shoulderblade said the reason he began crafting wood rings was because something was missing.
“I lost my wedding band — my wife says four times, I say three,” he said. “But I was like, ‘You know what? I love working with wood.’ I looked up a bunch of YouTube videos on how to make a wood ring… and then bought my first lathe.”
A lathe is a machine that holds and spins the ring. Shoulderblade carves the ring’s edges and inlays, fills those inlays, and then covers everything with a glue that creates a shiny, clear finish, almost like plastic.
Some of Shoulderblade’s most colorful rings are inlaid with beading. He said he also learned how to bead from YouTube — as a way of reconnecting with his Native American heritage.
“I was in foster care for the first 10 years of my life, essentially, and I got adopted out into a non-Native family,” Shoulderblade said. “And so [I] didn’t really have a lot of connection to my family on the reservation.”
He said he has since found ways to get closer to his culture, through Indigenous student groups in college, through powwows, through visits to the Northern Cheyenne Indian Reservation where his grandmother still lives, and through his wood rings.
“Quite a few people from my tribe have ordered a ring, and so that’s fun,” Shoulderblade said. He added that through the business, he’s met Indigenous people from across the U.S. and Canada.
Shoulderblade Designs launched in earnest after he posted a January 2021 TikTok video that showed him making a beaded ring, set to Nimihito’s remix of the song “Land Back” by A Tribe Called Red and a quote from the movie Smoke Signals: “It’s a good day to be Indigenous.”
The video went viral. It received close to 200,000 plays, nearly 54,000 likes, and over 1,000 comments saying things like: “All the aunties just collectively gasped!” and “How do we purchase? Do you take requests? If so, I need 4 please.”
Shoulderblade doesn’t use TikTok anymore, but his business is on Instagram and Etsy.
And his inventory usually sells out fast — he has to limit how many orders he can take, because he makes these rings around his role as a dad and around his day job at the University of Vermont, where he’s the First Nations Student and Community Empowerment Coordinator.
“Between 5 and 7 a.m. is kind of when I work on my rings. Sometimes I work on them late at night,” Shoulderblade said. “I only take like seven orders at the most for the month.”
As for the seventh and final order for the month of December, the ring inlaid with sweetgrass and turquoise? He finished it right on time — with one week to go until Christmas.
This story was originally published by Vermont Public. It was shared as part of the New England News Collaborative.
