About Homekeep Studio

In February 2022 I took a tinwork class at Santa Fe Community College with Richard Gabriel Jr. I was looking for something I could make with my hands. Accessible, no major machinery, and less likely to cost me a finger than some of the other things I'd tried. I lost part of one at age eight and I haven't forgotten it.

I moved to Santa Fe from Kansas City in 2020. I'd started my own interior and commercial design business in 2018, but Covid made starting over in a new city complicated. I added vintage and secondhand to my Shopify store to keep things going. Then I found tinwork.

What caught me was the history. The craft goes back to Mexico and being Mexican American, that felt like something. Not a costume, not an appropriation, but a possible thread back to my own heritage and ancestry. I started volunteering at the Nuevo Mexicano Heritage Arts Museum around the same time I started taking classes. I looked at their collection, read books on New Mexican styles and makers, and started to understand what I was actually holding in my hands.

For a couple of years I kept taking classes and did one market a season — learning the work, figuring out what I was making. Then I made the decision to go all in. The vintage is gone, the design work is gone. It's just tinwork now. This is where my heart is.

My background is in interior and commercial design. I used to draw in AutoCAD and SketchUp, now I work in Illustrator at 1:1 scale. I design a piece, print a full size pattern, and build prototypes. It usually takes at least three iterations to land on a final design, and even then it tends to keep evolving. The tools are mostly traditional ones. I don't have a master to learn from. It's a lot of trial and error, a lot of looking, a lot of making.

Homekeep Studio is a modern tinwork studio. The work is shaped by my heritage, the craft itself, and the things I actually want to live with. Clean lines, quiet presence, made by hand in Santa Fe.

— Michella Estrada Wempen