About Us
Ann Scott Wicks: I am a retired educator with a career spent working with children and teenagers, and a lifetime loving horses. From the time I started riding a neighbor's Shetland pony at the age of four and then received my own pony at age eight, I have always loved being with horses. Growing up, my favorite pastime was riding bareback along the many forgotten and overgrown dirt roads of rural Alabama. As an adult, that love for horses and the trail led me to the sport of endurance riding, a perfect match for my equine interests and sense of adventure.
It is hard to say when my creative endeavors began, but there are some early glimpses. My mother taught me to knit and sew when I was young, and I grew to love making sweaters, scarves, mittens, and the occasional pair of socks. If something turned out a little too large (sometimes the result of my impatience and unwillingness to first knit a test swatch), I would simply felt it. Such magic! The summer I was ten, I clearly remember making my first piece of sterling silver jewelry while I was at camp in the North Carolina mountains. It was a coiled rattlesnake ring, and I have such distinct memories of sitting in the cool shade of the craft barn filing the diamondback pattern and each individual rattle. The ring has long been lost, but not my interest in learning to work with metals. It lay dormant until more recent years when I was able to take silversmithing classes at the Virginia School of Blacksmithing, Visual Arts Center of Richmond, McGuffey Art Center, Beverly Street Studio School, and the William Holland School of Lapidary Arts.
My quest to work with my hands and learn to make the items I love to wear and use led me beyond the jewelry workbench to the mohair loom for weaving mohair girths and cinches, and to the tools of the trade for working with leather: knives, punches, awls, waxed thread, rivets, rawhide hammers, and finally, a beautiful industrial leather sewing machine named "Bob."
None of this would be possible without the support of my husband, Jim Wicks, who is an active partner in all aspects of farm life and who, in addition to managing all things mechanical and overseeing the annual hay production, is also pursuing some of his own creative interests in woodworking and growing American chestnut trees from blight-resistant stock.
