A family visiting Manchester dropped their two teenage daughters off at Gathered & Made and went to dinner. When they came back, the girls were still at the table, still making things, and neither one could tell you where her phone was. “At some point they were like, ‘Where are our phones?’ They didn’t even know,” says Loralee, who owns the studio with her business partner, Cheslea. The parents were so taken with the scene that they left the girls to it and went into the back to throw paint at canvases of their own. Two adults, four canvases. They loved it.
If one story explains Gathered & Made, that’s the one. The studio at 4927 Main Street in Manchester Center is a craft space, a retail shop stocked by local artists, a classroom, and a room where you are handed a poncho and encouraged to fling paint. It’s built for locals and visitors, kids and adults, the crafty and the people who swear they aren’t. And it exists because two women decided Manchester needed a place to make things.
Cheslea and Loralee moved to Vermont around the same time and met the way a lot of parents do: their sons played football together. Loralee had spent her career in the corporate world and was ready to be finished with it. “I was telling my husband, I don’t want to do this anymore. I’m done with corporate,” she says. Her husband had already met Cheslea and told her she needed to meet this woman, because she was saying the same things.
So they started meeting and brainstorming. Their first idea was a “handywomen” service, born from the experience of redoing their own houses and not being able to find anyone to hang wallpaper or paint a room. They eventually let that one go and kept circling a different gap: the town had painfully few indoor places to gather and be creative, for any age, at any skill level.
“We wanted to build a space that people would come and gather as a community,” Loralee says. “It’s hard to meet people as adults.” She also liked that it offered a way to spend an evening that didn’t revolve around food and drinks. And there was one more reason, the simplest one. “We’re moms ourselves. We know what it’s like when you’re looking around for things to do in the community,” Cheslea says. “That’s why we opened this place.”
The first thing you notice inside is that the quality of the projects are really quite impressive. A wallet sewn from scratch in a single class. Decoupaged book art. Polymer clay earrings. Moss arrangements on wooden boards. “We call it elevated crafts,” Cheslea says. “We want people to have access to beginner-friendly crafts, but we also want them to be able to walk away after an hour or two with something that they’re really proud of. That’s really the whole basis of the business.”
The studio runs on two tracks. Drop-in crafting works like a menu: choose a project from a rotating seasonal board - string art, wool pom-pom garlands and trivets, painted trail signs and terracotta pots, moss and stone terrariums - then collect everything you need from the studio’s “general store” of supplies. The base price covers the materials at the base level, and add-ons are exactly that. Want three air plants in your terrarium instead of one, or a small army of butterflies on your moss art? Totally up to you and your budget. No reservation is required for drop-in, though you can book a table and they’ll save you a seat.
The second track is classes taught by local artists, and the sewing classes have been the early hit. In an intro class, everyone walks out with something they actually made, and the July calendar shows the range: fused-glass garden stakes on July 16, a one-hour sewing foundations session and an upcycled-jeans workshop on July 21, an evening of Korean cooking and wine pairing on July 25, a flower class on July 30 covering growing, cutting, and designing, and a sew-your-first-tote class on July 31. The flowers, when Loralee teaches, come from her own garden beds and from Full Moon Blooms, a flower farm in Londonderry. There’s also a twice-monthly open sewing service where you can bring in a repair or a project and get guided help at the machine, plus kids camps running as screen-free creative weeks through the summer.
For the people who came along but don’t want to craft, there’s a lounge with comfortable seating and free coffee. That’s not an afterthought. It’s the difference between “I’ll wait in the car” and everybody coming inside.
Then there’s the room in the back. The Splatter Zone is exactly what it sounds like: you suit up in a poncho, goggles, and shoe covers, prep a canvas, and spend twenty minutes throwing washable paint at it with whatever tools look fun. A full session runs about 45 minutes, up to four people can paint at once, and there’s a viewing window cut into the wall so friends and family can watch the chaos from clean clothes. Canvases can be customized ahead of time with tape or decals - mask off a shape, splatter over everything, and peel it away at the end to reveal crisp negative space in the middle of the color. Reservations are required, and it’s BYOB.
“I think it really expands our audience a bit,” Cheslea says. Ask her who the splatter room is for and she laughs, because the answer keeps changing. “We have couples coming in here taking four canvases - they have a huge space to fill in their house and they’re throwing paint around. We have little kids coming in here, and we have friends, teenagers, people just coming in here and making really, really cool stuff.” They’re already plotting what the room becomes next; blacklight painting is on the list.
For a town where a rainy afternoon can stump a whole family, an indoor activity like this fills a real hole - the same one Pastime Pinball fills on the arcade side.
The retail side of the shop follows one rule: everything is made by local artists, most of whom also teach at the studio. Sell here, teach here - it gives working artists revenue and exposure in the same room where customers just learned how hard the craft actually is. The owners find their artists the way everything seems to happen in this town: they meet one person, and that person leads to another. Artists who want in can reach out directly; no formal teaching credentials required.
The local sourcing runs deeper than the shelves. The wooden boards under the moss art were foraged in Newfane by a man who identifies trees with a disease that leaves striking veining in the wood, cuts the boards himself, and now forages mushrooms for the studio’s moss pieces too.
The building keeps unfolding as you walk through it. Behind the main studio there’s a private party room that hosts a steady run of kids’ birthday parties, a kitchen waiting on future baking and cake-decorating classes, and the lounge, which doubles as private event space for groups who want the place to themselves.
What holds it all together is the thing Loralee comes back to when she talks about why they built it: making something with your hands feels good in a way that’s become rare. “You end up feeling so good about yourself when you walk away with something that you make,” she says. “We see it here every day. People come in and they’re like, ‘I can’t do that.’ They sit down and they start, and then it’s, ‘Oh my god, I did it.’”
Gathered & Made is open six days a week (closed Wednesdays) at 4927 Main Street in Manchester Center. Browse the July class calendar, reserve the Splatter Zone, or just walk in and pick a project off the board. And if you’re keeping count, it’s one more reason Manchester’s Main Streets keep getting more interesting - This & That Vintage being the other new arrival worth your afternoon.
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