Grounding his passions with a methodical mastery and solid business sense, furniture maker and tin smith Jim Rantala added a new facet to his repertoire: broom making.
Since June, the Cedar resident has transformed himself into a broomsquire. Working with human powered, old-fashioned equipment, he winds, binds, sews and trims brooms the traditional way.
He has been building up a stock to take to a show in Ohio at the end of the month. Already noted for his hand-crafted Windsor furniture and tin products, Rantala will also showcase his latest avocation there. He will demonstrate the technique as well as sell the finished products, offering a one-of-a-kind alternative to mass-produced brooms.
"There is really something to say about a utilitarian object that people make,” said Rantala of brooms as well as his other practical creations.
After seeing a broom maker at another show three months ago, Rantala has pursued the craft with his trademark single-minded devotion. He even planted a small plot of broom corn — whose history in this country traces back to a seed planted by Benjamin Franklin that founded a cottage industry — in his front yard. He plans to use the yield in future products; currently, he buys broom corn grown in Mexico.
"There's nothing that I haven't pursued that I haven't been able to do,” said Rantala of his three-time immersion into a new obsession, all of which turned out to be complementary. "I just kind of think to myself, 'What's next?'”
He is used to having an idea take root in his mind, incubate for a few months or years and then suddenly flower into a full-blown passion.
Well aware of this pattern, Rantala calls it "romancing the process.”
"I find an interest, pursue it, acquire the tools, then get a little bit of knowledge and then make mistakes,” he said, noting that he had been interested in broom making for five years.
A successful commercial photographer in Houston, he transitioned into Windsor furniture making in the early 1990s and jumped in full time shortly after when he moved to Michigan. He added tin work a few years ago and relishes the contrast of creating something real from his work, not ephemeral photographs for corporate documents.
"That's what's so different from commercial photography: this all has substance, you can touch it, you feel it,” said Rantala. "I don't miss photography, I don't even have a digital camera yet. The last thing I wanted to do was sit in front of a computer.”
Modern technology facilitated his acquisition of the antique broom making equipment, however, thanks to a quick Internet search, and a cell phone.
When the seller he located in California did not have a photo of the components and refused to box it up, Rantala contacted a shipping company for help. They dispatched someone to estimate the cost of boxing and transportation. Before the deal was closed, that employee took a snap of the equipment with his cell phone, e-mailed it to Rantala, who replied back, "Buy it!”
The purchase included three machines: a kick winder that fashions the brooms, a gripping device that guides the sewing and a trimmer. The latter piece is actually a fodder trimmer farmers used years ago to chop animal feed.
"Broom trimmers are hard to find but they're almost exactly the same,” said Rantala, who made two modifications to his fodder trimmer for broom making.
Twenty minutes after he had the equipment out of the crate at his home workshop, he was making brooms.
The equipment is notable because the pieces are hand-made, with sturdy, utilitarian lines that carry an inherent grace.
"This is a museum piece,” Rantala noted of the winder, which is usually commercially made. "There's just something about the aesthetic, the broom's origin: there's not a button anywhere.”