SHARON DUGAN
BASKETMAKER

MEDIA

“For a while I was a closet-basketmaker,” Sharon recalls, describing the time she spend experimenting and polishing her skills, “But my family and friends encouraged me and pushed me out the door, so to speak.”

She took samples of her work to the Sandwich Home Industries shop in Center Sandwich because, as the birthplace of what we know now as the League of New Hampshire Craftsmen, “this is where it all started,” Sharon explains. She is referring to the movement to preserve traditional crafts skills and to give rural women an opportunity to sell their work that was started in Sandwich in the early 1900’s.

Karen Baybutt, manager of the Sandwich shop, encouraged Sharon to submit her work to be “juried” for sale at the shop. She won the seal of approval in the fall of 1996, and in May 1997 was approved by a state jury of her peers for sale in all league shops.

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