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The Pescadero artist makes brooms by hand using traditional techniques and local materials.
Lisa Sheffield Guy doesn’t consider herself a crafty person.
“I don’t sew or quilt,” she said. “It just felt like something I wasn’t good at.” This may be surprising to those who discover Butano Broomcraft, the name under which Sheffield Guy creates a variety of handmade brooms from the Butano Canyon area of Pescadero.
“A few years ago, I was determined to make Christmas gifts for my family and friends and not just go buy stuff,” she recalled. So she signed up for a class from a broom-maker in Santa Cruz and gave it a go.
“I made a really ugly broom in that class,” she said. “I still have it hung up so I can see how far I’ve come.”
Guy’s housemate dyed the plant. Photo by Magali Gauthier.
Soon enough, to her surprise, she was hooked on broom-making, spending hours researching and practicing with different styles and materials.
“I didn’t really set out with the intention to go full broom obsession,” she laughed. “It just sort of happened.”
Her brooms are mostly rooted in traditional techniques — such as full-size flat-woven kitchen brooms made in a traditional Shaker style, the “classic Harry Potter” European-style cobwebbers and charming, small “turkey wing” whisk brooms — but with her own creative touches. Over the course of her journey, she’s enjoyed learning a bit about broom-making traditions from all over the world.
“There are a lot of beautiful Asian brooms. In Mexico, palm fronds are used,” she said. “Every culture has developed their own unique broom styles.” And in Alaska, where she’s worked extensively (she’s a wildlife biologist by trade), real bird wings are a traditional material.
Birds are one of Sheffield Guy’s particular interests, so it’s no wonder that her design for Butano Broomcraft’s logo features a broom-riding turkey vulture – the winged scavengers whose scientific name, Cathartes aura, translates to something akin to “purifying breeze” because of their ecological job as nature’s clean-up crew.
“I’m a bit obsessed with turkey vultures. Where we live, we’re kind of up high on this ridge and the turkey vultures will fly by at eye level. They’re just so amazing to me,” she said. “I wanted to make them my logo because the vultures clean up; that’s their role.”
It’s the perfect poster bird, as it were, for a cleaning tool and a maker who enjoys foraging in the landscape.
For as long as she can remember, she’s loved immersing herself in wilderness, which is reflected in everything from her choice of wildlife biology as a career to her habit of collecting sticks while hiking with her family. This fascination with nature has translated into her broom craft, as she experiments with using different environmental materials.
“Working with different types of wood feels like a very natural fit, tying into my love of the natural world,” she said. “It feels like there’s endless creative possibilities.”
Her “absolute favorite” wood to work with for broom handles, she said, is bay laurel (known as myrtle in Oregon, where she grew up) because of its distinctive delightful scent.
“Handling the wood, it just smells so good,” she said. “The main kitchen broom I’ve had in my house for years, it still smells good. The smell just never goes away.”
She sometimes uses stinging nettle stalks, or deer antlers her dad’s collected for her. For the bristles, she uses broomcorn, a type of sorghum that grows long tassels at the top and was once a common crop before commercial brooms started being made with plastic (she cultivates a bit of her own broomcorn at home but has found that it doesn’t get hot enough for the fibers to grow high enough to be useful, so she usually orders it in 50-pound bundles from Texas, she said.)
Other favorite local materials she’s discovered, living near the coast, are driftwood for handles and bull kelp for weaving over the top.
“It’s really hard to work with. I end up ripping it out and redoing it,” she said of the seaweed. Still, “I love the way it looks.”
Sometimes she includes striking pops of color or intriguing trinkets such as crystals or antique skeleton keys, well aware of brooms’ long association with witchcraft and magic.
“The magical history of brooms is fascinating. It’s fun to make brooms that capture that spirit,” she said. Some folks use them as altar brooms for ritual and ceremony. It can be “kind of symbolic, like moving energy, or physically dusting off your dirty altar,” she said.
No matter how beautiful, all of her brooms are intended to stand up to years of hard sweeping labor, made with “incredibly strong” fishing net seine twine.
“These are definitely intended to be used,” she said. “Every once in a while I’ll see a really old broom in a corner – it’s worn, they’re just so loved, that’s kind of what I hope for,” she said.
In addition to sweeping up messes and clearing cobwebs, she’s found her cobwebber styles have a surprising additional function in her wildlife-rich area.
“For some reason, we get a lot of bats in our house,” she laughed. The critters will cling on to the broom to be released into the wild. “It’s the best-ever bat transportation.” She’s also found that dogs and cats are fans of her broom work, too, gathering near her and enjoying the feeling of the bristles against their coats.
“I should have a line of pet brushes; they love it,” she said.
She can usually complete a small broom in around a half-hour, while the larger ones take several hours of work, not including all the time spent soaking and otherwise treating the wood, which can be extensive.
She typically sells her smaller hand brooms in the $20-$30 range, and the full-size kitchen brooms between $80-$100, “depending a lot on how much went into the stick.” Her aim is to keep them affordable, because “everyone should have beautiful, handmade tools in their house,” she said.
In the near future, she’s looking forward to experimenting more with natural dyes, made by a housemate. She’s also happy to restore people’s old, beloved brooms that have gotten worn out to help keep things out of the landfill and give longer life to cherished objects.
Batches of her brooms can often be found for sale at Pie Ranch’s farm stand, as well as at periodic Pescadero craft fairs and markets. She also loves creating bespoke brooms to order, which can be arranged with her directly. However, she doesn’t currently have any plans to set up an Etsy shop or ship her wares, mindful of the carbon footprint involved.
“The wood I’m working with is local,” she said. “I just kind of want to keep it in the area.”
Butano Broomcraft, Instagram: @lisasheffieldguy.