MASTERMIND: Britten Stringwell

Despite her nomadic tendencies, Britten Stringwell knows where her home is. It’s been Ann Arbor since she was four years old and after growing up a townie and attending the University of Michigan, the 25 year old still finds herself pulled back into the city’s warm embrace (season dependent, mind you) time and time again.

So what to make of her temporary relocations to Seattle, Chicago, New York City and Portland? Think of them as fact-finding missions.

“I go to these places and hang out and sew and sort of immerse myself in their community spaces,” she says. “I notice what works and what doesn’t. I pay attention to the layout and colors and what the lighting is.”

You see Britten is fascinated by how, where and why people come together. You might even say she’s made a life study of it. While attending U-M she crafted her own major when she couldn’t find one that fit her interests.

“U-M has the Individual Concentration Program,” she explains, “which lets you design your own curriculum. I put together a bunch of classes that included architecture, a lot of courses in the School of Natural Resources, and some classes in personality and spatial psychology. I even took a course in theatrical lighting because I was interested in how light defines space. We called my major: Environment and Behavior.”

Doubled with a study in graphic design –”it was something practical, which was better for my parents who were helping me through school”— Britten was taking both an artistic and anthropological approach to urban planning, experimenting with ideas of space and human interaction.

“I’m very interested in how spaces are laid out and how people come together,” she explains. “In Europe a lot of cities are built around piazzas and paths that come to community gathering spaces and I’m fascinated by people’s attitudes about these spaces, how they choose to gather. Here it seems we develop spaces around goods rather than people.”

A head for inspiration

Which is not to say Britten is opposed to commerce. In fact, the artist and designer has supplemented her travels to far flung progressive cities by selling her self-fashioned “unihood”. 

Says one local blogger: “It may be the best haberdashery you’ll ever purchase.” The unihood is exactly what the name implies, an unattached hoodie. Fashioned from recycled or repurposed material, Britten’s hat creations each have a personality and flare of their own, attracting customers who are searching for something more individual than assembly line corporate fashion.

“I’ve always made my own clothes and sewn for friends and I started to rethink how I could put those skills toward making some income,” Britten explains. Her unihood became both a portable and personal industry that allowed the artist to make some money while connecting with other Do-It-Yourselfers – no matter where she lived.

“I’ll move to a city for a little while –usually for three months– and find someone to house with, then get a sewing machine off Craigslist or something and start making unihoods,” she relates. “It’s become my bread and butter project, I guess, because it’s one thing I can make, and it doesn’t require a lot of material and it’s pretty versatile.”

While Britten says that a few boutiques carry her unihood, she prefers to sell them directly at events like Ypsi’s twice-annual Shadow Art Fair. Not only does she get to keep all the profits, but she also really enjoys her interactions with customers and fellow DIY’ers.

“At the Shadow Art Fair last year I was next to Greg Roos, who roasts his own coffee, ” she recounts, “and he and I had a really good time together. We started having unihood/coffee specials. Then I started doing the same thing with these comic book artists at the fair. There’s a real energy and connection at these fairs.”

For Britten, the unihood has become more than just something she sells. And it’ll last for as long as it lasts. “I kind of think the unihood is as much a process as it is a product, connecting me to all sorts of people I might not otherwise know.”

It’s those very connections, as well as her stints in other cities, that have given Britten ideas about how to plug in with other self-sufficient creatives to build an artistic community — ideas that are now fueling her efforts in Ann Arbor.

A yellow barn

True to her live-where-she-finds-it ethos, Britten has settled on a 10-acre farm not far from Ann Arbor-Saline Road, about XX miles outside downtown. There she trades work for rent, fixing up a small space with a wood-burning stove. And slowly building a DIY artistic community in the adjacent barn.

“I used to dream: man, if only there were a spot where creative people could gather. Then I met Bill Gross and it just sort of happened.”