Twenty-eight years in one building, cleared for a turning lane. Vonda Bricker (74) has until November 1st to empty the shop she has sewn in since 1998 — the last of her handmade dog baskets are going at 55% off.

Vonda Bricker, 74, in the shop on Meridian Street she has rented and sewn in for twenty-eight years. It comes down in November.

The short version: „I’m not closing. I’m being closed.“ Randolph County has the funding to widen the corner of Meridian Street and County Road 200 N — a turning lane, a landscaped island, new curb. The building Vonda Bricker has rented and sewn in for twenty-eight years sits inside the right-of-way. The county takes possession on November 1st. The machines come the week after. Inside are a hundred and sixty-four dog baskets — about forty that were already on the shelf and the rest sewn since April. All of it is going out at 55% off, because there is nowhere left to keep it.

Half the shop is in boxes already. The bone-handled shears her grandmother carried up from Kentucky in 1934 are wrapped in a dish towel by the door. Twenty-eight years of cotton — oat, brick, navy, mustard — is coming off the back wall a bolt at a time.

The last things she made in there weren’t table runners. They were baskets.

„I haven’t taken commission work since April,“ she says. „The cloth isn’t coming with me. Either it turns into something or it sits in a dumpster. I’d sooner sew it.“

The notice came in April, on county letterhead. The hearing had been in March. The corner needs a turning lane, an island and a wider radius for the grain trucks, and the surveyors had already been out with their ribbons. Her lease runs to October 31st.

„A turning lane,“ she says. „That’s what it comes to. A turning lane and a bit of grass, and twenty-eight years has to come out of that building to make room for it.“

The lane is already marked out. The orange stakes cross the sidewalk, run up to the wall of Vonda’s building, and stop there.

She argued it. She wrote to the county engineer twice and got the same paragraph back both times. She stood up at the March hearing and said her piece in front of forty of her neighbors. What she asked for in the end was small: one more winter in the building, and she would go quietly in the spring.

„The contractor is booked for November. That was the answer,“ she says. „Everyone was perfectly nice to me. Nice, and then no. Every single time. To them the building is a rectangle on a site plan. Not one of the people who drew it has ever made a thing with their hands.“

Early autumn in Winchester. The shop smells of cotton, cedar and a stove she won’t be lighting this year. Along the side wall the baskets are stacked four rows deep — every one quilted through, every one carrying a design of its own. Tuck, the beagle, is asleep on top of the third row, where he has been since about eight this morning.

„I made these because I felt like making them,“ she says. „They can’t come with me. Somebody ought to be using them.“

In twenty-five years they went to people who walked into the shop and asked for one. This is the first time they have been available to anyone outside Randolph County — and it is the last.

Sixty-seven years, one machine, and a wall of cloth that isn’t going with her

Vonda won’t call herself an artist. She sewed at the kitchen table for forty years, for whoever asked — hems, curtains, a wedding quilt here and there. She opened Bricker’s at forty-six, when the children were out of the house, in the back half of a feed store that was already old then. Table runners, cushion covers, quilts to order, alterations. One woman, one machine. She never had staff and never wanted any.

Vesta Ridenour came up from Harlan County, Kentucky in 1934, twenty-four years old, on the back of a truck with her brothers when the mines went bad. What came with her, besides a change of clothes, was a quilt top her own mother had pieced and never finished, and a pair of bone-handled shears.

There is a photograph on the shop wall: a girl of seven on a back step in the summer of 1959, cloth across her knees.

„She put them in my hands and told me — you finish what you start, Vonda, even if it takes you all summer. It did take me all summer. What I made was terrible. She hung it up in her hallway anyway.“

Sixty-seven years of evenings and Saturdays followed. Two children, Renae and Brent. Forty-six years married to Delmar, and then the morning in February 2019 when a stroke took him.

„I kept sewing after Delmar went. Cloth doesn’t ask you how you’re holding up. That was worth a great deal that year.“

The shears still get sharpened every spring at Denbo Hardware, four doors down. They have since 1948.

Vonda at the machine, running the quilting pattern around a basket panel. The shears on the table crossed the Ohio River from Kentucky in 1934 and were handed to her in the summer of 1959.

The baskets started about twenty-five years ago — one here, one there, for people who came through the door. Somewhere near three hundred of them before this year, by her own reckoning. Every one built start to finish by her. Every single one sold within thirty miles of where it was made.

It began with a woman at the counter. Vonda had table runners and cushion covers out front, nothing else. The woman asked whether she had ever made anything for a laundry room.

„She told me her hamper was the single ugliest object in her house,“ Vonda says. „What she wanted was something that looked like it belonged where it stood.“

Vonda sewed one that week. When the woman came by to collect it, she stopped in the doorway and said nothing for a moment.

„Then she said she wasn’t sure she wanted to put laundry in it. Too pretty to shove in a corner, is how she put it. I’ve been turning that sentence over for twenty-five years.“

A month later somebody left a photograph of their dog on the counter and asked whether she could get him onto one. After that it never stopped.

„They’d bring the picture in and leave it with me. I did them in the evenings, once the commission work was off the table. It was never the business. It was what I did when the business was finished for the day.“

Three or four times a year she carried a handful to a market — the 4-H fair, the Harvest Market on the square, the Methodist bazaar at Christmas. Ten, maybe twelve a year, which is all one woman manages on the side. They were usually gone inside the first hour.

„People come back the next year and ask for the one with the dachshunds. I tell them the same thing every time — I’ve got two with me. That’s the lot.“

She never put one in the window. She never advertised. They went to whoever happened to ask, and no further.

Until this year.

What’s different about them

The dogs are why people stop. The way they’re built is why they keep them.

A heavy cotton-poly face goes around a firm batted core, and the whole thing runs through the machine in Vonda’s quilting pattern — right the way around the outside, not just across the panel you happen to be looking at. That is where the weight comes from. You notice it the moment you pick one up.

Six designs, all of them from the final run. Each one quilted from the ground up, each dog cut and sewn on by hand.

Nothing on the surface is printed. Every ear, muzzle, bandana and knitted sweater is a piece of cloth she cut and stitched into place herself, standing slightly proud of the ground behind it. Drag a thumb across one and you feel where each dog begins and ends.

„They won’t crack, peel or wash off,“ Vonda says. „They’re sewn into the cloth — they’re part of it. Sixty-seven years on and my hands still do it while I’m thinking about something else entirely.“

That part matters more than the rest of it. The usual fabric basket gives up the second you take the laundry out — handles falling inward, sides caving, a sad heap in the corner. Vonda’s don’t. At seventeen inches across and nineteen tall, one holds a week of laundry and still stands when there’s nothing in it. And when a dog gets to it first — and one will — the whole thing goes in the machine on a cool gentle cycle.

See all six designs →

The one she kept

There is one basket in the stack that was never meant to leave.

„Sleeping Dog — the little white one on the cushion. That’s Biscuit,“ she says. „He belonged to Erma Shinn, out on the east side. Erma didn’t get past her own front door the last four years of her life. That dog met everybody at it for her.“

Erma died in the spring of 2022. Vonda quilted the basket that winter for her own chair, and that is where it has stood since.

„It goes with the rest of them. No sense hanging on to one basket.“

One of them has held the same corner for nine years

Vonda doesn’t keep many records, but she remembers the people. A friend two streets over was given one nine years ago.

„Started off as her laundry. Now it’s her knitting and her good quilts and whatever the grandchildren leave behind. Nine years on and it’s the hardest-working thing in that house. She’s the one who talks every new visitor into coming and asking me for one.“

„That’s all I ever wanted for them,“ Vonda says. „Not a thing you tuck away because it’s too pretty to touch. Something you keep out because it works.“

The handwork up close: each shape cut, layered and sewn onto the quilted ground. Run a thumb across and you feel every one.

What’s in the shop is all there is

The final collection exists because of a turning lane.

At seventy-four, Vonda moves up to Fort Wayne at the end of November. Renae has had a room waiting the best part of two years. There is no room in it for the machine, the frame or the cloth.

„Some things you carry with you. Some things you hand on.“

There is a second reason, and she gets to it more slowly.

„There’s nobody after me. Renae’s a nurse, Brent’s down in Louisville, and not one of the grandchildren wants to give their evenings to learning this the way I learned it. I don’t hold it against them — it isn’t the world I learned it for. But it does mean that when that building goes, it is the end of it.“

Twenty-eight years going into boxes. The baskets stay along the wall until they’re gone; the demolition notice is already taped to the door.

Afternoons go to packing now — patterns, spools, the photographs off the wall. What came off the machine this year is nearly all of it, and there will be no more. There is no apprentice, the machine is going into storage, and nobody is taking the pattern.

„Nobody’s going to spend twenty-five years learning to do this properly,“ she says, without any bite in it. „The quilts all found somebody in the end. I expect the baskets will as well.“

A shop over in Muncie once asked to sell them on her behalf at a hundred and forty-five dollars each. She turned it down — it never felt right to her. Now, with a demolition notice on the door and a date on the calendar, she has done something she avoided for twenty-five years: cut that figure by 55%, down to $65 a basket.

„The money isn’t the point at my age,“ she says. „I’d rather they ended up in houses that use them than in a dumpster on that corner.“

Kenzie (18) is the one who got them online. „I never got the hang of any of that,“ Vonda says, laughing. „She had it working before I’d finished my coffee.“

Take 55% off before the shop comes down →

What people say

Where to get one

Kenzie, Vonda’s granddaughter, set the shop up and packs every order that leaves Back Road Goods.

Vonda’s baskets go out through Back Road Goods, the small online shop her granddaughter Kenzie (18) runs. It is the only place the real ones are. They have never been in a store and they never will be.

„Kenzie runs every bit of it,“ Vonda says. „I wouldn’t know where to start.“

Payment and shipping: all the usual cards, PayPal, Apple Pay and Google Pay. Orders go out within 2–3 business days. Returns are free for 90 days.

One warning. Since word got around, copies have started turning up on Amazon and other marketplaces. They photograph identically. They are not hers. The real ones come out of Kenzie’s shop only — built the way Vonda has built things for sixty-seven years, with cloth shapes sewn on and standing proud, rather than a flat printed panel.

Check what’s left →

In short

This is the basket you won’t want to leave in the laundry room.

Which is deliberate. Vonda has spent sixty-seven years making things meant to be used every day and looked at while you use them. Soft enough to carry, stiff enough to stand where you put it. And every new person who comes through the room stops, leans in, and puts a hand on the dogs.

Tuck has spent the whole summer sleeping in a different one every week. Vonda gave up moving him out around June.

Twenty-five years she made them for one county. These are the last ones she’ll ever make.

Thank you, Vonda.

More from customers

See the final collection →