ABOUT STITCH & RIVET

Stitch & Rivet is a bag and leather goods studio in Buckland, Virginia, between Washington, D.C., and the Shenandoah Valley. Owner Katie Stack designs and patterns each piece. Stitch & Rivet manufacturing takes place in Stack’s Virginia studio, with some pieces or parts occasionally outsourced to local makers and stitchers working from their home studios, who earn a fair per-piece rate negotiated by the artisan.

Stack received her training at The Theatre School at DePaul University and has a dual BFA in Costume Design and Costume Technology (studio management and patternmaking). Before fully dedicating her time to Stitch & Rivet, she worked for a decade as a knitwear patternmaker, milliner, painter/dyer, and costume crafts manager in professional theatre costume shops and as a freelance artisan. While Stack loved her time working in theatre, she loved working for herself more and committed to Stitch & Rivet full-time in 2012.

Stitch & Rivet had a brick-and-mortar shop in the Brookland neighborhood of NE Washington, D.C., from 2013 until March 2020. Like many people, in 2020, Stack decided to work from home and seek a less complicated life. She lives with her husband and two cats in a small house on an acre of land, and when she is not in her studio, she is learning to garden, identify birds, and appreciate her backyard fauna. Her full-time feline staff members supervise her studio time: Studio Manager Miss Kitty Salad Lamarr and Studio Intern Buddy Crouton Hopper. You can follow along on Instagram for behind-the-scenes studio updates, gardening attempts, and studio cats.