Peek inside artists' workspaces during National Craft Open Studios weekend

In his workshop, Eddie Phillips is shaping more than a piece of wood.

"You're putting an edge profile on something that is unique. This isn't going to be something you can replicate with a machine," Phillips said.

For Phillips, it all begins the same way. With wood, patience, and his own two hands.

"I design and make everything myself," he said.

After leaving a corporate career, he turned a lifelong passion into Boom Island Woodworking, creating custom furniture from his Northeast Minneapolis studio.

"A client may take a mockup and take it to their place and see if the lines fit with their other pieces of furniture and I encourage them to take a sharpie to that model and then I can adjust it for them and that's just all part of the process of commissioning some custom furniture," he explained.

He's one of more than 250 studios opening their doors for the first-ever National Craft Open Studios Weekend, organized by the American Craft Council.

Visitors register online to unlock an interactive map, making it easy to plan a route through participating studios in small towns to big cities.

"Creative business, craft businesses. We want to make it easy for people throughout the United States to discover what is right in their own backyard," said Andrea Specht, the executive director of the American Craft Council.

Artists showcase handmade textiles, ceramics, glass, pottery and metal work.

"But craft is also very much of this moment in that one of the reasons that there is a resurgence of interest, I think, is that craft gets us off of our screens," said Specht. "People have a hunger for that right now, I think to have contact again with things that are made by the human hand and to have conversations and interactions with makers."

"I put a lot of my own heart and soul into every piece I make, if somebody has value in that it's the most satisfying thing in the world," said Phillips.

National Craft Open Studios Weekend is Saturday and Sunday from 12 p.m. to 5 p.m.

You can register at the Craft Council website to learn more about all of the participating studios.