When Trice Clark’s great-uncles watched her as a child, she went wherever the work took them.
For a while, she was the only granddaughter in a family full of boys. If her great-uncles and their sons were fixing a roof, Clark was on the ground picking up shingles. Together, they built go-karts from lawnmower engines and tinkered with mini motorcycles.
“I was just being an extension of them,” she says.
Those afternoons helped shape a curiosity that has followed Clark into adulthood. Today, the Detroit artist and founder of Kraftologie teaches people across metro Detroit how to make things for themselves—from jewelry and other small projects to woodworking.
And now, after more than a decade of bringing workshops into other people’s spaces, she’s working toward a permanent home for Kraftologie.
In May 2026, Kraftologie won the Comerica Hatch Detroit Contest by TechTown, receiving a $100,000 prize and business support to help open a brick-and-mortar location. hatchdetroit.com
For Clark, the vision is a place where people can walk in, choose something that interests them and give it a try.
“I just want people to come and get a new hobby,” she says. “Try something out, explore.”
“I just want people to come and get a new hobby,” she says. “Try something out, explore.”
Learning by doing
Clark, who is also known as Kraft Doll and Detroit’s Handy Woman, began what would become Kraftologie with DIY Fridays in her college apartment. Her first public workshop followed in downtown Detroit in May 2014.
She learned much of her craft by experimenting. After losing access to arts education in elementary school, she kept working with materials, figuring things out and building skills through practice. That approach became part of how she teaches.
Over the years, she has led workshops in spaces throughout metro Detroit, including at Carhartt. Her classes invite people to pick up a tool, work with a new material and make something they can take home.
Clark considers herself an artist, though she doesn’t confine her work to one medium. She’s interested in too many things, she says, and the techniques she learns often overlap and inform one another.
Much of what she makes begins as a sample for a workshop. She learns a technique herself, works through the process and then finds a way to teach it to someone else. Kraftologie also offers kits and tutorials for people who want to keep creating at home.
A community of makers
Clark’s curiosity keeps her moving between teacher and student.
She applies for scholarships to attend craft schools and learn from artists with deep knowledge of their materials. She recently told BLAC about spending a week at a craft school in Tennessee for a metalsmithing workshop. While there, she wandered into a neighboring fibers studio and learned basket-weaving techniques from a woman who shared her family’s tradition of sweetgrass braiding.
For Clark, those exchanges are part of what makes the work meaningful. A workshop is a place to learn a skill, but it can also be a place to meet someone whose experience opens another door.
“There’s so many processes, so many different crafts to learn,” she says. “I could never be bored.”
“There’s so many processes, so many different crafts to learn,” she says. “I could never be bored.”
That sense of connection has also carried into her travels. In June, Clark attended the Great Craft Gathering for Black Artists & Makers at Peters Valley School of Craft. The gathering brought together Black artists across generations to share skills and talk about their work.
A home for Kraftologie
The Hatch Detroit win brings Clark closer to creating a dedicated space for that spirit of shared learning in Detroit.
In a July interview with Daily Detroit, she described a vision for a family-friendly creative learning lab with instructor-led workshops, self-guided projects, supplies and room for people to work on their own ideas. She was targeting the West Village area and hoped to open in May 2027, while continuing to seek the funding needed to get there.
Until then, Clark is still teaching, still learning and still inviting people to see what happens when they give themselves room to try.
The project they leave with may be a spoon, a piece of jewelry or something they didn’t know they could make. For Clark, it may also be the beginning of whatever they decide to make next.
Find workshops, tutorials and craft kits at kraft-ologie.com. Follow Trice on Instagram or subscribe to her newsletter.
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