(mellow music) - Remember when Mr. Rogers used to go to a factory to see how something was made?

Like crayons or toothpaste or pretzels.

I loved those segments.

And for me, it's not just factories, I am always so happy when I meet people who make things.

Well, in the next half hour, five stories of people who make cool things.

(upbeat music) There's the Chicago woman who has made dollhouses all her life, including every detail of what you see here.

A man who makes wildly creative gloves and hats.

An artist whose medium is taxidermy.

The Chicago School of Violin Making and a visit to the first vinyl record manufacturer in Chicago in 30 years.

Stick around, that's right now on "Jay's Chicago."

(smooth jazz music with whistling) Hi, I'm Jay Shefsky.

We never really know what event in a child's life will have the greatest impact.

For the woman you're about to meet, it was a handmade gift from her father and it inspired a lifelong passion for making miniatures.

(playful music) - When I was five years old, my father made a dollhouse for me, made everything, all the furniture, wooden furniture, played with it every single day.

- [Jay] Pat Lohenry has loved miniatures for as long as she can remember.

As a teenager, she went from playing with them to making them.

And today they're all in her basement, 20 dollhouses and 170 room boxes.

Wow.

[Jay] It's a magical place, overflowing with her creations.

- This is January.

(playful music continues) I can't seem to stop.

I want to do more and more and more Fanatical?

No.

I just love the miniatures.

And you know, I can tell a story with miniatures.

- Look closely, and you can see those stories.

The boy crying because the ice cream fell off his cone.

The queen angry at her drunken maid, or the girls pouting on the 4th of July because the boys have cotton candy.

(laughs) I love these two girls.

- They're not happy.

- Pat says there's a divide among people who make miniatures about whether or not to include people.

Chicago's most famous miniatures do not.

The beloved Thorne Rooms at the Art Institute of Chicago were designed and commissioned by wealthy socialite Narcissa Thorne.

Pat loves and admires the Thorne Rooms, she says, but she wants more life in her boxes.

So she puts in people.

- [Jay] What about the clothes?

- I make all of them.

- You make all of these clothes?

- Yeah, I make all the dolls.

I've made thousands of dolls.

- [Jay] What, you make the dolls themselves?

- [Pat] And the hair.

(Jay laughs) You can lose your religion putting hair on a doll.

Let me tell you it's true.

- [Jay] Pat buys the porcelain doll parts, but then does the rest herself.

No, Pat does not make every item in every room.

She doesn't make the animals or little food items, or utensils, but she does make most of what you see in most scenes.

- The rug there is needle point, okay?

- What?

Wait, that's your own needle point?

- [Pat] Yes.

- [Jay] Wow.

Now, how did Pat Lohenry go from playing with dollhouses to building them?

Simple.

When she was 13 that dollhouse her dad built was getting too full.

- So I decided I'm going to put an addition on his dollhouse.

Did I know how to build anything?

No.

- [Jay] But she learned and all the carpentry you see is hers.

- Men would go like, "Oh my God, your husband, he built it?"

I go, no.

He doesn't even know what a hammer is.

- [Jay] Pat Lohenry does not sell her miniatures.

In the eighties, she had a small storefront museum for a few years, and now she's in her eighties and that's what she wants again.

- This is a sin to have it down here and not share it.

- [Jay] But Pat is retired and on a fixed income.

So she says the rent for a space that would hold all this is out of the question.

So for now, she will just keep on making them - And my family will say, "Stop making so much stuff."

"You got enough stuff.

Stop making it."

You know, I can't stop.

- [Jay] And that original doll house furniture that her dad made for her nearly 80 years ago?

Now it's in one of her boxes.

- Some people get dollhouses, you know, and they play with it for awhile and then, you know, they get tired of it.

I never got tired, never got tired of dollhouses.

(upbeat music) - In Chicago, we depend on our hats and gloves for their function, to keep us warm in the winter and shade our eyes in the summer.

But the man you were about to meet creates hats and gloves that can only be described as works of art.

(nostalgic upbeat music) - When I was a child, there was a time everybody wore gloves.

My mother had drawers full of gloves as did my grandmother.

And they were just a part of my childhood.

There was something very elegant about them, refined, and just very romantic.

My name is John Koch.

I am, at the moment, a glove maker.

(nostalgic music continues) I have been a milliner.

I have been a handbag manufacturer.

I have been many things, but right now my emphasis is on gloves.

- [Jay] Wow.

I can say I have never seen gloves like this before.

- Thank you.

- These are amazing.

Not many other people have.

(Jay laughs) Glovemaking is a forgotten art.

(playful music) - [Jay] Over the last 45 years, John Koch has made hundreds of pairs of gloves, every stitch by hand and each its own work of art.

Who wears these gloves?

What kind of an event would you wear gloves like these to?

- Art openings to theatrical productions to the opera.

Some of them I think would be knockouts with just a black sweater and jeans.

You can't go wrong.

(Jay laughs) They're generally for a woman who is very sure of herself.

- [Jay] John Koch's hats came before his gloves.

His best guess is that he has made close to a thousand hats in the last 45 years.

Some are elegant and some are, well, whimsical, outrageous, kooky.

- So this is the first hat that John designed for me.

The poodle hat to go with the poodle blouse.

- [Jay] Denise Stephan has gone on to buy more than 20 of Johns hats.

- Is that about right?

- [Jay] Denise raises money for several local nonprofits.

Hat parties, she says, have been fun and successful fundraisers for good causes.

- So it was always fun to see what he was going to come up with next.

- That is awesome.

- Take a good grip on yourself.

You're going to die.

- [Jay] John has always been a fan of old movies where it's easy to find a wide variety of women's hats, but his love of hats began with his grandmother.

- My grandmother always wore a hat with a veil and I can still remember kissing her goodbye as a child, kissing her through her veil, and smelling her face powder.

Those days are long gone.

(upbeat nostalgic music) - [Jay] John's hat making days are mostly behind him too.

A long time customer convinced him to make this one.

He's also set aside his work on handbags, jewelry, costumes, and bustiers.

He's closed his studio workshop and now spends his time creating more highly adorned gloves in his highly adorned North Side apartment.

Creating each one of these gloves takes a lot of time.

Just the undecorated glove takes about 12 hours to construct, he says, then another 60 to 80 hours.

John's creations are meant to be eye-catching and to put the wearer at the center of attention.

And that's a place the rather shy artist himself would prefer to avoid.

- And I'm not as flamboyant as my work, you know?

I don't know.

I guess I'm too self-conscious.

I want to disappear into the shadows, you know.

(chuckles) - [Jay] But luckily for those with a taste for what John calls arm candy, he's found a quiet way to step boldly into the limelight.

(upbeat music) If you want to become a professional violin maker, there are three schools in the United States, one in Boston, one in Salt Lake City, and one in the Chicago suburb of Skokie.

I've been driving past the Chicago School of Violin Making for years.

I get my lawnmower blades sharpened down the block.

Finally, I decided it was time to pay them a visit.

When a handmade violin is complete, then comes the moment of truth.

It's time to play it.

(man plays violin) - This is a, you know, kind of like a baby crying for the first time.

You get a sense of what it is going to sound like eventually.

So that's very exciting.

(gentle violin music) - [Jay] This is the Chicago school of Violin Making.

There are 26 students enrolled in this three year full-time trade school and there are only two other programs like it in the country.

Many of the students also play violin.

- I've always loved fixing things and building things.

And this was kind of the marriage of the love of music, you know, violins especially, violin family, and making things.

(man plays the violin) - Today, Jordan Ripstein's new violin is being played and critiqued by Paul Zafer, Concert Master of the Chicago Sinphonietta.

- It's very, very good, but I want it to kick harder.

I want it to be basically cut in half right.

Right?

(man plays the violin) - [Jay] Now and then, professional musician's stop by to give students important feedback about their work.

(Paul continues playing violin) - There's definitely a difference when I hit the A.

Let's see if you hear it.

- [Jay] Paul Zafer says many top-notch violin makers and restorers have graduated from this school.

And every violinist, he says, is looking for just the right violin.

- It's your vehicle.

Some people find it very quickly.

Some people could take years to process, but you're really trying to find your voice, your voice through an instrument.

- [Jay] The violin as we know it, was invented in the 16th century in Cremona, Italy, Antoine Nedelec is the school's executive director and lead teacher.

- There hasn't been much change in the design of the violin and there actually hasn't been much change in the way we make them.

(classical violin music) It's almost identical to the way they were making it back then.

Almost all handmade.

- [Jay] Antoine is himself, an award-winning violin maker.

And the program is hands-on from day one.

- As soon as they arrive, they get started on making their very first violin, and by the time they're done with school, they will have made six instruments.

And the very last one of them, they are capable of making it completely on their own without any instruction.

- [Jay] The students come from all over the world and for many different reasons, Joe Itse is a former flight attendant from Hong Kong, looking for a career change.

Luke Elliot got hooked on making violins as an Indiana teenager, working in his brother-in-law's violin shop.

Joyce Turley is a Chicago area neonatologist preparing for a retirement career.

And Andree Simard is from Quebec.

She is a long-time professional violist.

She says playing a viola and making one are more similar than you might think.

- If you practice an instrument, you zone in and you spend hours on detail and it applies a lot to the making here.

(classical violin music) - [Jay] The Chicago School of Violin Making was founded in 1975 here at Kenneth Warren and Son, an internationally known violin shop in Chicago.

They needed more qualified workers.

The school is now an independent nonprofit based in north suburban Skokie.

Making a great violin involves a lot more than just learning and repeating a series of steps.

- You can teach someone how to make a violin, but there's a certain sense of artistry that's individual.

That's hard to teach.

- [Jay] Each handmade instrument is unique, a somewhat mysterious combination of wood, glue, and varnish assembled with the skill and artistry of the maker.

(Paul plays violin) And ultimately each violin must serve the music and the musician who plays it.

(upbeat music) Vinyl records were long ago replaced by CDs and then by digital files.

But vinyl, you may have heard, has made a comeback.

And now in Chicago, there are vinyl records being made for the first time in 30 years.

Andy Weber has always loved vinyl records.

(rock music plays) - It allows you to slow down.

It allows you to sit back and listen to a side for 30 minutes and then sit back with your record jacket, just like it's a fine book to read.

I'm Andy, glad to be here with you this morning.

Gonna be here for about another hour... - [Jay] And as a Chicago DJ, Andy's heard a lot of frustration in the local music scene when it comes to releasing on vinyl.

- Yeah, friends in bands would would say they weren't going to do vinyl because of costs, and because of six month wait times.

- [Jay] So Andy and some friends started their own record plant, the first in Chicago in about 30 years.

It's called Smashed Plastic.

Andy's partner, John Lombardo, also owns a small label.

He says it amazes him that vinyl works at all.

- The whole process is kind of magical.

We always talk about the fact that you can actually cut a groove right into a piece of plastic.

And then you can have a turntable and an amplifier do the opposite process, where it's basically reading that groove, pushing it through speakers, amplifying it and creating sound waves.

Again, it's kind of a crazy process.

- [Jay] The process starts with PVC pellets.

Today, the pellets are white and white records come out the other end.

They can also make traditional black vinyl or just about any color.

The PVC pellets are melted in here and our first formed into something that looks nothing like a record.

- It looks like a hockey puck and that's, what's getting transferred in.

- Wait, that thing is going to become a record?

- Right.

Yeah.

- [Jay] The hockey puck and the record label then move between two plates called stampers, where it is flattened and the grooves are pressed into it, kind of like a big waffle iron.

- So these are what are called stampers.

So this is the negative of the music.

So what happens is, when you saw the press, when it was coming to close, these were on there and they're closing together, and where there's grooves, these are ridges.

So that's what's pressing out the music.

- [Jay] After the hockey puck is flattened, it is quickly cooled, so it's not too floppy when it moves to the trimmer, where the excess vinyl is cut off, saved, and made into more records.

It then moves on to a stack of finished disks.

(dramatic music) One record every 32 seconds, about 500 every day, just from this one machine.

And they're hoping to add two more machines soon.

One advantage of having a record plant in Chicago is that local musicians or their labels can pick up the finished records and even listen to them with the people who made them.

This record is a collaboration between Chicago Symphony Orchestra cellist, Katinka Kleijn and guitarist, Bill McKay, both serious vinyl lovers.

- [Katinka] It's less cold maybe.

You know, you just don't just press a button or something.

There's like this process that you see, like, you know, when you make music, you make sounds with physical things, with metal and wood, and so it's nice to kind of get the feel that sound is physical.

- [Jay] And by some magic, when a record spins on a turntable and a needle rides in the groove, (upbeat music) what comes out of the speakers is audio that many audiophiles say is better, warmer, and more real than any other way to listen to recorded music.

(upbeat music) The job of a taxidermist, I think it's fair to say, is to make dead animals look as lifelike as possible.

Well, the taxidermist you're about to meet has another goal too, she wants you to love her art form as much as she does.

- I usually wear gloves when I work on larger animals, but with birds, they're so delicate, it helps to be able to feel where I'm sticking my hands.

(playful music) - [Jay] Mickey Alice Kwapis knows that she does not fit most people's idea of what a taxidermist looks like.

She is trying to change that.

And she knows that, for most people, this part of taxidermy, when the insides of an animal are being removed, is the toughest to watch.

But once the skin is empty and being stuffed, it begins to look almost like a plush doll.

- I definitely have learned a lot more about animal anatomy than I ever thought that I would, originally wanting to be a visual artist and then becoming a taxidermist.

- [Jay] Mickey Alice Kwapis has taxidermied parakeets and squirrels, and many other mammals, birds, and reptiles.

(playful music) Mostly she sticks with smaller animals because she does the work in her apartment.

She doesn't do hunting trophies, but has acquired a few along the way as part of a distinctive collection.

- And this is the stitch that you would use on any animal, from sewing up a baby mouse to a giraffe.

- So how far between stitches?

And she teaches taxidermy, mostly to millennial women, but occasionally to an aging reporter.

So about there?

She's teaching more than just taxidermy technique.

She wants to share her love of animals and respect for nature.

- I grew up with my mom working on a petting farm when I was a kid.

And so everything that's alive has to die eventually and it was always just like this really sad thing where we just had to bury them and that was it.

And now I don't know if some of my passion for this work stems from that.

- [Jay] Mickey got the idea to try taxidermy when a friend asked for help with a science class dissection.

With guidance from YouTube videos, her first attempt was this rat.

- ...And it doesn't look that bad, but I got all the way done and realized I didn't have any eyes to put in it.

So that's why it's curled up sleeping.

I went to an estate sale and there were squirrel sized dresses and I bought all of them.

(playful music continues) - [Jay] When Mickey started out, she would never have put a squirrel in a dress.

- I wanted to do anatomically accurate taxidermy and I thought that the anthropomorphic taxidermy was tacky or kitschy, but the more anthropomorphic taxidermy that I made and took to various art shows that I was doing, the more I was able to connect with people who thought taxidermy was gross or barbaric or unnecessary.

- [Jay] Both of Mickey's grandfathers were Michigan hunters.

She still has the head of the bear that one grandfather bagged before she was born.

Mickey does not kill any animals for her taxidermy.

Still, she feels inspired by her bear-hunting grandfather's philosophy.

He wouldn't waste anything.

- He wasn't a trophy hunter.

He kept a small relic of this experience that was like a once in a lifetime experience, but he made his family eat the whole bear.

And so that's kind of where my mentality of wasting nothing came from.

My freezer is in my room.

- Mickey coined the term sustainable taxidermy and is very careful about where she gets her animals.

Some died in pet stores, some are trapped as pests and would otherwise be disposed of, and some come from people who hunt for food.

She skins the animals, and sends back the meat.

(playful music) There may be another reason why people are often surprised that Mickey Alice Kwapis is a taxidermist.

Not only is she a young, non-hunting woman, she is also quite sunny.

And she says people seem to think of taxidermy as dark and all about death.

- [Mickey] I know that what I do is odd, but my goal is to normalize it because taxidermy is so important for education, for conservation, for protecting our wildlife.

I hope that I can get other people involved in it too.

(upbeat music) - You can watch any of these stories again, along with 15 years of other stories, on our website, wttw.com/jayschicago.

And while you're there, tell us what you thought of the show.

I'm Jay Shefsky.

Thanks for watching.

(smooth jazz music with male whistling)