Deep in South Jersey, around Exit 2 on the New Jersey Turnpike, CarlyBlue Woodcraft seeks the heart of art-ness. Carolyn Hogan is a master of her craft, and like any skilled artisan she is always seeking more inspiration, more challenge, more growth.
Working from her converted garage (who really uses those for cars anymore?), Carolyn has taken a space created for motor cars and put in a few motors of her own. The room hums with a lathe, a bandsaw, jars of watch parts, and wood and acrylic blanks stacked like bright candy. Carolyn, a Navy veteran and now-retired electrician, turns pens that people display like heirlooms.
Carolyn’s love of working with her hands is in her blood. Coming from a large family, she was often told she was one of her father’s sons. After doing a hitch or two in the Navy, her first job after mustering out was working in a collection agency, but racking up that kind of karmic debt took its toll.
Speaking with her electrician father in the early ’80s, he mentioned that they were looking for women in the Camden Local Union 439. She had worked with her father and knew she could do the work. The class was very small, and she was the first woman in the Camden unit. She would wait about a year before other women began to join and it was a tough time to be a woman in a male-dominated field. Ironically, there was more pressure from the younger men rather than the older ones. Carolyn said, “The older men were more like, ‘Oh, it’s about time they got women in [this profession].’” It was the younger ones who bristled. “They felt we were taking their jobs from them simply by showing up. The truth is, I was better than most of the men that I worked with.” That’s the truth.
Carolyn Hogan was good. Capable-good. Manager-good. Yet when layoffs came — since construction has its seasons — she was often first to go. “This guy blew up a damn transformer, and you didn’t lay him off yet? He wired the transformer wrong and they kept him! That’s the way it was then.”
She pushed to become a foreman. She knocked on truck windows when someone tried to clock out early. She gave directions to men who didn’t want to take them from a woman. She endured anonymous poems questioning her sexuality. When harassment crossed lines, she called in a union rep — even when the offensive notes weren’t signed.
She was out to some, not to others. In those years, visibility was negotiated carefully. “It’s about the work,” she would say.
For decades she wired beneath raised floors while the world changed overhead. Punch cards gave way to reels, reels to floppy disks, floppy disks to humming server rooms. The digital age did not descend all at once; it arrived in increments of cable and conduit, and Carolyn was there powering it.
There is something quietly radical about queer people who build infrastructure. While the culture debates our existence, we wire the buildings.
Retirement did not arrive with applause. It arrived with math. Benefits shifting. At 57, she stepped away. That could have been the end. Turns out, it was the start of the next chapter.
Carolyn has always made things. In the service, she built an end table in the barracks. She still has it. The instructor at the time asked if she’d worked with tools before. She hadn’t. “You’re a natural,” he said.
Carolyn is the craft; Connie Hewitt is the infrastructure. A veteran of Hewlett-Packard’s IT department from punch cards through modern systems, Connie handles spreadsheets, scheduling, tax IDs, mailing lists — the discipline artists resist. Carolyn jokes she’s “cheap labor.” Not true. This is a partnership in the fullest sense. Connie is the marketing genius whose work shows Carolyn’s handcrafted wares in the best and most beautiful light. Connie’s career in IT seems tailor-made — the CarlyBlue web presence and expert photography is difficult to achieve, and Carolyn’s work benefits from Connie’s artistry in the thoughtful display of art pens and kitchen tools.
The name of the business, CarlyBlue, came about equally organically. Carolyn’s nephew, when he was younger, had trouble saying her name, hence “Carolyn” became “Carly.” Blue is her favorite color, and heart plus heart equals love. After Carolyn’s early retirement, she and Connie — her partner since 2011, her wife since 2014 — began traveling out West. In Jerome, Arizona, a wee arts town near Sedona, they wandered into a kaleidoscope shop offering a once-a-year workshop. One class required turning your own kaleidoscope body on a lathe. While Carolyn lacked experience with a lathe, she signed up anyway. A star was born.
Back in New Jersey, at a wood show, she watched a pen-turning demonstration. She and Connie walked in, curious. They walked out with a lathe and a grinder, though the lathe sat in the garage for two years. Then came the rearranging of cabinets and the courage required to begin.
When she finally turned her first pen, “I’m in love,” she thought. Originally, she worked in wood. Rosewoods, Thuya burl, honeyed and swirling like captured light. Then one day she broke out in hives. She was allergic. So she pivoted.
Acrylic, resin, pine cones suspended in translucent color and more became her art. Imagination ran wild, watch parts layered into intricate mosaics before being sealed and polished smooth and sports themes emerged.
And what a collection! The watch-part pens stop people in their tracks, meticulously crafted and labor-intensive. Once, a man bought an $80 pen, handed over $100, saying “Keep the change.” Five minutes later he returned, peeled off more money, and exchanged it for a $450 watch-part piece. The pen really is more mighty.
CarlyBlue began doing shows around 2018. One woman owns so many of their pens, she bought a display case just for them. She has Connie check a list at every show to avoid duplicates. A young man who ran over his graduation pen with his truck, brought back the pieces and Carolyn salvaged and rebuilt it. A gym teacher who machine-washed his pen? They now include a smiling “Do Not Machine Wash” tag.
A pen begins as a blank — three-quarters of an inch square, five and a half inches long. It may be wood or resin, embedded with watch gears or pine cones. It is drilled, glued to brass tubes, mounted on a mandrel, and turned down until it meets its components. With wood, layers of finish are polished to glass. With acrylic, sanding and buffing coax depth from color.
“You don’t know what you’re going to get until you turn it,” she says.
Resin opens like galaxies. Burl reveals hidden landscapes. Every blank contains a surprise.
Both Carolyn’s life as an electrician and her life crafting beautiful and useful items are expressions of the same instinct: work with your hands. Solve the problem in front of you. Shape material into function.
She once powered buildings. Now she powers signatures.
Their garage will never hold a car. It holds seeds — blanks waiting to become something cherished. It holds the echo of a woman who once knocked on a truck window and said, “You want to come back in with the rest of the guys?”
There have always been two steady hands, the stubborn refusal to sit still and the harmony of the heart.
