Smack between Kristen’s bedroom and her living room sits her studio, filled with heaps of turquoise and camel suede, reworked sewing machines, and rows of half-finished pieces. She gives us the grand tour.“I’m neurotic about the scraps. I keep anything over the size of a dime—I’m drowning in them. I’ve started to play around with different things I could make, like jewelry.” Kristen incorporated some of her candy-colored scraps into the belt she designed exclusively for Of a Kind. Check it out here—there are only 10 available!“I had a hard time finding materials at first, but now I get everything from the U.S.—mostly from a place in California that sells all by-product from the meat industry. I love how suede looks dyed because it has so much texture and the color is so saturated. There’s nothing like it.”“Even though I’ve been doing this for six years now, I still have those moments when I’ll think, ‘I just made a shoe! That’s crazy!’ I think moving to New York has helped me make more durable shoes. Because you walk so much, you have to have a little more padding. I’ve found a new foam that is used in running shoes that makes the insoles really comfortable.”“I grew up around sewing machines, so I figured out how to fix them—make them the way I need them to be. I turned this one into a leather machine even though it wasn’t designed that way—really beating it into submission.”“I have such a small space. I have to be smart about how I pull out materials. I can’t spend half of my day preparing. If it’s a day of cutting, I try to cut all my soles.”“The baby stuff is all hand-done—there’s no machine. With the adult moccasins, I use a machine for the soles. It stitches through so much leather, which impresses me every time.”

The talented woman behind Manimal keeps up with fashion magazines like any good designer, but when asked to cite her primary sources of inspiration, she rattles off a series of places and things with a decidedly a more educational bent. “I’m into looking at different cultural artifacts and seeing how they can be re-interpreted,” she explains, noting that making poppy moccasins and suede jewelry doesn’t require reinventing the wheel so much as jazzing up classic forms. These five points of reference always trigger new ideas.Mashantucket Pequot Museum and Research Center at Foxwoods“My favorite museum is actually at the Foxwoods Resort Casino. You would never think to go there, but it’s really nice—and big—so it’s a good day trip from New York. It has great interactive displays, and there’s this huge room that’s like a village with life-size people. They’re all casts of living members of the tribe. If you lived on the reservation, you would have a cast of you. It’s so beautifully done.”(110 Pequot Trail, Mashantucket, CT, 800-411-9671; pequotmuseum.org)National Geographic“I’m obsessed with National Geographic. I do get a lot of ideas from back issues, but I also love the recent stuff. In a series about weird sea creatures a few months ago, there were colors I was really into—salmons and pinks.”(nationalgeographic.com)Hall of Northwest Coast Indians at the American Museum of Natural History“I could go there and just sit for a whole day. It has a lot of clothing, totem poles, woodwork from ships, and things like that. It’s really big—it’s not just a little display. Even the room itself is an artifact. It’s closed off at each end with lots of dark wood. It’s what I want my living room to be like.”(Central Park West at 79th St., New York, 212-769-5100; amnh.org)The Family Creative Workshop“I have this series of books called The Family Creative Workshop, which is like an arts and crafts encyclopedia from the seventies. It has so many weird projects, like cardboard tables and awesome backpacks. My father got me these, actually—before DIY was a thing.”(amazon.com)Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology“I lived in Boston for a long time—I went to school there and stayed. There’s a museum at Harvard that was put together in the 1800s when the university was formed. It’s not modern at all, and I hope that nobody ever donates money to modernize it because it’s amazing. It’s one of my favorite spots in Boston. I went to visit their archives—it’s just rows and rows of weapons and textiles and jewelry.” (Harvard University, 11 Divinity Ave., Cambridge, MA, 617-496-1027; peabody.harvard.edu) Check out the very cool, very versatile belt Kristen designed just for Of a Kind here!

Kristen Lombardi, the designer behind Brooklyn-based leather-and-suede accessories line Manimal, has artistic talent in her gene pool. Just about every member of her family has a crafty profession or an aesthetically-minded hobby—and the same will likely go for her latest creation: a baby boy, who is expected to arrive any day now. Here, she shares the work of her clan. “My dad draws. He’s really talented. But he grew up without money, so it wasn’t encouraged. I went to art school. I had to learn how to draw, but he just has it in him.”“My mom just finished this bunting for the baby. When my sister was born in 1972, my mom made one for her, and we each have one. She has eight grandkids, and each of the grandkids have one. We all got to pick colors for our kids—or at least I did because I’m incredibly fussy.”“This is a crazy suit that my great-grandmother made me when I was in high school, when she was about 95. She crocheted it. And I wore it, which I think is the craziest thing!”“When my youngest niece was about four, she had this amazing Disney coloring book. She colored the princesses’ capes and dresses black and all of the evil people pink and purple. She said she wanted to see if she could make all of the evil people good with good colors and the good people bad with bad colors.”“My husband is a musician, so I’ve done his album covers. This is a tapestry I made with a T.S. Eliot line, from ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.’”“My grandparents are very Italian. My grandma has her kitchen, and my grandfather has his kitchen. They aren’t allowed in each other’s kitchens. I have my grandfather’s bread recipe—I took bread-making lessons with him for a year after college, every Wednesday. It was really intense, and it took me about six months to work up to putting olives in it. He took it so seriously. He has all of these decoy recipe books and he said to me ‘Don’t show your uncles these.’ He’ll pass down the fake ones, but I’ll know where the real ones are.” Check out the very cool, very versatile belt Kristen designed just for Of a Kind here!