Our Story
Wear to share the Adventure
Penguin taking a mountain top break to admire the view on the Appalachian Trail 18'
"Somewhere on the AT, 2018."
A hiker wearing the blaze earrings at Trail Days 2026.
Penguin taking a mountain top break to admire the view on the Appalachian Trail 18'
In 2018, I walked the Appalachian Trail northbound — Amicalola Falls, Georgia to Mt Washington, New Hampshire one white blaze at a time. I came home with sore feet, a trail name that stuck, and a strange kind of homesickness for a place I'd only just left.
That's really where JP Handmade started — not on the trail itself, but in the months after, trying to hold onto something that felt like it was already slipping away. I picked up resin almost by accident, looking for a way to keep a blaze, a mountain, a moment, in something small enough to carry every day.
Years on, I'm still making them — and if anything, I understand why a little better now than I did at the start.
Every piece I pour is still, in some way, about that same feeling: the trail doesn't really end when you step off it. It shows up on a keychain in someone's car in Georgia, in a pair of earrings worn to a trail town reunion, in a necklace someone puts on the morning they leave for their own adventure. Making these lets me stay part of that — still a hiker and I also get to hand a bit of the trail back to the people still living it.
That's the part that's kept me at the workbench years after I thought this might just be a one-summer project: it was never really about the resin. It's about everyone who's ever felt the pull of a trail long after their shoes came off — and wanted something to wear that says so.
Wear to share the adventure. I mean that more now than I did when I first wrote it.
— Julie, "Penguin"