Lake Vermilion island camp
— a cabin you reach only by boat.
Not only on a wall.
Lake Vermilion island camp, on ceramic.
Each tile is finished by hand in our Knoxville studio. Artwork is slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure, and rests beneath a thin glossy finish. The colour lives in the surface, not on top of it.
Pick any four 4-inch tiles — National Parks you've been to, a Smokies set, the four seasons of one place. $ for a set of , cork-backed, ready to live on the table.
Each tile ships in a kraft box, tied with cream ribbon, with a handwritten note from the studio if you'd like to add one.
Three or five different vistas, hung together — a chapter of places you've been, or want to go.
“One of the small camps you find on a rocky island, the kind you can only reach by boat across a wide arm of the lake. A dock, a screened porch, a stone fire ring, a path through the pines to the back side where the sunset throws red across the water. Three hundred and sixty-five islands on Vermilion, and a fair number of them carry a camp like this. Held in the same families for generations. from the studio
The place, in three passes.
Lake Vermilion sits in St. Louis County in northeastern Minnesota, about 25 miles south of the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness. The lake covers roughly 40,000 acres and holds 365 islands by the old count, many of them small enough to carry a single cabin and a dock. Boat-access camps have been part of the lake's character since the late 1800s, when the first sportsmen reached the area by rail through Tower. Most island camps remain privately held and pass quietly down through families.
The camp season opens around the Minnesota fishing opener in mid-May, when the ice has only recently left, and runs through the end of color in early October. July and August are the long, warm weeks of swimming off the rock; September brings the loons calling on still mornings and the first pine needles in the boat. By late October most camps are closed, water lines drained, shutters up, until the next May. Ice-out averages around the first week of May.
An island camp on Vermilion is its own kind of quiet. No road, no neighbors within sight, the engine sound of a passing boat carrying across a half-mile of water and dropping off. The loons are loud at night and the wind in the white pines is louder. The Bois Forte Band of Chippewa holds reservation land along the north shore; the Ojibwe name for the lake is Onamuni-zaaga'igan, the lake of the sunset glow. The light on the back side of an island, late, is what people come back for.
