Editor’s note: This is the first in an occasional series that will help us discover makers, artists and craftspeople in the east metro.

Here’s how to find the dreidel-maker.

You’ll first want to go to his apartment-slash-woodshop, in the Northern Warehouse Lofts. Walk past his bedroom and kitchen and several bicycles and two Appalachian dulcimers hanging on the walls and his cat, Appa.

He made those instruments, by the way.

If you reach the framed Gregorian chant notation with family photos tucked in front of the glass, next to the microscope and the dreidels-in-progress and the rinsed-out tofu container holding who-knows-what, you’re probably in the right place.

“I just have a lot of stuff all around, a lot of things going on simultaneously,” Stuart Barron said. “If things are too neat and put away and focused, it sort of deadens me.”

For as recognizable a Jewish symbol as dreidels are, especially around Hanukkah, there aren’t many people hand-making the spinning tops anymore, Barron said. After all, he pointed out, his email is dreidelmaker at Gmail dot com. Not even dreidelmaker2.

And what does Barron, who’s 69, do during the spring and summer and fall, many months away from the holiday season? Keep making dreidels, of course.

“I know it’s anachronistic, and I don’t want to be cute about it, the whole notion of this bearded old Jewish guy hand-carving dreidels up on the 5th floor,” he said. “But I appreciate that story, that narrative. It works for me.”

‘We were rocking the world’

Barron’s father was a prominent doctor in the Twin Cities, as was his father before him. In Jewish families like his, he said, that was simply the way of things: Doctor, lawyer, maybe salesman or teacher.

So after high school, Barron enrolled in … cabinetry school.

“What, are you kidding?” he said, laughing. “This was early ’70s. We were rocking the world, man!”

His goal was to become a guitar-builder, and he studied string instrument repair and construction in Minnesota and Massachusetts before ultimately opening his own instrument business. But by that point he had two young kids, and his family was “getting freaked out,” he said, at the economics of the instrument industry.

So he earned an education degree and became a science teacher, though eventually returned to woodworking at a custom window shop. His most recent gig, before retiring about six years ago, was with St. Paul youth development organization Urban Boatbuilders.

Throughout it all, one constant has been dreidels.

‘Hand-making things that people cherish’

Barron has never felt strongly Jewish in a religious sense, he said, and has long been wary of mainstream Jewish institutions he views as overly prescriptivist. But creating Jewish objects, such as dreidels, connects him to Jewish culture — and, more importantly, Jewish people — in a way that resonates with him.

Barron sells his creations at a few craft markets and open streets events a year and, occasionally, from the back of his bicycle around Lowertown.

The joy of setting up his traveling “Dreidel Lab” booth is in inviting people to play — almost spiritual in itself, he said — to the extent that he sometimes forgets to tell people that his creations are for sale at all.

“Despite my ambivalence about Judaism and all that, I really love the idea of having a culture,” he said. “I just gravitate to hand-making things that people cherish and that are important to them. Not for their monetary value, but for their function; what they represent.”

Some are true dreidels, labeled with Hebrew letters, and others are closer to old-school tops, made from recycled materials like Cholula bottle caps and slices of his grandmother-in-law’s rolling pin.

“And I hardly think of them as toys,” he said. “Unless a toy could be defined differently, as something that draws someone from their normal daily responsibilities and takes them to another world.”