About Us

We are a family business. Collectively we have backgrounds in painting, design, illustration, sculpture, technical theater, construction, and business. These experiences have led us to the desire to do something with our talents and skills that uses a higher level of purpose, consideration, and heart than we have been able to express in our other jobs in life. We are people that are constantly seeking rebirth both in our lives and in our work.

Our mission is to make beautiful, quality work using materials and processes that are not only safe for the consumer but also for the artist. We believe that what was created in nature exhibits not only excellence and beauty, but positively impacts the world around it. We believe, as many artists in history have, that the art should imitate nature in as many ways as possible. With this in mind, we use wood in its natural color (no stains). We use a natural finish (shellac), and the force of magnets instead of conventional hardware. To line our boxes, we use a felt that is made from recycled plastic bottles.

The process we use to make our patterns was born from the desire to use what others would call scrap or discards, and transform those pieces into something beautiful that would make people question what is thrown away and transform some ideas of what art can be. The technique used to make our patterns is a process very similar to making “murrini” in glass or “millifiori” in clay…however, our process uses wood. Layers of pattern are built up forming blocks, which we “slice” to make the patterns for our work. This process also shows the end grain of the wood, showing the rings of the tree or the “life lines” as we call them.

We began this journey when my husband was in the garage trying to figure out what to do with a pile of scrap wood we had. Around the same time we saw a documentary on the staggering amount of wood that is wasted in America each year. He decided to make a few crates to replace old ones we had in the house. When he had finished them and brought them inside, we realized that part of the wood had come from scraps from remodeling our 100 year old home, others were from a friend of ours who had some extra wood and knew we would find a use for it, and the other parts came from scraps from a stage set that was going in the dumpster. Immediately, we became enamored by the history of the wood and that it represented a desire to recycle from not only ourselves but from others.

From there, our love for the material has continued to grow as we have explored other species of wood.  We are constantly learning about the wood's natural colors and textures and the variety that has been created in nature. It is like meeting new people and learning about their cultures.  Although our sources, unfortunately, are no longer completely reclaimed, we have been carefully saving as many scraps and pieces from our processes as we can. We are developing ideas to use these pieces in future work as we continue in our quest for turning what is generally considered waste into something beautiful.