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In the spirit of spreading love and light, we’re offering a new product: heart shaped tea light holders. The first batch we’ve made a deep, rich mahogany, with an offset holder for a tea light. We also have a slightly lighter mahogany version with a contrasting maple stripe. They are cute, fun, and we love ’em.

The tea light holders are in stock at our Etsy Store. The Hearts ship with a gift bag and a tea light so you are good to go right out of the box. As with all of our products, volume purchases are discounted.

Give one to someone you care about as a Valentine’s day gift or just to let them know you are thinking about them!

Last year, we learned to make wooden things that were straight, flat, and “square.” Square in this case isn’t about having four equal sides with 90 degree corners but, more about perfectly regular polygons in one or more planes. We also achieved some of the other basics like making air tight two part joints.

This year, we are working on something different: curved and irregular shapes, and cylindrical forms. One can create pretty fun forms by changing the axis on which a cylinder is spun — i.e.  spinning it on different centers — while reducing material. The band saws we have helps with the irregular shapes. We also acquired a “vintage” Delta-Rockwell scroll saw that will allow us to do even trickier stuff as well as a midi-lathe.

Over the past week, we have been having a lot of fun creating and working with cylindrical forms (for the most part). Over the course of the year, we will be integrating these skill to build useful things like lamps, candle holders some kitchen utensils, and small furniture.

Until we get there, however, here are some pictures of what we have been making. Some of this stuff will be productized and put up on our Etsy store. Stay tuned for more.

We’ve already mentioned that getting through November was pretty hectic. December was more of the same. While we haven’t really been selling stuff through our Etsy store, we have sold several boards and other stuff through our presence at Forage Homewares and through semi-custom orders. My guess is that over the next few months we will increase our presence with local retailers and make products available through this site rather than focusing on Etsy as a channel.

A part of having products at Forage Homewares on Mississippi is that one has to work a couple of shifts at the store offering direct contact with customers. That’s interesting. Curiously, people wanted the display stands that we we had to use as drying racks. They also wanted a bag. Our boards are now delivered along with a rustic burlap bag (soon to be “branded”), a stand/drying rack, and a little card that has care instructions and our warrantee and return policy. We are not sure about the card as we feel like it would get tossed after the first use. My guess is that we’ll end up printing the care instructions on the stand/drying rack as soon as we figure out how to accomplish that affordably.

Now that the Holiday season’s complete, we’re taking a deep breath, doing some much needed maintenance, trying out some other products, and getting ready to rock 2017. Following are some pictures of what December looked like.

 

November was a crazy month and we have just about recovered from it. The month started with equipment fails and repairs, followed by crazy product building, and ended with us having a booth at the Portland Christmas Bazar (the largest of it kind in the US) and getting product into a local store in a hipster neighborhood (Forage Collective on Mississippi Ave). It was a great month, but hectic.

The Christmas bazaar was grueling. We signed up a couple of weeks before it started at the suggestion of a friend of ours. We hadn’t researched the event in depth. It seemed like a good idea. We took the shot. It was after the registration deadline anyway. What was the likelihood of getting in?

Both of us had been at conventions in our corporate careers. No big deal. NOT. We missed the whole team of people whose job it was to set up, decorate, and tear down the booth, provide security, and made sure everything ran smoothly. When our application was accepted, … we had to scramble. We had to figure out the booth details, signage, layout, order processing, staffing, food, water,  … and that minor technical detail, products and quantities.

Since this was a Christmas bazaar, with about 30,000 potential customers and no ideas as to how much of what would sell, we had to scramble build stuff to stock our booth. There were a couple of long weeks.   Needless to say, we were totally winging it when showed up at our booth on Black Friday with most of our inventory — cutting boards and some home decorations.  Fortunately, we had very nice neighbors who’d been at the show many times before who helped us get organized.  They also turned into an awesome cheering squad.

The short version is we learned a lot from our experience. Net: we will not be doing THAT again. The response to our products was interesting.  Generally, there were two sets of people. The first thought what we had was pretty. They were looking for “deals”. They were curious about how we created the colors in the wood. They probably voted for Trump.

The second set of people were buyers, generally 35+ who knew what they were looking for. Unfortunately for us, there weren’t many of them at the bazar.  The question in their minds was typically which item or what size.  If they picked up a cutting board or box, they generally made a purchase.  They like the construction details, they loved the display/drying stand for the cutting boards, and the way things felt in their hands.

What we learned from the bazaar was we should follow our instinct and make well designed, attractive, durable products, at  a  good value. We don’t want or need to compete on price. We also learned getting product into people’s hands (literally) is key.  Besides our Etsy store,  our products are now carried at a little boutique in the hip Mississippi neighborhood.

We have a bunch of new stuff we will be posting on Etsy as soon as we can take some decent pictures. Following are pictures from our  November whirlwind.