Posted on

A Crazy November

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? read more

Posted on

Making a Batch of Beech End Grain Cutting Boards — 2

Okay. So we had our beech end grain cutting boards glued up, sanded, and ready to be finished. And then we needed to tidy up a bit before making the final push to listing product on our Etsy Store and (hopefully) shipping them. And then, … we ran into some long grain cutting boards we had made a while ago. Sigh! Our entire process got sidetracked while we refactored and upgraded the long grain cutting boards to be serving platters.

We decided to add a juice groove to one side of the beech boards so that if they are used for carving a turkey or a roast during the holiday season all the juice doesn’t run off and mess up the counters. We also added a finger groove to make them easier to pick up. While all this may seem trivial, a large part of the challenge is making tasks precisely replicable. This means the first time, always takes longer as there is a lot of “figuring out” that needs to happen. read more

Posted on

Our Etsy Store is Finally Stocked

For those of you who’ve been following our woodworking venture, we have (finally!!!) listed our first products on Etsy!!! We’ve had the store set up but hadn’t stocked it with product.

Getting stocked was more challenging than we had anticipated. It’s not so much getting stocked since we had inventory, but it’s all of the other details :  presentation, photography, pricing, packaging, policies, …. the list goes on. It’s not that any one thing is difficult, it’s that the details make a difference. Yeah, we could ship stuff in a paper bag with a bunch of stamps, but that seems déclassé. On the other hand, wrapping product in silk and having it delivered by carrier pigeon’s isn’t cost effective. Plus you have to train the pigeons. We nixed that idea. read more

Posted on

Building an Outfeed Table

The past few days have been a little bit of fun and a lotta bit of drudgery. After our recent experiments with cutting wider panels for the end grain cutting boards we’ll be making, we decided that we needed to have an out feed table to support longer work pieces as they are pushed through the saw. Without this support, longer workplaces would tilt, possibly catching the blade and damaging the workpiece — or worse, one of us.

Initially, we’d thought we would make a simple little table to support work pieces as they were pushed through the saw blade. Then we thought we’d upgrade to a face frame cabinet like you’d find in most kitchens. What we ended up with, however, was a set of stacked, modified  torsion boxes. read more