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1. What do you mean by ‘repurposed’ materials?

Repurposed, salvaged, reclaimed… for us it comes down to using materials that would otherwise be thrown out, to create something new. We use wood, metal, leather and other materials we find or salvage from what would otherwise get put in a landfill. We source barn wood from our area, as well as small wood scraps from burn piles at local woodshops. We also collect broken found furniture as well as fallen trees – We once took apart a broken piano that was being thrown out, to discover it had beautiful ash, oak and birch in it! We make our herb markers from copper in electrical wiring scraps that were headed for the trash.

2. What do you finish your products with?

We hand rub our salad servers with beeswax, and everything else is finished with a hard wax oil, with is zero-VOC and completely foodsafe. Hard wax oil penetrates the wood and strengthens the fibres from within without leaving a film on the surface, like varnish. It’s also completely natural!

3. How do I maintain my cooking utensils?

It’s worth treating your wooden utensils with a little TLC so you can enjoy them for a long long time. The big key is to not wash with soap – just rinse and dry. If you’ve used them to handle raw heat, make sure you use very hot water. Soap will breakdown the wax and oil protecting the wood. Make very sure not to leave your utensils soaking in water – the fibres will bloat and start to lift.

For most cooking utensils, the re-coating of oils each time you use them should keep them in good shape, but if you feel they need to be re-treated, give them a wipe with some olive oil.

4. Do you do custom work?

Yes, we are always open to custom orders. Contact us and we’ll see what we can do!

5.  Who makes what?

Rachel makes all the bookmarks, magnets, cooking utensils, herb markers, and the woodburned designs. Aaron does all the planing, jointing, glue-ups, cutting and turning. We share the sanding, drilling and finishing!

6. What tools do you use?

We have a lathe for turning bowls, a bandsaw, table saw, jointer, planer, a shared drill press that we constantly fight over, Rachel has a pimped out scroll saw, and we each have our own belt sander.

7. Do you share a space?

Our metalshop and woodshop are separate – Aaron’s woodshop is in the garage while Rachel’s jewelry studio is in the house. Rachel’s studio houses the scrollsaw, which we use for cutting bookmarks, but is otherwise restricted to silver-only, since silver dust is valuable and needs to be recuperated. Copper herb markers and copper rivets are hammered in Rachel’s studio, while everything else is made in the woodshop. Working wood creates a lot of dust that needs to be controlled with a proper dust collection system, and the woodworking tools require a lot more space.

8. Who comes up with the ideas?

We both contribute our own ideas! Sometimes we are on the exact same page about where to take a design, other times we try out different approaches and pick the winning formula.