Philosophy
Elevate your kitchen with a piece that blends artisan craftsmanship, everyday durability, and timeless natural beauty. This handcrafted End Grain Cutting Board is built for those who expect the tools in their home to be both functional and thoughtfully designed. Featuring end grain construction, a self healing surface, natural pattern and color, a food safe microplastic free hand rubbed surface, with heft and weight for a stable surface, and serves as a workhorse in the kitchen and a beautiful presentation surface at the table.
Craftsmanship
A story in grain
My goal here isn't to become a millionaire. I am offering a story. Each piece of wood that I work is personal to me. I pour some of my soul into my projects and bring that beauty and integrity to your home. Let's face it. We are all bought and sold by large conglomerate corporations. We buy from Amazon, Walmart, or Costco because its cheap and easy. The products we buy don't last and we find ourselves throwing away more and more. What I and people like me are offering goods that last. Useful beautiful tools that have a story. Have a soul. Bring that into your kitchen and cook with that joy. That honor.
Art
The beauty of living art is that it creates itself. I may choose how the grain flows together and find interesting contrast in color, but the individual pieces of wood were grown. They did it all on their own. Every layer in the grain has its own life and its own story. All I do is let it speak. My commitment is in creating functional pieces of art that reflect the unique bond between the soul of a craftsman and the pith.
My Life In Wood
I have come into woodworking from an odd direction. I worked for the Pabst Theater group as an audio engineer and became a guilty woodworker by association. It started small as most things do and grew from there. There is a meditative state achieved through building something from scratch. Mistakes force your choices. Lessons are learned slowly and sometimes through spiritually painful repetition. I have become a bit of a purist. I still use power tools because my time is not endless, but there is nothing more satisfying than the sound of a razor sharp block plane pealing back a thin shaving of wood to reveal the true depths of beauty a piece of wood has to show us.
Think of that tree. It was once a seed. That seed somehow arrived in the ground. It could have been carried by the stomach of a bird, drifted from a parent tree on the wind, or an myriad number of ways to find itself at the perfect time and place to be nourished by nature. This tree grew strong and proud and beautiful over decades drinking in the sun.
I buy raw aged and dried lumber from a local lumber mill and I process it from there. A once rough hewn set of boards becomes a piece of art to brighten and warm your kitchen or dining room through many hours of intimate labor. The sanding process alone takes several hours due to the resiliency of the ends of the grain. I start with 40 grit, then 60, to 80, 120,150, and finally polished smooth with 220 grit.
I am limiting the amount of contact with plastics in my life and my work. A wooden cutting board, while not completely untainted by the nefarious stuff, will at least limit the amount I am directly putting into my food. At this point microplastics are showing up at the bottom of the deepest depths of the ocean and we may just have to live along side it now but we don't have to contribute to its use. Think of all the plastic that ends up in your food every time you cut on a plastic cutting board. Those little particles are going inside your body.
Every way you can limit plastic in your household is a move in the right direction. Wooden cutting boards and wooden kitchen implements are a great start.
I don't even want to go down the rabbit hole of the PFAS class of chemicals, but do yourself a favor and go out and get some cast iron and stainless steel cookware. Buy things that last a lifetime and don't kill you slowly while you use them.