When I started my woodworking career back in 2004 I decided from the beginning there was too much waste in industry and wanted to be as efficient as I could be with my materials from the very start. Fast forward 18 years – lots of hard work, sweat, many highs and lows, we are here where we are today 3 weeks into our Christmas retail and I’ve been subtly telling you all about our sustainable Christmas range of products (until now!).
Christmas has long been linked as a time of excess… be it food, drink, gifts. But my issue is the excessive amount of waste!! There is so much unnecessary packaging, plastics, non recyclable waste associated with Christmas that I wanted to flip it on its head. So in our arget to further our efficiency to produce less waste that goes through our wood burning heating, we decided back in June to start preparing for a “Sustainable Christmas”.
As you may know we use FSC and PEFC certified timbers, reclaimed hardwoods and locally sourced timbers but we needed to have a big sort out of all our timber stocks and started putting pieces to one side so that we could use them for our upcoming Christmas season. It’s quite amazing what volumes of materials you can amass being in the same workshop for 8 years! So once we went through it all, we found we had lots of pieces that were either short, thin, twisted, overstock, etc and in a larger business this would go into a skip. But not with us. We set to work penning out ideas for simple styled Scandinavian themed items for our Sustainable Christmas range.
With lots of very short chunky pieces we decided to make some star and tree shapes. We kept these simple and affordable with a 3 for £15 price tag as the target so we went with the one size fits all approach – the only difference being the timber colours. They have been cut out on the bandsaw and given a quick oil and have been amazingly popular to the point we already may sell out! We have made rather alot of these as Duncan can tell you as he’s oiled every single one of them!
We have also made some giant stars (from shorter lengths of timber), tree wreaths, trios of stars, chopping boards and our signature Christmas item our Giant Industrial Baubles. Our Giant Industrial Baubles have had a little bit of a tweak for 2022 with some reclaimed English oak, which has come from a project we worked on in Tideswell earlier this year, as the base for the scorched redwood tree silhouette. We have also use old school lifting eyes as the hanging point along with pine cones picked from the forest with our 2 children Austin and Felix.
But what do we do with the waste from producing all of this? Well I have to admit it’s been rather toasty in the workshop this winter so far which has made making our other works much more pleasurable.
In the build up to Christmas you can find us at:
Bakewell Farmers Market Nov 26th
Macclesfield Treacle Market Nov 27th
Urmston Artisan Market Dec 3rd
Old Glossop Christmas Market Dec 4th
Christmas Under Concord Dec 11th
Bakewell Farmers Market Dec 17th
Macclesfield Treacle Market Dec 18th
Or you can drop us a message and we can post items over to you (postage and packaging costs applicable).
Merry Christmas and hopefully see you soon,
Ben