Crystal’s dad made her a table out of black walnut, Siberian elm and blue stained pine. It was a custom work because the dining room in her house was too small for a traditional table. When the time came to finish the table, he wanted to use a material that would help the table last a long time.

He decided to try finishing it with a bar top epoxy, which took much longer that he anticipated because he encountered a lot of challenges that many of the videos you find on Youtube never show. In this case the top kept warping as the epoxy dried.

He finally got a good finish on it, purchased sturdy, gorgeous legs and shipped it to his youngest daughter who had just moved back closer to home. She attached the legs and it has been a centerpiece of warmth and conversation ever since.

Still she wondered if some of the challenges were because the planks on the table top were solidly joined pieces. So, she collected some pallets from the back dock at her office and started working to shape her own table.

All scrap wood, the pieces began to seat together nicely. When it came time to pour her nephew tipped her that even if using deep pour epoxy, you should only really pour about an inch at a time. Her sister, contributed some leftover epoxy from a home project, with a warning that because it had sat in the garage for a long time, there was no guarantee that it would work the way it was supposed to.

Undeterred, she set up a frame in the garage and hoped for the best. It seemed to have worked . . . but there are a lot of things that should have gone differently.

JEFF

CRYSTAL

Jeff’s first try was much more ambitious. He fell in love with the figuring of burl wood and wanted to make a table for their outdoor dining area with it. They spent more than a month collecting all the right pieces and learning about how to weight down the wood pieces that kept floating up, how to manage bubbles, how to use tints and mixing and pouring the epoxy.

Jeff decided it is the perfect mix of science and art and wondered if he might be able to create more pieces and learn everything about creating first class furnishings from wood that was otherwise unsuitable for structural purposes, but was beautiful none-the-less.

Out of that, this company was born. The artist and the carpenter, stumbling through creating in this format together. We are learning about woods from around the world and we hope to share what we learn with all of you.