Handmade Gifts for friends and your home

Hackberry
Bowl 3″ x 3″ including lid.           $34
Mark Baldwin, Surry Maine

There are plenty of less than $20 salt cellars on the market usually a hole drilled in a piece of wood, plastic, or marble with a stopper. This one doesn’t work any better though it’s easier to pinch the last bit from a rounded bottom than a flat one. This one comes with flaws, or interesting points, depending on how you see it. The little indented wiggles are where an adolescent powder post beetle chewed its way out of the tree when it was big enough find a mate and plant new eggs. The tracks are well sealed now, just a memento of a fellow inhabitant.

Cost each: $34.00
One of a kind

Ash, roughly 2″ T x 7″ H                   $42.
Temple Blackwood, Castine Maine

This unique candlestick holds a tea candle. What’s the advantage of that? No candle stubs or dripping wax, but mostly they give a lovely light and they are short enough so you don’t have to look around them to see the person across the table.

Cost each: $42.00
One of a kind

3″ x 4″                   $28.
Temple Blackwood, Castine Maine

Use either end, the small for eating out of the shell, the large for scooping your egg into it.

Cost each: $28.00
One of a kind

Hackberry.  5½″ x 1½″             $25.
Mark Baldwin, Surry Maine 

If this bowl is going to a child we’ll include a little sheet explaining the “worm tracks,” which are really exit holes for tiny beetles who eat their way out of the log after they hatch, reach reproductive maturity, and go looking for a mate.

Cost each: $25.00
One of a kind

5″ x 2½″              $95.
Peter Keniston, Turner Maine 

Peter, who learned turning from his father, prefers to use found pieces of wood –– something interesting from the firewood pile, pieces friends drop off, maybe a hunk left behind by a road crew.

Cost each: $95.00
One of a kind

7″x 8″ x 3″ at highest.      $195
Temple Blackwood, Castine 

Maine Here’s an experiment: keep a log of visitors in the house with a column for those who have a close look at this and those who don’t. We’re curious.

Cost each: $195.00
One of a kind

7½″ x 1½″              $60.
Mark Baldwin, Surry Maine

An occasional rub with the right oil will keep the warm glow for years and years as a family grows or they are passed around. Drop us a note if you’d like a short review of what we do, and some info on food-safe finishes. (Everything here is safely finished.)

Cost each: $60.00
One of a kind

6″ x 1½″      $40.
Mark Baldwin, Surry Maine

A small bowl with many uses.

Cost each: $40.00
One of a kind

6½″ x 4½″   $235
Temple Blackwood, Castine Maine 

This will be a household treasure for a long time.

Cost each: $235.00
One of a kind

Oak, oil paint on lid.  
4½″ x 4″     $80.    
Mark Baldwin, Surry Maine 

In our house this would be a butter bowl. We can’t insist on what it is in your house but we’d love to know.

Cost each: $80.00
One of a kind

Cypress.    5½″ x 1¾″   $40
Mark Baldwin, Surry Maine 

Elegantly serve hummus or salsa, olives, nuts, malt balls, or rose petals.

Cost each: $40.00
One of a kind

American elm.  7½″ x 1¾″    $85
Temple Blackwood, Castine Maine

The American elm is one of the hardiest trees, or at least used to be before most were killed by Dutch Elm Disease, though varieties are developing that may be more resistant. This dish is from one of the old unfortunates. It grew on the Old Ferry Road in Castine, Maine.

Cost each: $85.00
One of a kind

Black walnut and maple. 8″ x 2″     $90
Mark Baldwin, Surry Maine 

Black walnut and sugar maple, two beautifully contrasting woods. Picture any color serving on the table.

Cost each: $90.00
One of a kind

Yellow Birch
8½″ x 3¼″                               $120
Peter Keniston, Turner Maine 

Perfect for salad – you can see that the color goes nicely with green. Yellow birch (also called golden) is named for the color of the bark. It is the largest of the birches in North America and can live for 150, even 300 years if it’s highly combustible bark doesn’t catch fire.

Cost each: $120.00
One of a kind

Cherry
7½″ x 3¼″   $95
Temple Blackwood, Castine Maine 

We find yarn bowls online, probably from Asia, for remarkably little money. They are pretty enough but, not so delicately turned and, Temple says, “never with the yarn hole hand-carved from a knot in the wood where the swirl of grain focuses the attention to the harmony of wood and wool.” Temple is a master turner in the village of Castine, not far from Borealis Press.

Cost each: $95.00
One of a kind

8½″ x 3″          $50
Peter Keniston, Turner Maine 

A person has to split a lot of firewood to find (and recognize) a piece like this.

Cost each: $50.00
One of a kind

Cherry
5¾″ x 3″                               $88
Mark Baldwin, Surry Maine 

This bowl is not made to live as a decoration on a shelf. It’s made to enjoy its feel as you pass it around the table with a steaming mountain of mashed turnips with garlic, capers, and butter – or perhaps a pyramid of chocolate truffles with a garnish of fresh mint leaves.

Cost each: $88.00
One of a kind

7″ x 3½″    $265
Temple Blackwood, Castine Maine 

Burls are those bulbous protuberances on a tree’s trunk or roots that can be the size of a small melon or a large beach ball. Burls are caused by some sort of stress but the result for the patient woodworker is wildly twisted and beautiful grain, or, occasionally, the excitement of chunks of an almost finished bowl flying off the lathe.

Cost each: $265.00
One of a kind

Poplar, teak, with oil paint.  
5½″ x  4″                     $68.
Mark Baldwin, Surry Maine 

The proprietor of this business would call every lidded bowl a butter bowl, but that may (possibly) not recognize that other people can have a different opinion. So please go ahead and imagine sugar, or paper clips, or pocket change. We’ll still call it a butter bowl.

Cost each: $68.00
One of a kind

(Not a propeller)
Old cherry with a new cherry lid. 
Bowl is 4½″ x 2½″     $90
Mark Baldwin, Surry Maine      

In 1915 cherry logs were hauled across Maine’s Green Lake for WWI airplane propellers. The ice broke and logs stayed on the bottom until Spud Davis and Gene King came home from WWII and salvaged them for their new Associated Builders in Ellsworth. I worked for Gene in the early 1970s and when I left he gave me the remaining planks too cracked and wormy for commercial use. This bowl is one of a few small pieces left of the would-be propeller wood. There are a couple of what we call worm tracks on the side and bottom, but really they are the exit holes from a small beetle that was born and came to maturity inside the log.
We think of this as a Butter Bowl, but we won’t take it back if you use it for something else.

Cost each: $90.00
One of a kind

Lidded. Cypress fir, teak, oil paint. 
4½″ x 5″                    $68.
Mark Baldwin, Surry Maine

A butter bowl? It makes sense but sugar or malt balls would be just as happy.

Cost each: $68.00
One of a kind

Flame maple.
5¾″ x 3″ + cypress lid.   $88
Mark Baldwin, Surry Maine 

“Flame” is one name for this kind of across-the-grain figuring. It’s also called Tiger, Curly – and Fiddle-back because it is prized for violins.

Cost each: $88.00
One of a kind