News from the workshop

Bespoke, sustainable door hangers for accommodation providers, offices etc. 

Wooden medals and trophies for the Eden Project Marathon 2026.

Rubber stamps for your business, hobby or gifts. Any size or shape up to 200mm in width. 

There’s real value in producing signage that reflects both its purpose and its environment. This week we worked on a piece of chestnut sourced directly from the woodland at Carclew in Cornwall, where a new natural burial site has recently opened. Etching the sign into timber taken from the same landscape gives the finished piece a clear and respectful connection to its setting, reinforcing the site’s focus on simplicity and sustainability.

Alongside this, we completed a series of signs for a Devon bakery. For these, we used our colour printer to apply detailed artwork onto European birch plywood, achieving sharp lines, accurate colour and a consistent finish suited to a busy commercial space.

Two contrasting projects, each shaped by the materials and processes chosen to meet their specific requirements, and a good example of how varied our workflow can be.

When Cornwall-based artist Abigail Reynolds brought us a cross‑section of ash and a request to etch a precise mathematical spiral into its surface, we knew the piece was destined for something special. It would sit centre stage at the London launch of Seven, the new novel by Joanna Kavenna — a moment where material, geometry and literature would meet in public for the first time. Our role was to translate a timeless mathematical form into the living grain of the wood.

The board began as a solid slice of ash with seventy‑five rings, each one a record of a year lived. Reynolds paired it with pieces shaped by natural processes rather than tools: smooth white flints gathered from the Thames, and hag stones from Margate, their holes carved slowly by clams before being cast in darkened bronze. Every material carried its own timescale.

To complete the work, Reynolds chose a spiral based on Voderberg tiling — a form of pure mathematics discovered in 1936. Its geometry is exact, endlessly repeating, and impossible to reproduce by hand with perfect fidelity. Laser etching was the ideal way to achieve the precision the pattern demanded.

Working directly onto the ash, we used the beam to burn the spiral into the surface, allowing the maths to unfold cleanly across the natural rings. The burn deepened the contrast of the grain, almost like developing a fingerprint. The pattern sits within the wood rather than on top of it, creating a tactile surface where the organic and the geometric meet.

And all of this happened in the aftermath of Storm Goretti. With no internet, a tree fallen across our workshop, and the usual rhythm of production completely upended, the process took on an unexpected drama of its own. In a way, the storm underscored the themes already present in the piece — time, disruption, natural forces shaping material.

Despite the chaos, the board emerged exactly as it needed to: a meeting point of ash, stone, bronze, mathematics and a beam of light, ready to take its place at the heart of Kavenna’s London launch.