"Original Designs"
Each Art piece comes from an original thought.  Donna Lynne does her most creative thinking in her sleep.  However, many designs come during the day and Charles knows when she gets that certain look, something new or a solution to a design is in the making.  That thought goes on to large paper with a pencil drawing.  The measurements are worked out and a scale is made.  This is a tedious step to work the art into a functional and durable piece.  The new design is now traced on to wood and Charles Norman takes over in the cutting shop. 

Scrolling cutting and sanding these unique designs takes much time and being very meticulous is a must.  After all the finished pieces leave the cutting area they are temporarily put together to work out where dowel pins, screws and plugs are going to be used.  The wood pieces go back to the shop for drilling, more sanding and getting it ready for painting.  Depending on what the piece is, just like the cutting, painting takes days or weeks. There is priming, more sanding, base coats, artwork and varnishing.  The final day (or days) of assembly putting each piece in place, leveling and watching what was a vision become functional art is called their Labor Day since a new idea is born. 

"Wood"
After years of experimenting with wood, trying different types of wood from soft wood to hardwood, learning to join, biscuit and plane wood Donna Lynne was not satisfied with using joined wood for scrolled art work.  They literally joined their own wood, bought joined wood and tortured tested it, beat it, jumped on it etc.  Joining wood is the term used for gluing wood together, with or without biscuits (oval wood pieces) or pegs and clamping the wood together to make a larger piece.  There is beautiful furniture made with joined wood but their type of art is different requiring another solution. 

Learning the hard way that wood has tannin, which is a brown stain, many painted pieces had to be discarded.  This lead them back to looking for the right wood.  Pine is not a hardwood; it is soft, sappy and has much too much tannin.  Many hardwoods should only be varnished and do not paint well.  Plywood grades vary and fuzz.  Some wood will simply eat up and break your saw blades. They had to be able to scroll and do artistic painting.  If Donna Lynne was designing Furniture instead of "Furn ART ure", any good hardwood would be fine.  Finally they found a ¾ birch cabinet grade plywood that was strong and could be scrolled and painted. They were hesitant to try plywood and other types of birch plywood have hollow holes but this one place, which cannot be disclosed, carries this nice cabinet grade and birch is a hardwood.  The down side of using this grade is that It is very hard and will break blades so more time is needed for cutting and scrolling and it requires more sanding.  The good points besides the outcome are that the layers are all crisscrossed bringing stability to the wood and it comes in large pieces so there is no need for joining to get the size needed for the designs.  If you are reading this because you are interested in buying our work or just learning how to make your own we hope this is informative to you.

"Handmade"
Being handmade means there will always be some imperfections.  Imperfections bring character.  In our art pieces, you will find that all the edges are not perfectly smooth and each paint stroke not perfect and if you throw it down a flight of stairs it would probably break but we design and build with the intention to be used functionally and admired.  We strive to do a good job.