About us
About Us
We are a family owned and operated business located deep in the woods of Western Maine. I live on the outskirts of a little town called Carthage, there are only about 500 of us in the town.
My name is Kim Dailey. Each piece is coming directly to you from my shop in the basement of our house in
I worked for many years as an on the road salesman. My wife and I built our house and I built the cabinets and some of the furniture for our new house. I am a self-taught woodturner and I started turning in the early spring of 2000. It all started because I wanted to make a set of bunk beds for our daughters. I had to teach myself how to use a wood lathe in order to turn the legs and spindles for the beds. I started turning pens and pencils for practice and I have been hooked on turning ever since.
A typical day
A typical day for me usually starts out on the computer, emailing and/or working on my site. I then make my commute to my shop. That's an inside joke here with the family, as a road salesman, over the years I put on more than a million miles driving in all kinds of weather. Now my commute consists of walking down 14 steps into my basement shop. The rest of the morning and afternoon is spent turning pens, bottle stoppers, pepper mills or salad bowls.
Our bowls and mills are made from locally grown and sustainably harvested wood. A lot of the burls are brought to me because the loggers don't want them to go to waste and they know that I will turn them into something beautiful.
Why functional?
I often get asked why I make mostly functional pieces. The answer for that comes from my childhood. My family didn't have a lot of money and everything had to have a purpose, the more things something could do the better. We didn't have art hanging on our walls or sitting on a stand to be admired. So I carried that forward with me into my turning. I like to make beautiful functional pieces that anyone would like to have in their homes.
How did the business start?
We started our business part-time in the summer of 2001. My hope was to sell enough to be able to upgrade my equipment and to buy new tools without digging into the family budget. In 2002 we were selected to be part of an incubator program for micro and small businesses. Each company selected would have a website built and then it would be up to us to maintain it. Suddenly our little business had gone from a small local business to competing worldwide.
Fast forward to January 2007 and it was time for me to leave my steady job and take the plunge into full-time starving artisan.
