🧸 Giant Peach Babycrafts 🚂

I've always been a big believer in the totemic power of objects.

I think about material and the objects it forms a lot: where they are in the world, how they shape the field there, how our memories and senses are extended into our spaces and what those spaces hold. As such, I've always been an easy giver of gifts: I think of it, I may get it for you, be it something practical or something ornamental, it's always sentimental. I love both the experience of finding the perfect place for a thing to be, that thoughtful touch in your environment that adds something special, as well as the notion that you think of me when you behold or use the thing, too, so we're together in that sense.

As I've been proceeding into my woodworking and finer building work more fully, in large part driven by the desire to build beautiful and timeless things, I've become more and more the giver of handmade gifts. I've had the pleasure over the last couple of years for many, many babies to come into my life: friends and family are making more of themselves! And so the handmade gifts I've had most fun making recently have been toys, specifically baby rattles.

I like to make simple, hardy wooden toys, all natural and safe to chew on and toss around. They seem to me the kind of durable but timeless childrens' toy we find in ruins of ancient buildings or pulled from decrepit barns not much worse for wear: they're the sort of thing both lovely and durable enough to rediscover in grandma's attic decades hence, wipe down, maybe sand a bit, and give to the next child effectively forever.

The rattles out there in the world:

• #1: a rocket ship, with baby
• #2: a hippo, with baby Gwen
• #3: a duck, for a baby yet to be
• #4: a B2 Bomber, for the patriotic baby Noah
• #5: a rocket, for baby Nora
• #6: a hippo, with baby Beniah
• #7: a rocket, soon to be with the newest cosmic copilot Aurora