My name is Steve Elder. Being born and raised in Oregon, wood has always been a part of my life. I've always appreciated its properties, its warmth and texture and its adaptability to so many products that touch all our lives. The fact that wood is a natural and renewable resource makes it a perfect material with few equals.

The forests of the Pacific Northwest contain numerous species of trees, including ponderosa pine, douglas-fir, sugar pine, hemlock, white fir, cedars, oaks, maples, yew, lodgepole pine and dozens more.

Recently my wife Elizabeth and I moved to an area that has a wide variety of flora with the above-mentioned firs, pines, cedars and maples, but also with less commonly used madrone, manzanita and mountain-mahogany. This got me interested in some of these woods that you can't usually find in the stores.

For example, birchleaf mountain-mahogany (cercocarpus montanus, a member of the rosaceae family - not a true mahogany), which is a variety of mountain-mahogany found in our immediate area, is a tree/shrub that has an unbelievably dense beautiful hardwood. I snagged a small piece that a neighbor had pruned. I cut, sanded and oiled it. It was some of the nicest wood I'd ever seen. I did some research and found that mountain-mahogany grows all over the west and that Native Americans used it for tools, war clubs and dyes. Elizabeth (knitter, sewer, weaver - a real fiber arts freak) suggested I make some buttons out of it.

Buttons expanded to shawl pins and to hair sticks and other items. The local woods - mountain-mahogany, manzanita, madrone - expanded to exotic and classic fine woods from all over the world.

I love making these pieces and I hope you enjoy them as well.