Announcement    WWW.FACEBOOK.COM/THINKINANDDINKIN
~~~~ Recycle ~ Reuse ~ Repurpose ~ Reduce ~ Refuse ~~~~
Welcome to The Thinkin' and Dinkin' Shop! Here you will find beautiful cutting boards, re-purposed candles, and other creative odds and ends.

I'm Aimee, The Thinker, and he is James, The Dinker. We have a love of nature and the outdoors and we strive for sustainability in our home and the world around us. I have a background in environmental studies and Jamie was a machinist who began working with wood as a hobby several years ago. He has creatively designed beautiful furniture, cutting boards, and a variety of other types of functional art. The mediums he enjoys the most are metal and wood.

About Our Wood:

We strive for sustainability and quality in our materials. We use high quality wood selects, from a local company, in all of our cutting boards. This company practices sustainable harvesting methods in their production. They even use all the scraps and outs to fire their kilns. 8-)

The wood we use in all of our furniture come from a local family owned and operated sawmill. All of their lumber is from sustainable harvest, of which 90% comes from storm damage and yards. This type of wood has more character and is ideal for unique one-of-a-kind pieces of furniture. The logs are cut on a Peterson swing blade mill and slow dried in a dehumidification kiln. This type of kiln recycles the heat used to dry the wood, making it much more energy efficient than other kilns.

When we get the wood home The Dinker rips the boards into strips and planes both sides. They are then glued together, clamped and left to dry for a minimum of 24 hours. When the glue is dry, the boards are run through a large sander to even the height. James then adds his creative ideas to the design of the cutting boards and hand sands them to perfection. We finish with The Dinker's Wood Rub, a unique formula of mineral oil and beeswax that brings out the natural beauty of the wood. This wood conditioner also protects the wood from moisture and stains. A detailed description of materials we use and care instructions are included with each board.

The Inspiration of Our Glass Works:

The inspiration for our cut glass comes from a few different quirky ways. Much of what we do is driven by nature and our need to waste less, so I will start here. Recycling is great! Recycling 1 ton of glass saves 1 ton of natural resources (sand, soda ash, and limestone)! Recycled glass also emits 20% less air pollution, 50% less water pollution, and uses 40% less energy than glass produced from virgin materials. The down side is that it’s still using a good amount of energy and emitting a good amount of pollution. So, we feel that re-purposing is better. Using a bit of human energy to transform trash into something useful is much less costly to our environment.

When we have a chance we stumble through the woods with our trusty reusable bags and dig old bottles up, as well as other discarded objects from the past. We bring them home, clean them up, and figure out what to do with them. I know people have collections of vintage bottles that sit on shelves, and that’s cool. We have our own small collection of funky and unique bottles scattered throughout our house. Our problem is that we live on a dirt road and collections like to collect too…a whole lot of dust! So, we try to make the things we enjoy surrounding ourselves with useful. One found bottle has been repurposed as our dish soap dispenser. The more an object is used the less dust it collects.

Knowing our quirky habits, a friend gave us a glass cutter a couple of years ago so we could cut the bottles we find and make more fun useful things for our home. Living in a rural area we are subjected to lengthy power outages when Mother Nature has a little fit and candles have gotten quite expensive. So, we have wanted to make candles out of these bottles for some time now. However, the time to play with the glass cutter had eluded us. Then one day a few months ago we were looking for fun goodies at a local flea market and came across a crate of vintage 1960’s 7up bottles. It was missing one bottle but we had one at home to complete the set! And so the cutting began.

Our Mission:

We try to follow the 5 R's of sustainability: recycle, reduce, reuse, repurpose, and refuse (eg: what you don't need, excess packaging, etc.). So, you will see many items in our shop that are made from repurposed materials. We also use as much of our scraps as possible. Waste not, want not.

We work hard to provide you with quality pieces of functional art for your home. We love what we do and hope that you love what we make. Stick around. Keep tabs on us. Watch us evolve. This is just the beginning. Enjoy your wanderings!