Making our Personalised Wooden Gift Ideas

All about us Making our Personalised Wooden Gift Ideas:

After several long days of being in our workshop making our personalised wooden gifts, I found myself running my hands over a piece of English oak which was about to become a personalised wooden tea light holder for a customer, and thought how very beautiful this material is.

When we decide to make any of our personalised wooden gifts, we always begin with a really good piece of timber. There is something romantic about using English Oak. Call it tradition, eco-friendly, but just getting your hands on a timber that has grown on English soil, managed on an English historic country estate for generations, felled and sawn less then 20 miles away from your workshop is quite a privilege.

English Oak has been regarded as the king of all oak trees. It has such a rich golden colour. Yes, we do use American White Oak for our personalised wooden chopping boards but it has one flaw. American White Oak does not do well outside due to open capillaries in the timber – if not well treated fungus can set in. It is best suited for internal joinery.

When it comes to our kitchen boards, American White oak is about as good as it gets. The grain matches well when using multiple parts, or staves, to join to create a large worktop saver. My personal favourite is a lipped chopping board which hooks onto the front of your kitchen worktop to stop it moving about when chopping. Also, if you are a bread maker and are getting stuck into kneading your dough, you need a good thick, heavy board to keep everything steady.

Our personalised chopping board with lipped edge: 

Shop Cutting Boards with Lips

Being in the Surrey Hills, we have a great source of English Oak on our doorstep and to most joinery workshops and carpenters we know, this would be sufficient.

Still, we have gone one step further – we hand pick everything, right down to the material used to make our engraved wooden key rings to ensure the highest quality. As with our Chopping Board construction, we only use Heartwood, the most sturdy, most prized portion of the tree and of course, the most expensive.

This makes up about 20% of the tree, and the majority of what we use is Quarter Sawn when it comes to wider planks that will become Welly Boot Stand bases, Oak Garden Swings or Oak Bench. Apart from being the most stable and resistant from warping, it also displays an incredible yet subtle ribbon-like pattern called Medullary Rays, seen across the face of the grain like streaks of oil in water.

All of our personalised oak gifts for the home, such as our wooden toast racks, wooden egg trays and wooden bookstands, the timber we use has such character and seems to become more and more beautiful the more you work with it. If you look at this example of a English Oak board photographed in our workshop, the grain is so very pretty and selected that day for an order we had for a oak wine rack.

This is the best part. When you have such a magnificent piece of timber to work with, the product you make is also going to look fabulous. As we started to carve the wine bottle grooves into the surface of this timber you see the grain twist and swirl as it follows the contours.

Our Personalised Wooden Wine Rack:

Shop Wine Racks

Personalised Wooden Toy Boxes

If you like the look of some of these oak gifts and would like to buy something special for a child or grandchild, take a look at these personalised wooden toy boxes, made by hand in our own workshop. You can view our full range of personalised children’s toy boxes here.

You don’t get this high quality finish from simply ordering timber over the phone – you need to select it as we do. We have a good working relationship with our local saw mill and hand selection is how we ensure the highest quality.

Want to know more about MakeMeSomethingSpecial? How we make our personalised wooden gifts? Leave a comment below or get in touch with us!

TEL: 01252 703 196

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