Devotion to your craft.

As a family we ate every meal around the table. We also played games around it, used it as a ping-pong table, and of course a duck and cover retreat during an earthquake. But, to my parents, it served as their personal creative studio.

Dad would sketch mural concepts amongst tracing paper and drawing pads scattered all over the surface. Mom would prepare Christmas decorations with garland, ribbon, ornaments, and trinkets. But, my favorite part, was secretly watching them work together in this magical duet creating a multitude of projects for family and friends, transforming the dining table into a torn battlefield between florist and flower, feeding us five kids more than food at this table, but modeling love and devotion as way of life.

These moments throughout my childhood have rooted themselves in my own creative career: to be intentional about how and why I make things, to pour myself into every detail of a table (or other woodwork) that I might make, not merely to satisfy myself with some misguided need for perfection, but for the meaning and joy it may bring to someone else…because I’ve witnessed first hand what really goes on around a table.

Now, married myself to a creative and industrious woman, we are raising two beautiful children who are probably secretly watching us pour our lives into theirs and into the details of everything we make.