About Me

I spent many of my childhood days playing in the woods.  When I was eight years old we moved to a house where the woods behind the house had just been thinned and the ground was littered with branches and the watermelon shaped wedges from felled trees.  I was fascinated by the grain patterns and colors of the different woods and that fascination has never left me.

When my wife asked me to make shawl pins to go with a group of knitted shawls she was making a few years back, I used bits of local wood that I could find to fashion simple fasteners in a variety of shapes.

As the years have passed and I acquired better tools and more time to devote, my designs have evolved and refined and my finishes have improved, but my goal remains to bring out as much of the natural beauty in each piece of wood as I’m able.  

All of my pieces are shaped by hand using a series of wood rasps and other carving tools, then smooth sanded. After finishing with a clear penetrating oil to bring out the natural color and figure in the grain, each piece is buffed to a jewel finish.

While I craft my wood pieces almost exclusively from found wood from my area in northern Maryland, I occasionally use small, interesting, and  more exotic bits of scrap woods from other local woodcrafters. I do not use any endangered or protected woods in my objects.

David Manos