A little history

We opened our Etsy shop last week, and are working on getting it fully populated with photos and descriptions of our products and information about ourselves. I know that I can be a little verbose, so when I hit page two on my artist biography, I realized that I was probably saying more than I needed to in that venue. But when I tried to paste the story of how I came to be a tinker, I was shocked to see that the character limit on my bio was 250...and I had 6,438. How can a person possibly condense the life story which led them to create, to include their creative process, their inspirations, their hopes for how their products relate to and affect their users, in a mere 250 words? That limit simply doesn't allow for connections beneath the surface; it precludes knowing the heart of a person's aspirations as an artist.

So here are my 6,438 words. Where I'm from, what got me here, and where I hope to go with this adventure.

-Ben

P.S. We'd love to hear from you - feel free to comment on our blogs directly, or send us a message! Our words are just babbling in the night without your involvement, and we'd love to know what resonates with you. Thanks for being a part of our journey!

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I spent my early childhood in a dry cabin (no running water) outside Fairbanks, Alaska. My parents built nearly everything around me, from the boardwalk to the log cabin and sauna, my training toilet, and many of my toys (they also started buying Legos for me before I was born, and I had quite a proclivity for Hot Wheels cars as well). I started “helping” in my mom's shop, where she made miniature cabins – exquisite little rustic masterpieces with brass fittings for potbellied stoves, hand-painted balsa wood books, and butter churns made of corks and toothpicks – when I was three or four. I still don't know how my father managed to cut the intricate shapes of some of the tiny toys he made for me, but I recall my parents assisting me in my first forays into using a table-top band saw long before my fifth birthday. One of my earliest memories is of the birthday when my father gave me my own hammer and hand saw; too weak to push the saw away from me, I had to pick it up between pulls...and of course, I set it down on my thumb and pulled back as hard as I could. I still bear that half-inch scar, and think of the trust (perhaps naive) that they had in my abilities to not damage myself at such a young age. You could say that working with wood, especially making miniatures and toys, has been in my blood all along.

One of my wheeled oak dragons, and some of the toys my parents made for me 35 years ago. They continue to inspire me, and I can see now that I wouldn't have founded a toy company without them.

Of course, I didn't take a direct path to being a tinker. I taught skiing in Alaska, Colorado, and Utah. I attended college at the University of Utah, first obtaining a B.S. in Environmental Studies and then a B.S. in Urban Planning. Along the way I took courses in children's literature, sociology, outdoor education, and organic gardening. These forays may have been a bit off-topic from my degree focus, but they helped me see things in a different context: how a child's sense of wonder can be fostered or extinguished; how the joy of discovery can transcend time and bring delight to people of any age; how we can build a better society through compassion, dialogue, imagination, and not a little fearless whimsy (after all, why not build a better world for ourselves and our children's children?).

I spent over a decade as a land use and transportation planner in my home town of Juneau, Alaska, where I delighted in finding new solutions to old problems, educating and building consensus among stakeholders, and striving to help the town I hold so close to my heart be an even better place to live. Eventually, I found that I had simply become too adult. Not that I needed to live with the Lost Boys and regain my childhood, but that I had lost too much of the whimsy from my life. I worked, I went to meetings, I researched, I conducted community outreach, I wrote, and I went to more meetings. And more meetings. Finally, I had had enough. My heart ached, and my dreams were full of bureaucracy and politics. I quit.

It took over a year of soul-searching and having more short-term and part-time jobs than I had had in the previous dozen years, but an idea started to formulate. A new, playful, creative idea. I returned to substitute teaching, I job I hadn't done since college, and I watched children interact with each other and the world they were as much creating as discovering around them. I was disturbed by the degree of violent and sexualized play that I witnessed on the playground, and at the incapacity of many children to imagine beyond whatever movie they had watched or video game they had played the night before. Toys which children brought to school were always plastic, and always licensed by some larger franchise of trading cards, movies, and video games. But during “free choice” time, children would still gravitate to the tiny kitchen and the plastic and wood “food” they could prepare there; they would play with rubber sharks and toy boats in the water table; construction toys would be used in fanciful and cross-system ways which the designers couldn't possibly have imagined, with Legos and Tinker-Toys taped to empty yogurt containers vying for control of a landscape of blocks and Minecraft characters. All hope was not lost.

In one multi-aged classroom, I watched a teacher conduct a multi-day build of a sprawling block metropolis. I was informed that this was a fairly common exercise in Montessori programs, and that at least one Montessori school in New York City based their entire curriculum around a complex block city's construction and function. I had been thinking of starting to make wooden blocks, but as I watched this city - replete with bisecting river and expansive bridges - take shape, I realized that a decent set of blocks must include a large number of precisely-sized and exactly-replicated pieces. Hardly the fun or creative endeavor I was searching for.

Enter Jess Lila, who had watched me search for a new creative calling for over a year. We don't recall whose idea it was, really. It came from both of us, from hearts and minds which had tired of “going to work” just to chase a goal of “how things should be”. It wasn't working for either of us, and neither of us were happy. Our lives lacked creativity, spontaneity, and the joy of play. So we packed up, I sold my interest in my home in Juneau, and we moved to Wisconsin where we could be close to her family and get our toy company going. In years to come, we plan on living a bi-local existence, living and working in one of our home communities for a time, then moving to the other's home for a period. We're currently splitting our efforts between Thimbleberry Toys and working on “Velda”, our home-between-homes, a 1999 International Genesis school bus that we're converting into an RV. You can follow along on that journey at www.veldathewonderbus.blogspot.com. [Of course, you're already here - this was written for publication on Etsy, not here.]

I'm delighted to be working with my hands, by brain, and my heart. Looking at a piece of wood and finding the shape of the creature which yearns to be realized from it; finding the perfect curve of stitching to give a teddy bear just the right curve of belly or tuck of face; imagining a new form in wood or cloth which can inspire creative play unburdened by modern branding and cross-marketing. Creating unique toys which children can make their very own, the toy's story not flashing on a screen but sprouting from within the child themselves. And hopefully, helping the child grow in their own inspired way, still able to find whimsy in the world around them as they become adults in their own time.

-Ben Lyman