We don't make them. We find them.

Every piece of wood we use washed up somewhere - a beach, a tide line, the base of a jetty. It had a life before us, and we mostly don't know what it was. By the time it reaches the workshop, it's weathered, salt-worn, and no longer wanted by whatever it used to belong to.

So we bring it in.

They arrive grey. Every one of them. Years adrift will take the color out of anything - sun,
salt, and a long stretch of going wherever the current went.

Then it comes back. It takes about four days - cleaning, piecing together by hand, the slow part nobody photographs - and the color returns a little at a time. Some of that comes out of a tin in our workshop. Some of it, we'd swear, comes back out of the fish.

Because it's real driftwood, you'll find knots, unusual grain, and the small nails that hold it
together. We don't see those as flaws. They're the marks of where it's been, and they're the reason no two are alike.

We give each one a name and a history. We're aware that's an odd thing to do to a piece of driftwood.

But you learn things about them. Bubba won't be hung lower than anybody else. Blinker
frightens people for about ten seconds and then doesn't. Crystal is the best-looking fish here and not, if we're honest, the brightest. So we write it down - where they were found, what shape they were in, who they turned out to be - and it goes home with them.