Recently, The CraftStar sat down with Nick and Sam Squailia, the artists behind the store, RusticCraft, to talk about being selected as The CraftStar's first Featured Artist of 2013. They are a husband and wife team from Fitchburg, Massachusetts and together they have a 3 year old super cute toddler named Niki.
Sam is an Architectural Engineer and has been designing for 14 plus years. Her husband Nick has been a Woodworker and Carpenter for just as long. They officially started RusticCraft in March 2012 when they started off with Nick building rustic furniture for their home. This migrated into also doing rustic wood cutting boards and other rustic wood items like elevated pet feeders, wine racks, chalkboards, engraved signs and ornaments. Nick does all the woodworking and Sam do all the engraving, marketing, and online management.
We asked the couple what item currently for sale in their shop was their favorite and they both agreed that their personalized handcrafted solid wood cutting board is by far their first choice. Their favorites do change though with every board they make, which is completely understandable considering the cutting boards are all so stunning! It's a spalted black
cherry with live edges on raised cherry rails. It has awesome live edge
coloring and wormhole-ing which gives such awesome depth of character to this
board. Plus it's reversible, so you can cut on one side and flip it over to use
as a serving or display board the rest of the time.
My favorite part of interviewing Featured Artists is asking them what their biggest lesson or mistake they've made while doing business so that we can learn from others. Sam told me about a time that she did an engraving. She traced the design onto the board and wood burned the
design over the tracing, took pictures, and packaged up the board for shipment.
As she was loading the engraving pictures onto her computer she realized that she missed a
line in an "N" in someone’s initials! She immediately reopened the package, fixed the mistake, and mentally noted that in the future these types of things must be double checked prior to packaging.
I couldn't let the couple go without asking them what a few of their favorite The CraftStar items were by their fellow artists. After a bit they both agreed that they couldn't live without the following three items from Sea Siren Rockstar, Luxe Bath and Body, and Poochy Couture.
You can find RusticCraft on a
variety of different forms of social media. Follow them! Show them some love!
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/
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