Let it burn.

When we opened the door to our business late last year, we realised even then that a very large part of our time would be spent not only making the stock for our store, but also, for want of a better word, gently 'educating' our customers as to why they should purchase what we and other local artisans made. What set our products apart, made them special.

Some ( most ) days it's really quite easy, people just get it,. On other occasions it can be like watching a dog listening to the radio. It's really not surprising when you consider that we have been conditioned for years to look for the lowest price we can. A bit of human nature.

We scour the internet not looking for the best, but the cheapest. Hardware catalogues spruiking circular saws for $49, mega Euro furniture stores advertising household furniture items for a tenth of what they might have ordinarily cost. To each their own as they say, but some days I do dismay at the level of landfill we are contributing to. The waste and senseless use of materials, often the wrong materials too.

So where am I going with this? I guess what I'm saying is that we cant expect to the greater community to be any better informed, unless they are informed. 

On Friday, for the first time in my life I bought firewood. It's Winter and having the open fire burning in the bar on Friday and Saturday night, churns through a fair bit of wood. More than I can keep up to from workshop scrap. So I ordered a cubic metre of Redgum and it was delivered shortly afterwards and dumped in the back yard. 

And there it was, a big pile of fiddleback Redgum. Fiddleback as good as it gets. Cut up for firewood. Worse still, given what I had to pay for the stuff and the way its chopped up, I've got not much choice but to burn it! ( Ok, I've squirrelled away a half a dozen bits to make chisel handles! )

I couldn't resist running it over the jointer and rubbing in a bit of oil. Nice firewood eh?

In the U.S. this stuff would be milled and sold to furniture makers as highly figured lumber. It reflects their appreciation of fine furniture too. Here in good 'ol Oz, we burn it, shove it under railway tracks or make fence posts out of it. 

What can you expect though if people don't know any better? If they cant distinguish highly figured timber from......firewood. Please don't take it as anti Australian sentiment, it's expressed more from a sense of disappointment than anything else. 

Anyway, enough of me on the soapbox, I've got a fire to light.