The Inedible Gift Guide
At a time when buying local is more important than ever, we’ve assembled a host of gifts from the Earth that are a celebration of the natural world and a tribute to the craftspeople, farms and communities from which they come. We’re also venturing into the world of the inedible where you’ll find useful gifts for the cook, the gardener and the crafter and for those who appreciate the beauty of simple, handmade things. Many are gifts that will last a lifetime.
From the Forest
Earth’s ultimate natural material is shaped with skill and artistry into handmade heirlooms for the cook in your life.
The right tools for the job
It’s said that it’s a poor worker that blames their tools, but it’s arguable that a beautifully made tool can inspire and uplift the person using it. A set of beechwood tools for making gnocchi and other shapes of pasta might not make the recipient as proficient as your friend’s nonna, but it might help them get started. Vancouver’s Flourist, known for its traceable, Canadian-grown grains and freshly milled flour, with a cult-like following among bakers local and farther afield, is also, as it turns out, a great place to find gifts for the cook and baker in your life.
Flourist co-founder Shira McDermott is unapologetic about her fastidiousness in picking product, explaining that she wants it to work for her customers and her brand. “We are picky about aesthetic.” We say her discerning nature pays off as Flourist certainly has assembled a host of desirable and carefully curated tools for which cooks clamber. They include a unique, beeswax- lined linen bread bag. What better to keep that sourdough we’ve all been making in pristine condition for longer? One-hundred- per-cent linen tea towels, hard-to-find bread lames for scoring sourdough and a unique locally made pasta set made by former Savio Volpe chef-turned-woodcarver Daniel Ewart.
Complete with a linen storage bag, this handmade set of tools is finished with mineral oil, bees and carnauba wax and includes a double-sided pasta board, a 100-per-cent wood bench scraper and four mattarelli or rolling pins, in various sizes, used to work homemade pasta into different shapes.
The pasta board is double-sided, with a traditional gnocchi board pattern, which can be used to shape gnochetti and rigatoni as well as garganelli — cylindrical shapes that are formed by rolling a square, flat noodle across its surface. For that cook who spends hours watching pasta grannies, the other side of the board has a rolled column that can be used to make fusilli, trofie, macaroni (the website uses the Italian maccheroni) and capunti.
Just as Flourist has sought to tell stories about the farmers with which it works to provide its flour and grains, McDermott says it’s equally important to her to tell the stories behind the other products she and her partners offer and the people involved in making them. They also try to support their customers with videos and information about how to make the most of their new tools.
Flourist
3433 Commercial St., Vancouver.
flourist.com | 604.336.9423 | @flourist.com
A wood of art
Douglas Gorze, the craftsman behind Douglas Made, is a former cattle rancher, trained chef and woodworker, but his work is that of an artist. From his studio in Aldergrove, Gorze fashions exquisite end- grain wood serving and cutting boards, which he sells along with his wife, Marlene, out of their shop in South Granville, opened last year. A few moments spent contemplating the surface of a Douglas Made board reveals unique puzzles and surprising patterns. A sliver of maple laid alongside black walnut glistens brightly, as if made of gold. He explains that it’s the type of thing you’ll notice over time and that even he sees new patterns in the board as he works with it. “My customers love that their board is one-of-a-kind. I even have some who hang them on the wall as art.”
Gorze, who has been in the wood business since 1978, working as a cabinet-maker and on wooden interiors, got excited about end- grain boards when he saw some at a craft show in Toronto in 2017. “I was mesmerized. I bought one and took it apart. Each piece was identical.” He began “fooling around” with some black walnut and developed a style that was more asymmetrical than what he had seen, arranging the pieces into a complicated and abstract puzzle. Gorze says he finds artistic value in his wood. “I look at a piece of wood and say, that’s going to be a beautiful board. I find art in the grain.”
Besides the artistic value, the practical value of end grain is in its durability. When a knife comes in contact with the end grain, the grain opens naturally to the knife and then closes up again. By contrast, when you cut along the wood grain, as is necessary with the construction of other boards, the wood gradually wears away. End grain boards are more durable and can always be refinished, which Gorze explains helps make them a timeless heirloom.
A unique feature of several Douglas Made boards are their “long legs.” Instead of having separate attached “feet,” the board is constructed with “legs” that rise up elegantly over the counter by a few inches to allow for a plate to slip neatly underneath. This smart feature allows chopped ingredients to be swept conveniently onto a waiting plate and maximizes storage in kitchens with limited space. Gorze reveals there’s even more clever design to this board. “The leg is actually a handle,” he explains, allowing the hefty board to be easily grasped and lifted off the counter.
In its shop, Douglas Made offers a number of styles and sizes made from different eastern hardwoods and while they are similar, no two boards are exactly the same. Beyond that, Gorze spends about half his time on custom work and to that end, he recently completed a series of 22 table tops for the Four Seasons Hotel in Whistler.
Above all, Douglas Gorz finds contentment in his work. “This combines all the things that I love and I wish that I could have found it 30 years ago.”
Douglas Made
3055 Granville St., Vancouver
douglasmadefinewoodworking.com | 778.240.7674
Wood that knows where it’s going
When Victoria-based wood turner Elise McLauchlan makes a new bowl, she places it on her mantle, living with it for a few days, making sure she is happy with it before sending the piece to its new home. Her work is characterized by sleek elegant forms, shapes she arrives at in an organic way: “It really does happen pretty naturally; I tend to just keep going until it ends up being a shape I like.” McLauchlan credits her days as a visual merchandiser for giving her a critical eye. “I find I can’t look at something I’ve made unless I’m happy with the outcome,” she says. “There’s no right or wrong, I just seem to know when I like it.” She doesn’t plan or measure, which makes her pieces truly one of a kind, and she admits, creates an issue for her in making duplicates.
Born in Vancouver, McLauchlan grew up and went to university in England. While at the School of Art, Architecture and Design in East London studying furniture design and making, she began wood turning after a lecture taught by one of her favourite lecturers, a woman, who she explains was one of the few breaking ground in a male-dominated industry in the U.K. Having always maintained her connection to Vancouver, upon completion of her degree, she returned to B.C. In Vancouver, she worked as a welder at a furniture company, a qualification she had from university, but wood-turning still drew her in. “I would be on the lathe constantly. Even on my lunch breaks,” McLauchlan says. After spending three years in Vancouver, she settled in Victoria in 2019 where she found it easier to find a bigger workshop space.
Working with wood is highly satisfying for McLauchlan, who credits its forgiving nature. “With wood, if you make a mistake, you can turn it into something else. I also love how I don’t know what the final product will look like until the very last step when putting the wood butter on. That brings out the final shade and grain and it still tends to surprise me. Mother nature does some wonderful things.”
For McLauchlan, who spends long days on the lathe, at what she calls an “addictive craft,” life on the West Coast provides an opportunity to recharge. “Being able to walk to the beach when I feel like I’ve been working too hard and need a break — it’s a huge resource for me,” she says, and adds, “it’s also impossible not to be inspired by Indigenous wood carvers in B.C. The Roy Henry Vickers Gallery is housed in a traditional Northwest Coast longhouse, which is entirely carved from cedar. I could spend hours staring at those walls. It’s a masterpiece.”
McLauchlan’s bowls are the type of gift that gets passed down through generations and her clients come from the U.K., Europe and North America. “When someone orders something from me I know who they are and where it’s going while I’m making it, which always feels quite nice to me.”
Elise McLauchlan
mclauchlanmade.com | @elise_mclauchlan
Of the Earth
Simple forms and an invitation to experience clay in its natural form, these gifts celebrate a community of crafts people.
Community of Craft
Kenneth Torrance, designer and founder of Barter Design, has worn many hats over the years. At different points, he called himself a designer, artist, product designer and even a manufacturer. His fundamental curiosity and quest to learn new processes required to execute his designs, and the realization that he alone couldn’t do it all, led him to the company that now is Barter Design, which leverages the skills of a larger local craft community to bring Barter’s products to market. For Torrance, products created by Barter Design are shaped by the people, the place and the materials of the locality. His “tools for living” include a commercial-grade line of dinnerware, produced entirely in B.C., raw clay planters and cedar stools. The designs highlight simple geometric shapes and repetitive forms that can be easily replicated in production.
Above all else, Torrance seeks to celebrate the material. “I want people to experience the clay in as natural form as possible.” For that reason, the natural forms of his clay pots and dishes are unglazed except where necessary on the interiors. A cedar planter or stool is cut on a subtle taper to reveal a grain pattern in the wood. Torrance says this celebration goes beyond the purely aesthetic and he seeks to create products with which people can connect in other ways. Part of the appeal of the raw cedar planters and stools Barter Design produces is the smell of the cedar. It’s also about living with the pieces and understanding that caring and maintenance are required.
Torrance is keen to tell the stories behind the products and the people who make them with photos of the processes on the Barter Design's website. “It takes a community to raise a product, Torrance says. “We all work together, everyone is valued.” This means working with a dozen or so local subcontractors such as Hazy Pottery on the Sunshine Coast, which manufactures Barter Design’s dinnerware line. It also includes a recent collaboration with Vancouver glass-maker Good Beast on a glass vessel set and the creation of a steel candlestick with local blacksmith Timothy Dyck.
Barter Design works with its team of makers to develop and use specific techniques such as slip-casting, where liquid clay is poured into a mould, forming a cast and allowing the production of multiples of Torrance’s designs.
Torrance arrived at the idea of a candlestick as a way of celebrating beeswax, something that Dyck had shown Torrance was traditionally used to protect steel from rusting. Dyck and Torrance worked together to arrive at a sleek form that is squished with a 70-year-old power hammer, to make a bulb at the bottom of a sleek steel form. This eventually became known as the Grove Candlestick, inspired by similar forms Torrance had seen in the alder trees near Fort Langley. When paired with slender hand-poured beeswax candles, and sold in sets of three with varying heights reaching up to 19 inches, the resulting combination is statuesque.
The story of Barter’s dinnerware, used at Vancouver restaurants PiDGin and Tacofino and now available to the public, is particularly interesting in that it required the development of a production method that didn’t exist in B.C. This highlights Torrance’s desire to conquer new challenges. “I need to keep pushing myself and learning.”
Barter Design
barterdesign.ca | connect@barterdesign.ca | @barter.design
Of Field and Flower
Grass-fed beef, sheep from northern BC, local Langley alpacas, and oh-so-clever bees have collaborated with some equally clever humans to create these gifts for the practical and the pampered.
Clean and cosy
Soap. It’s something that everyone can use and, in these pandemic times, it has never been more in demand. So why not consider a local option for something you use every day? “For us, it is all about zero waste,” says Barbara Schellenberg of Pasture to Plate Natural Products Ltd., as she tells about why her family makes soap. Her parents have been on their Redstone, B.C. ranch for 40 years and they have been selling fully traceable organic beef (grass-fed and grass-finished), lamb (grass-finished), pork, chicken and turkey from their Commercial Drive butcher shop for the last 20.
Tallow is a by-product of the meat-rendering process and has been a traditional ingredient in soap for centuries. It cleans the skin without drying and tends to last longer than other soap. Using organic beef tallow, natural clays and as many local ingredients as they can find, Pasture to Plate’s staff members currently make five different soaps, including rose geranium with Vancouver Island salt, pumpkin spice, lavender and oatmeal, peppermint scrub and the very popular pine and cedar. Soon they will also bring on a version using goat milk. And of course, they’ll get that from their ranch, too. It all ties back to the same philosophy of letting the customer know where their products come from that Pasture to Plate applies to its meat production.
In addition to soap, the company sells wool products made from the fleece of its Merino herd. It started six years ago with cosy wool socks. The socks, along with yarn for knitting, are processed from their wool in Carstairs, Alta., on machines that date back to 1886. Two years ago, Pasture to Plate added queen-size 100-per- cent wool blankets handcrafted on Prince Edward Island. The sheep's raw wool is collected and shipped by train to P.E.I., where it is washed, carded, spun into wool and woven into an heirloom- quality blanket by MacAusland’s Woolen Mill, a 100-year-old family mill. This may seem like a long way to go for a blanket, but the technology for this craft doesn’t exist everywhere. Keeping it as local as she can, Schellenberg says, “It was the closest place we could find in Canada that could do what we wanted to do.”
Pasture to Plate Natural Products Ltd.
1420 Commercial Dr., Vancouver, B.C.
pasturetoplate.ca | 604.215.0050 | @pasturetoplate
Local luxury
Catherine Simpson has come a long way since she first decided to put 12 alpacas on five acres in Surrey in 2000. “The old maps called the area Kensington Prairie County, so we named the farm Kensington Prairie Farm,” Simpson says. In 2006, having outgrown those five acres, she expanded the operation to 45 acres in Langley,
B.C. The name came with her. Today, she has approximately 70 Huacaya alpacas that she breeds and raises for yarn.
With 26 natural colours of alpaca ranging from white, through cream to fawn, brown, shades of gray and black, two lengths of fleece and six grades of quality, “no alpaca is created equal,” says Simpson, who is a certified grader and sorter. “When it comes to grade, you may have a variety of grades within one fleece.”" "In the months prior to shearing, Simpson sends a small selection of fleeces to Australia to test and identify the micron count. This informs breeding and shearing decisions. Simpson selects only the best fleeces for yarns and finished goods. The alpacas are sheared each year in the last week of March or first week of April and the fleeces are sorted immediately by colour with any exemplary fleeces selected to show. Professional shearers come from Alberta to carry out the shearing, which has been, until the pandemic, a large public event.
Based on grade and length, Simpson decides what yarns she will produce and sends the fleeces to Twisted Sisters & Company Fibre Mill in Alberta, where the fleeces are washed, carded and spun into yarn according to her specifications. They send the yarn back to her as skeins, at which time she labels it and places it for sale in her shop. She also sells roving, long narrow bundles of fibre prepared for spinning and use by fibre artists and locally woven alpaca throws.
“I got into alpaca breeding for the yarn. I really wanted to make the very best yarn we could,” Simpson says, admitting there is a huge difference between the yarn she produces today and what she produced 20 years ago, with lots of learning and improvements along the way. “It’s no contest. I’m really proud of the yarn we produce.”
Kensington Prairie Farm
1736-248th St., Langley, B.C.
kensingtonprairie.ca | 604.625.4395 | @kensingtonprairiefarm
The bees made it
What started as a hobby and one hive with a honey harvest of just 12 jars is now a business with 80-plus hives, local honey and a range of products, from salves to wraps and oils to candles. “Bees make amazing stuff,” EastVan Bees’ Steve Sandve says. Beyond honey and wax is bee propolis, or what Sandve calls “bee glue,” which bees use to seal their hives. With antiseptic properties, it is infused into EastVan Bees' beard oil and gardener’s salve.
EastVan Bees started making beeswax food wraps, used as an al- ternative to plastic wrap, because someone asked them to make one. “They were a hit, so we kept making them,” says Sandve. The bright and colourful fabric they use for the wraps ranges from the cute to the quirky. The labels are hand-printed by local printer District Dog Designs on a 1909 letterpress printer.
The popularity of EastVan Bees’ host-a-hive program, whereby individuals and families can enjoy the benefits of having bees in their yards and gardens without the concerns of care and maintenance, has meant that the waiting list to get hives is long, but EastVan Bees also offers options for individuals to sponsor a hive.
For Sandve, the true gift of beekeeping is the time he gets to spend with the bees themselves. “You open the hive and you can feel, smell and hear the workings of nature. It’s hard to quantify.”
EastVan Bees
eastvanbees.com | 604.626.5421 | @eastvanbees
That’s a Wrap
Save the paper and wrap your treasures in a tea towel for creative packaging that will do double duty.
Petal flock off
This gorgeous group of gals in pink and blue will make washing up a breeze. Like all the distinctive creations from Smoking Lily Handcrafted Goods, this 100-per-cent cotton towel is screened and sewn in Victoria, B.C., using non-toxic inks that are kind to the environment.
Smoking Lily
smokinglily.com
Hothouse flowers
Red orchids, protea, ginger and lehua blooms grace this gorgeous linen tea towel from Vancouver design studio Banquet Workshop. The 100-per-cent linen fabric washes up beautifully and dries in a flash.
Banquet Workshop
banquetworkshop.com
Wild salmon
The artwork of Coast Salish artist and designer Simone Diamond graces this teal 100-per-cent cotton tea towel, featuring salmon, seen by many on the Northwest Coast as a symbol of abundance, transformation, wealth and prosperity.
Lattimer Gallery
lattimergallery.com
