Creative Woodwork

by Jon Continued from page 11

While teaching at a Psycho Ed Center, Jon found that his students would be stressed and exhausted mentally by lunchtime. He thought that if he could get them to work with their hands, he would be able to get through to them on other subjects. So, with permission from the administration, he began to have the students work in wood. Through this activity, the students could learn vocabulary, cooperation, communication, self-control, patience, and following directions.

Jon would also make toys, games, and puzzles, and give them away. But friends would tell him he should be selling his work, and for a while he did, but it wasn’t as rewarding and eventually it became more like a job. So, he gave away some items.

“If I was visiting someone,” Jon said, “I would make something to take. I read about some people in an apartment complex who had a fire, so I made them seventy-five toys. Then I started looking for organiza- tions who needed toys, puzzles, unique birdhouses. There are now ten places that I make items for. I make one or two things a day, then I box them up and deliver them. That gives me joy.”

Jon has a workshop in the basement of his house in Snellville. He makes children’s toys such as trucks, cars, puzzles, and what he calls “manimals” – half person, half animal. He said he goes through phases making many items such as bird houses, then tires of making those and creates something new. “Once you put the puzzle together it’s done,” he explained. “So, I created stacking puzzles, which can be stacked twenty different ways and balance them.”

He works in his workshop four or five days a week and likes to finish the object he is working on in a day or two. “Occasionally I make something unique like a rocking polar bear and rocking unicorn, and a three-in-one piece of furniture for infants,” Jon said. “It’s a highchair with a horse head, rocking horse, children’s chair and desk recreated from a picture I saw.”

Continued on page 17