About Faux
Grain...
Faux Grain is a small on-line mail-order company located in
Guelph, Ontario,
Canada, near Toronto. Faux Grain offers original woodworking plans, wood
crafting patterns, and
decorative painting packets, designed by Wendy Maki.
Go to Contact Information.
Faux Grain concentrates on what it does best: designing patterns and
plans for wood projects. Working in a small workshop, just like yours,
Faux Grain is always reminded of the needs of the crafter working in a home workshop. Faux
Grain develops every project from the first hen-scratches to finishing the final
project. Then, Faux Grain works (and re-works) the instructions and patterns
for the woodcraft project on computers to produce patterns that are clear and easy to follow.
Wendy Maki, Faux Grain's owner and
designer...
Wendy Maki, B.A., M.A., originally from the northern woods of
Ontario, Canada, learned early to make
things and to love working with wood. She remembers her " earliest memory is of the
smell of poplar sap" as her "parents hand-peeled bark from poplar
logs."
Growing up in the practical world of homesteaders, Wendy started making patterns
for her projects in early grade school. It's a creative practice
that she has continued to this day. Although she currently focuses
on designing wood projects for Faux Grain, she also designs original
clothing, knit-wear, and crochet-wear.
"Most things I learned to do by making my own patterns
and designs first. Only later, once I'd mastered the basics, then
I start turning to prepared patterns. It's a very practical approach and
it's how everyone I grew up
with did things. Special classes,
patterns and books simply weren't readily available. They didn't grow on
trees (smile). If you wanted something, you had to find a way to do it with what you
had."
Wendy brought her practical approach with her as she went on to study Fine
Arts and English at the University of Guelph, in Southern Ontario, graduating with a Masters
of Art. Her fine art training focused on painting and print-making.
Throughout, Wendy's practical how-to and creative
interests have always shared center stage with her interest in
communication, written and visual. Writing, making presentations, teaching,
or just talking to a friend, Wendy enjoys explaining a difficult concept so
that someone else can understand it, no matter what the subject is. She says,
"I
love the challenge of finding a way to communicate
so that I can help someone else understand something. It comes
down to questions of how someone else takes in information,
how to present it, how to organize it. It's basically the same no matter
what the subject is."
Wendy brings the same down-to-earth approach to
communication and her critical eye to the
instructions and
patterns she creates for Faux Grain.
Wendy sums up her approach to patterns this way:
"I rarely use patterns that make me work for the information I need to make
the project. After all, why get a pattern if you have to work it out
yourself? That's not why we use patterns."
"When I create my own patterns, I'll work and rework it until I've got it. I'll
do as much puzzling as it takes. It's different when I get a pattern already
done by someone else. I expect all of that to have been done. I
want to know exactly what to do, what to do it with, and I don't want to
have to search for it."
"When I
do find a good pattern by someone else, I'll
make it over and over, usually making a bit different every time. I particularly like patterns that I can use
in different ways. I assume that others like to have
choices too, to be able to make projects work for their own needs."
It was a natural step when Wendy registered Faux Grain
as a business in 1999. In Faux Grain, she brings together a life-time of
experiences in crafting and communication to create original patterns
and how-to-materials that are clear, practical, and
easy-to-understand.
