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My customer Sarah sent me this sweet photo yesterday of her kids doing math lessons around their River Table 🥰

Humans excel at making boxes and straight lines - we strive to bring order to the natural world. Nature, however, is untamed, wild and free. It’s unpredictable and rarely repeats itself. I’ve always been fascinated by the relationship between man/nature and if you look closely, you can see that relationship at play here in my newest dining table | Available on my website. #rivertable #klassenrivertable #rivercollection

Puzzle pieces for a triptych in my new art series. {Each ring represents one year of growth as a tree. This guy was 74 years old} #cedarseries

Is it time for more coffee yet? #klassenrivertable #rivercollection

Unstacked 2,500 lbs of Pennsylvania black walnut today looking for the right pieces for a new commission. Boy do I really wish I owned a hot tub tonight 🥴 #walnutriverdiningtable #klassenrivertable #rivercollection

5 YEARS | I broke ground on my shop 5 years ago today. Before this I’d been working in an unheated, single car garage with no windows, behind a rental house we lived in. First thing I did each morning was open the garage door to let the light in. Keep in mind, this wasn’t just a hobby. I was and still am the sole bread-winner and this was the place I was running my business from, sink or swim. When I moved in, it had two wall outlets and no insulation, and my office was an iPad set up on a workbench in a heated corner. I built my business from that garage and created the first River Table there. After years of hard work and saving up we bought a little piece of land with a 100 year old farmhouse on it and dreamed of someday building a shop on our land. A few days later my business exploded and that someday was suddenly a real possibility. I dreamed up a design that would be modern yet fit the local barn vernacular and be built with local materials. The western red cedar is from the PNW and I used locally salvaged old douglas fir for the timber frame walls, the gallery floors and my workbenches. Building my studio was a million decisions and a monumental effort. My studio has become such a blessing to my work and our family. It’s where I design, where I build, where I experiment and play. More than that though, it’s where I teach my kids my craft, where I gather our community for events, and a place where I feel like anything is possible. Swipe to see photos of the various stages of consgruction. Click on the hashtag #watchgregbuildhisshop and you’ll see most of the process from start to finish. #klassenshop

A couple years ago a fan flew out to my studio from Germany 🇩🇪 ✈️🇺🇸 to save the cost of shipping and pick up this wall-hanging in person. He ended up staying in the USA for a bit and doing some traveling, visiting Vancouver 🇨🇦 (not far from my studio) and then driving down to the giant redwoods in California before flying home. He brought the artwork home in his suitcase 🧳, and the money he saved on international shipping was instead spent on a great trip If you live far from my studio and want to own some of my artwork, reach out to me and I can help you plan your trip to the USA 🇺🇸 (Same goes for you folks who live in the US and want to visit). I would love to meet you and welcome you to my studio! #klassenshop

“Finally bringing you the product you’ve all been asking for!” (jk no one asked for it). 🥃 “And bringing it to you in a new material you’ve all be hoping for!” (jk no one ever thought it was a good idea to have a wood whiskey glass…heard of splinters?). 🥃 “And now it’s finally being offered in a tray to keep them all together!” (jk literally no one asked for any of this, and frankly the tray seems unnecessary). 🥃 “But hurry, supplies are limited - 1 set only!” (jk there’s only one set because these dang things took forever to make, stole 2 whole work days from me, I’ll never get that time back and I never want to make another one again. But they’re actually kinda awesome, and waterproof and one-of-a-kind and fun to drink from and none of your friends will have a set like this. Literally. None of them. Because these shouldn’t exist) 🥃 #whiskey #whiskeynight #klassenwhiskeytumblers #glenlivet

Would you believe that this wood had been pulled out of the mud with an excavator and was full of dirt, rocks and rot, with little roots dangling every which way? I wish I could have gone to the stump store and bought one like this but unfortunately there are no stump stores. Instead, I washed, sand blasted, carved, routed, leveled, sanded and clear coated until every little texture was exposed and every little detail brought out. Then I gave it the little lakes it was asking for. Later I bought the top from one of those glass tabletop places. It arrived 99% perfect but had some fine, little scratches in it so I sent it all the way back to New Jersey. Instead of taking the replacement they offered, I paid 4x more to have one custom cut by a local shop and given the perfect polished edge. It’s flawless and made to the ideal diameter to best fit the proportions of this magical stump. You can do things the easy way and be kiiinda happy with your work or you can obsess over the details, take the time it requires and be really dang proud of what you’ve made. That’s the way I like to do it. Sometimes it can be discouraging how long things can take but you gotta keep going. Now we just have to wait and find this table a home. For those interested, this is a one-off design and not customizable. It’s as much a free-standing sculpture as it is a dining table. Also, I imagine I’ll need to personally deliver this one so fingers crossed you live somewhere really cool 🤞 You can see more photos and pricing at gregklassen.com #rivercollection

Here’s a short before/during/after look at a little lake-inspired sculpture I created. This is made to be freestanding on a desk, table or shelf. The void was created as the tree was beginning to die. #lakesculpture #rivercollection

First piece from my new Cedar Series spotted in the wild. Can’t quite see it? It’s somewhere back there behind the kitty and near the butterflies 🦋 #cedarseries : @thenightshooter

Raven’s Hut Lodge is one of my favorite wood structures in the Pacific Northwest. It’s a mid-mountain lodge you can only get to it on a pair of skis or a snowboard. Visitors are rewarded with a crackling wood fire inside a big stone fireplace and windows looking out on the snowy Cascades I esp love the clean lines and the beautiful use of materials, surely taken right off the mountain where it was built Oh, and those tiny dots in the top left are skiers. Swipe left to see some shots from our family’s day at beautiful Mt. Baker. The snow was incredible ❄️ @therealmtbakerskiarea #homeschoolskiday #mtbaker #ruthelizabeth #beatriceanne #oliverabe

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Greg Klassen Furniture Maker