Batteries not included You won't find any video games or electronic gadgets at Gordon and Megan Wilding's St. Francois-Xavier toy workshop. What you will find is a world of wooden wonders By: David Sanderson Posted: 7:00 PM CST Friday, Nov. 9, 2018

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This article was published 08/11/2018 (2142 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Gordon and Megan Wilding own two TVs, one that hasn’t been plugged in since either can remember and a second they and their daughters, Jasper Lily, 12, and Laine, 8, use strictly for watching DVDs.

That might explain why the married couple, the brains behind Wooden Squirrel at Work, a two-year-old enterprise that turns out charming, old-world playthings that wouldn’t look out of place in Geppetto’s workshop, were so perplexed a few months ago when their Etsy page suddenly “blew up,” Megan says.

In July, Making It, an American reality series that features craftspeople competing against one another for a shot at $100,000, debuted on NBC. During the premiere episode, hosted by Amy Poeller and Nick Offerman, a contestant constructed a unicorn marionette that mildly resembled one the Wildings sell.

After the show aired, an online promo pointed viewers to where they could purchase items similar to what that week’s slate of makers had built. Among the sites tagged was Wooden Squirrel at Work.

“I was at my parents’ cottage with the girls when, all of a sudden, we were selling a ton of DIY-unicorn-marionette kits,” says Megan, seated in the living room of their two-storey country-style farmhouse in St. Francois-Xavier. “I Googled and Googled to figure out why, until I finally found the Instagram post that linked to the Making It advertisement.”

Although the Wildings have only seen a few episodes of Making It at her parents’ place — they can’t stream it, they’ve tried — the program, in their words, “made our summer.”

“Not so much the sales but more the fact somebody else wanted to sit down with their child and work on a special project we had created for our own kids,” Megan says with a hint of pride.

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Megan, a high school art teacher and accomplished photographer, and Gordon, a production designer who has fashioned myriad sets and props for the motion picture industry, met in December 1998 when she was working in the Exchange District, directly around the corner from his Princess Street studio.

A good number of their friends got married and had children before them, Gordon says, and one thing he began picking up on about other people’s kids was the amount of time some spent parked in front of a TV or computer monitor playing video games.

“It sort of frightened me so I thought when we have children maybe not so much of that,” he says.

A few years ago, the Wildings hosted a family-themed New Year’s Eve party. To keep the youngsters occupied while their parents counted down the seconds to midnight, Gordon crafted a number of wooden noisemakers, which the kiddos were encouraged to paint and string beads to. Because they were such a hit, he did the same thing the following December, this time with marionette puppets.

“It turned out the adults, who we invited to help glue on hair and paint the puppets too, had as much fun as the kids and that’s when I started to think, ‘Hmm, maybe we’re onto something here,’” Megan says.

Before officially launching their biz, they needed a name. Deciding to involve the whole family, they summoned the girls to the kitchen one afternoon, at which point they placed folded slips of paper with different words written on them into a series of cereal bowls: nouns with the nouns, adjectives with the adjectives… you get the picture.

Next, they invited Jasper Lily and Laine to take turns plucking a single note from each bowl, everybody having agreed ahead of time whatever combination of words was selected first would be what they’d call themselves.

“I can’t remember everything we wrote down, but yeah, we could have just as easily ended up as wooden octopus or sheep,” Gordon says, tapping his finger to his noggin when asked where the ideas for his whimsical creations, which include superheroes, pirates and mermaids, come from.

Since their official debut at a Scattered Seeds market in the fall of 2016, Wooden Squirrel at Work has fielded orders from as far away as Japan, Luxembourg and Germany. Because she’s a curious sort — “OK, nosy,” she says with a laugh — Megan usually makes a point of going online and street-viewing everybody who buys something from them.

She was recently gobsmacked, she says, when she tracked down a customer’s home in Bedfordshire, a county in east England, and, after doing a bit of digging, discovered it sold for £4 million the last time it was on the market.

“When I mentioned that to my brother a few days later, he said I should have doubled our price.”

Gordon builds everything, including his ultra-delightful puppet theatres, by hand in their attached garage-turned-workshop. He’s an accomplished carpenter — he helped design and build parts of the Manitoba Children’s Museum, plus various attractions at Assiniboine Park Zoo — but he’s not a machine, he points out, so there are always subtle differences from one plaything to the next.

“I think that’s part of the charm, that all their toys are one-of-a-kind,” says Melissa Penner, co-owner of Made Here, a weeks-old shop located in the underground concourse directly beneath the Richardson Building.

Made Here features the handiwork of close to 100 Manitoba artisans. Penner says it was a no-brainer to include Wooden Squirrel at Work in the mix when the shop, which donates a portion of all sales to various children’s charities, opened in October.

“Prior to the store, my partner and I had a website called Made Here for You, and (Wooden Squirrel at Work) were one of our featured vendors,” she continues. “When we were considering which makers would best suit our space and whose products would probably go over well, they were among the first people we thought of.”

Penner says the Wildings’ wares are eye-catching, to say the least, but the fact they don’t require batteries seems to be what appeals to shoppers most.

“People I talk to love that aspect, how they encourage children to use their imagination, especially the ones that allow you to paint your own figures,” she says. “I guess simple but elegant is the best way to describe what they do. Everybody who sees their stuff on the shelves immediately falls in love with it.”

On Nov. 24, Wooden Squirrel at Work will be on-hand at Third + Bird’s 10th annual Christmas market, in the basement of The Bay downtown. As well, Gordon and Megan have met with the owners of Toad Hall Toys where, as soon as they can figure out proper packaging, their goods should be for sale.

Other than that, Megan, who handles all the marketing for the biz and helps her husband build dollhouses, isn’t sure how much bigger Wooden Squirrel at Work can get, given they both work full-time.

“The thing is, even if it stays relatively small, we think it’s important we’ve already shown our kids how important it is to have lots of things going on,” she says.

“They probably won’t have the opportunity to grow up and stick with one job for the rest of their lives since they live in a different time. Because of that, we wanted to show them there are lots of valuable skills out there you can use if you just take that first step and aren’t afraid to jump into something.”

david.sanderson@freepress.mb.ca