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Danielsville resident creates whimsical toys with his kids as inspiration

y day, he is a mild-mannered medical insurance broker, making calls from his home office behind his house or visiting area doctors.

But by night, Danielsville resident Jacob Wienges can be found sawing, chiseling and sanding chunks of scrap wood into whimsical wooden toys. He creates gnomes and forest folk, boats with cotton sails and even large castles, treehouses and barns.

While the toymaking is a recent endeavor, woodworking is not; Wienges has been crafting wooden flutes for years and even toured up and down the West Coast of the United States and Canada playing them. After meeting his wife in Canada, starting a family and moving back to the Athens area, he realized his passion for working with wood was calling again.

This time, though, instead of crafting professional-quality flutes, he looked to his family for inspiration and realized his three boys could have a lot of fun playing with wooden toys. But there was one problem.

"All my tools stayed behind," Wienges said of the move he and his family made from British Columbia, Canada, to their farm in Danielsville. So, he began the process of collecting the tools he would need for a proper wood shop.

Because he found the tools individually, rather than buying them all at once at a store, each one came with its own story. He pointed to a wood-framed bandsaw he purchased for $100.

"It belonged to a fireman who had the only barn in Queens (New York)," Wienges said. "It was a kit; he made it."

The firefighter had passed the saw on to his grandson, who had such fond memories of working on it with his grandfather that he couldn't bear to part with it - and held on to it for 25 years.

When he decided to sell it, he asked Wienges what he planned to use it for.

"I said, 'I'm making toys,' " he said. "He got all choked up, because that's what his grandfather made. Even the tools have their stories."

After more than two years of planning and stocking the shop, Wienges began making his unique style of toys in August. He's sold his creations mainly by word of mouth and at an occasional artist market during the holidays, and soon plans to have a website up for online sales, too (www.farmandforest toys.com).

All of his wood is locally sourced - his neighbor, a retired woodworker for Athens-Clarke County, lives next door and cuts his own timber from his backyard. Wienges happily takes his scraps.

Other toys, though, require wood that doesn't grow locally. Wienges' boats, for example, are made from western red cedar. A pile of salvaged wood sits near the woodshed, found at a construction site on the West Coast and shipped to Wienges rather than get scrapped.

Otherwise, Wienges said he makes every effort to keep his materials local and free of dyes or artificial colorants. Even the sealants he uses are food-grade oil.

"If something is going to come from the West Coast, it would have to be surplus," he said.

Even the scrap pieces turn into little creations, he said. Some become pebbles for gnome paths, others become odd-shaped blocks. Bins below Wienges' work bench hold the pieces waiting to be carved, again, into something new.

And if it's too small to beamed into a pathway or a block? "The final use - it goes in our wood stove," he said.

Sandy Cederbaum, an Athens resident who owns the web-based business A Small Green Footprint (www.asmall greenfootprint.com), said

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