Handmade
 
Materials: wood, paint


Our home in Renfrewshire is called Ben Seillean. Ben Seillean means hill of the bees in Scots Gaelic. We love bees and are investing in making the perfect garden to nurture our bees through the year. Heather, lavender, wild flower meadows and beautiful bulbs keep the garden in bloom from early spring to late autumn.

We love bees 🐝 everything we plant is selected to attract them and create a vibrant garden full of life and biodiversity.

Check out our range of organic beeswax candles snd soaps. All handmade in Scotland with love ❤️ 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿

We all change our minds from time to time. We want you to be happy with your order and so you can return with confidence for a full refund. Check out our returns policy for peace of mind.

Packed without plastic
Plastic sucks and we are working toward 100% plastic free packaging.

Delivery
Postage is always FAST and FREE here, no matter how big or small your order.

Matryoshka dolls; also known as babushka dolls, stacking dolls, nesting dolls, Russian tea dolls, or Russian dolls) are a set of wooden dolls of decreasing size placed one inside another. The name matryoshka, literally "little matron", is a diminutive form of the Russian female first name "Matryona" (Матрёна) or "Matryosha". A set of matryoshkas consists of a wooden figure, which separates at the middle, top from bottom, to reveal a smaller figure of the same sort inside, which has, in turn, another figure inside of it, and so on. The first Russian nested doll set was made in 1890 by wood turning craftsman and wood carver Vasily Zvyozdochkin from a design by Sergey Malyutin, who was a folk crafts painter at Abramtsevo. Traditionally the outer layer is a woman, dressed in a sarafan, a long and shapeless traditional Russian peasant jumper dress. The figures inside may be of any gender; the smallest, innermost doll is typically a baby turned from a single piece of wood. Much of the artistry is in the painting of each doll, which can be very elaborate. The dolls often follow a theme; the themes may vary, from fairy tale characters to Soviet leaders. In the west, matryoshka dolls are often referred to as babushka dolls, babushka meaning "grandmother" or "old woman".
More about woodturning

Woodturning is the craft of using the wood lathe with hand-held tools to cut a shape that is symmetrical around the axis of rotation. Like the potter's wheel, the wood lathe is a simple mechanism that can generate a variety of forms. The operator is known as a turner, and the skills needed to use the tools were traditionally known as turnery. In pre-industrial England, these skills were sufficiently difficult to be known as 'the misterie' of the turners guild. The skills to use the tools by hand, without a fixed point of contact with the wood, distinguish woodturning and the wood lathe from the machinist's lathe, or metal-working lathe. Items made on the lathe include tool handles, candlesticks, egg cups, knobs, lamps, rolling pins, cylindrical boxes, Christmas ornaments, bodkins, knitting needles, needle cases, thimbles, pens, chessmen, spinning tops; legs, spindles, and pegs for furniture; balusters and newel posts for architecture; baseball bats, hollow forms such as woodwind musical instruments, urns, sculptures; bowls, platters, and chair seats. Industrial production has replaced many of these products from the traditional turning shop. However, the wood lathe is still used for decentralized production of limited or custom turnings. A skilled turner can produce a wide variety of objects with five or six simple tools. The tools can be reshaped easily for the task at hand. In many parts of the world, the lathe has been a portable tool that goes to the source of the wood or adapts to temporary workspaces. 21st-century turners restore furniture, continue folk-art traditions, produce custom architectural work, and create fine crafts for galleries. Woodturning appeals to people who like to work with their hands, find pleasure in problem-solving, or enjoy the tactile and visual qualities of wood.