Beech Ring

This solid wooden ring is perhaps most familiar to us as an old-fashioned curtain or drapery ring. Beech is a cheap, durable and sustainable hardwood, most often used as a practical utility timber, as fuel, or architecturally, rather than as a decorative wood. European Beech trees are most commonly cultivated in Scandinavia, where these unpainted simple wooden shapes are still popular as children’s toys. This will have been machine carved from a whole log, and sanded to achieve a regular ring shape. A ring is a very strong shape, making this object very versatile and robust and suitable for a range of craft and practical applications, only limited by your imagination! The form also reveals the beautiful inner structure of the wood, showing the opposing grains of the rings of the tree, and the fine pores, which carried water and nutrients up the trunk when the tree was alive.