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Castle Mountain Designs will be taking a break for a while.
Read more...
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Castle Mountain Designs are a married couple, Tracey and Rob, who live and work in the mountains
of Southern California with our pet cats, Mothra and Michiko. We design and hand-make hairsticks,
earrings and, occasionally, other things that just happened to tickle our fancy. But that's just
the tip of the iceberg...
Why Castle Mountain Designs?
The name Castle Mountain comes from Tracey's family name, Shiroyama. Shiroyama means Castle
Mountain in Japanese (or at least, it does in this case!), and the characters you can see in the far top
left spell out Shiroyama in Japanese.
And where did it all begin?
There are a lot of possible answers to that one, but in the end, they all boil down to one thing - we couldn't
find any long, strong, beautiful hairsticks! The kind of hairsticks that Tracey really wanted were all around
five inches in useful length, which just wasn't long enough for her knee-length hair, and the sticks that she
could find would often bend or snap under its weight. After a lot of looking, we finally decided we should
just make them ourselves! At first, we made them just for Tracey; later, we made them for her friends as well.
Today, we're making and selling them online!
So you make long hairsticks?
Yes, but not only long hairsticks. We've made hairsticks and hairpins in a variety of lengths, ranging
all the way from under three inches to nine in effective length, and we use a variety of materials and finishes, too.
Some of our hairsticks are made from dense hardwoods, like Ebony, which are perfect for people with heavy hair
that need the strength and can handle the weight. Others are made from lighter-weight woods, suitable for people
with lighter and more delicate hair, who don't need the strength of the dense woods and would rather use a piece
that isn't so heavy.
And what do you do?
Well, Rob hand-turns the hairsticks and occasionally injures himself. Mothra inspects our work, especially the tassels on
our gift bags, ensuring that they meet her very particular standards, while Michiko plays with the gemstones to see what
kind of sound they make. And Tracey does just about everything else. She designs the pieces, assembles them, finishes them,
sews the bags that they will ship out in - she even decides which hairsticks she wants to have turned, to go with the designs that she has in mind! So in the end,
when you buy a hairstick from Castle Mountain Designs, what you're really getting is a
hairstick that was designed and made by Tracey, with Rob, Mothra and Michiko helping out!
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If you've any more questions, then by all means contact us!
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