Darren Gay buffs a wooden stick horse head until it’s smooth. A Georgia native, Gay has been woodworking since eighth grade.

Editor’s Note: This article was taken from the October issue of Senior Life ELKO edition.

Text and Photos
By Lilli Dwyer
InkFreeNews

SILVER LAKE — On a country road outside the tiny town of Silver Lake, just shy of entering Wabash County, is an in-home workshop where Darren Gay and Teresa Martin-Gay spend their days handcrafting items for their toy store, My Unique Wooden Toys. Stick horses, blocks, cars and tractors, doll furniture, games, baby rattles and more line the shelves.

Teresa Martin-Gay grew up on a Wakarusa dairy farm and Darren Gay hails from Stockbridge, Ga., where he started woodworking in eighth grade shop class. The couple met online in the early days of cyberdating, back in 2004, and were married later that year. Gay moved up to Indiana and helped out at the dairy farm Martin-Gay had lived on with her late husband for a while, but the two had greater ambitions.

When they were looking to start an online business in the fall of 2005, Martin-Gay noticed one of the most popular searches at that time of year was for toys. With that, Gay’s woodworking skills and the equipment that came with him from Georgia, the idea began to take shape.

“I think God directed us to it,” she said. “He gets 100% of the credit.”

My Unique Wooden Toys was solely online at first. After a tornado in 2014, they moved their workshop from an outbuilding to their home’s basement and opened up a physical storefront there.

The couple spends most of their time in the workshop with their three cats, Smokey,

Teresa Martin-Gay puts together a baby rattles, one of her favorite items to make.

Whiskers and Bubs. Martin-Gay mentioned they don’t like to be wasteful, so the scrap from the shop goes into their wood-burning stove upstairs.

August begins their busy season, Martin-Gay said. A surprising number of people are already thinking about Christmas in the summertime — not just the parents and grandparents looking for toys, but the theater directors putting on seasonal productions of “The Nutcracker.”

“We do a lot of stick horses and rifles for ‘The Nutcracker,’” said Martin-Gay. “I have a lady right now that’s waiting for 20 color guard rifles … Another one just ordered 30 muskets, and that’s for reenactments.”

Wooden guns and fishing poles are often ordered as accessories for Halloween costumes.

With as many identical items as they need to produce, Gay said he loves an opportunity to craft the one-of-a-kind, personal items they’ve been asked for over the years. My Unique Wooden Toys once received an email from a worried mother in need of a wooden pocket knife.

“Her dad had made her son a little wooden knife, and it had gotten chewed up by the dog,” said Martin-Gay. “The grandfather had died. She said, ‘I know it could never replace what he’s done, but could you make one that’s similar?’”

Using the provided pictures, they created a near identical copy.

“It was walnut and maple in the middle of it. The maple was the blade, it actually folded out and locked,” Gay recalled with pride.

One of their most unique creations is the toy MRI machine. They had never considered such a thing until they were contacted by parents whose daughter needed to get an MRI. They asked for a wooden MRI machine, big enough for an American Girl doll, they could use to show their daughter how it worked and ease her anxieties about going inside the machine.

“It was like, how are we going to do this?” Gay recalled. Still, they persevered. “We got that all built and shipped to them with special instructions on how to put it all together. … They sent us reviews on that and they were in awe.”

The couple are still making wooden MRI and CT scans to this day, though these are a bit smaller, about the right size for a Barbie doll.

“Hospitals buy them for medical play,” said Martin-Gay. “They’ll take it bedside to a child, to show how they’re going to do it.”

Neither could pick a particular favorite item to craft, though Martin-Gay does enjoy creating the baby toys.

When they’re not working, the couple like to spend time with their 16 grandchildren, and are regular churchgoers.

Teresa Martin-Gay, left, and Darren Gay look over some unfinished wooden color guard rifles in their home Silver Lake home workshop. The couple started My Unique Wooden Toys together in 2006 and spend much of their time in the workshop with their cats.