✦ How It Started
We met by chance in the nineties. Thirteen years old, and it was immediate — that specific, uncomplicated certainty that hits before you're old enough to second-guess it. We wanted to see each other constantly, the way teenagers do, and we did our best with what we had. Which wasn't much. We were twenty minutes apart with parents and older siblings who had their own lives and very little interest in chauffeuring a couple of kids with a crush.
So we lost touch. Not in any dramatic way — just the slow, ordinary drift of growing up, getting busy, living the lives that were waiting for us. There was no last conversation we recognized as goodbye. It just got quiet, the way things do, and thirty years went by.
Then, out of nowhere, we found each other again. And here's the thing nobody tells you about dormant feelings: they don't actually go anywhere. They just wait. What we felt at thirteen was exactly where we left it — and suddenly we were in our forties, a little wiser and a lot less patient with wasting time, and it was still just as immediate as it ever was.
We weren't looking to start a business. We were just looking for more time together.
"Neither of us knew which conversation was our last. Thirty years later, the first new one felt like no time had passed at all."
✦ The Printer Changes Things
We had ideas. So many ideas — strange ones, beautiful ones, things that existed nowhere except in our heads and demanded to be made real. When we got our first machine, his kids became the very lucky first benefactors of our obsession. They held those early dragons like treasures, named them, carried them room to room. Watching that kind of pure, uncomplicated delight cracked something open in us.
We couldn't stop. We didn't want to stop. We were laughing and designing and arguing about filament colors at midnight, and somewhere in the middle of all that ordinary magic we realized: this is what we want our life to look like.
Not the grind. Not the ladder. Not the version of adulthood that asks you to fold yourself into something smaller and more manageable and less embarrassingly enthusiastic about things.
We chose the dragons.
Our printer runs twenty-four hours a day. We are occasionally awakened by the midnight distress calls of a clogged nozzle or a rebellious spool, and like dutiful parents, we take turns stumbling out to attend to BABS — our Bad Ass Bitch of a Bambu — because she demands it, and honestly, she has earned the right.
✦ What We Actually Believe
Society has a very specific script for people in their forties. Settle. Stabilize. Stop making noise about things that don't pay well. Be practical. Be sensible. Stop playing.
We have read the script. We found it uninspiring.
What we believe instead is this: the people who light up when they talk about what they make are the ones worth buying from. The things built by hands that are genuinely obsessed with the making carry something the manufactured ones don't. You can feel it. It's not a marketing strategy — it's just true.
We are obsessed with what we make. We are obsessed with each other. We have built this little corner of the world out of stubbornness and affection and an embarrassing number of hours spent fine-tuning silk filament settings, and we are not remotely sorry about any of it.
"We don't need it all. We need each other, a workshop full of filament, and people who appreciate a truly excellent dragon."
— Kim & Matt✦ What Curious Whimsy Is
Every piece that leaves our workshop has been handled by both of us. Designed, debated, printed, inspected, and — occasionally — vetted by a very particular orange cat in a steampunk hat who serves as our Chief Feline Officer and Quality Inspector.
We specialize in the strange and the beautiful. Things with a gothic edge and a playful heart. Objects that make you do a double-take, then smile. Our aesthetic is whimsical-dark — not grim, not precious, just peculiar in the best possible way.
We are based in Morley, Michigan — a town small enough that everyone waves, and quiet enough that you can hear BABS running from the next room. We print out of our living room, our bedroom, and whatever other surface hasn't been claimed yet by the latest batch of creatures waiting to find a home. The house smells like sweet filament and bitter coffee and whatever Kim is making with garlic, which is most things. We do craft shows and online orders and custom requests, and we treat every single one with the same ridiculous level of care.
This business is our story. It is also our excuse to spend every available hour together doing something we love, and we will not apologize for either of those things.