Photos by Cherrie Hanson
Muhammad Ayesh, balances his love for creating beautiful wood objects and his full time commercial construction business.
Wood as an artistic canvas can not only bring unique and intricate projects to life but also produce items of utility. When Muhammad Ayesh is not busy at work with his family construction business, he can be found furnishing various wood pieces including coffee tables, charcuterie boards, lazy Susans and more under the name Wood Flow.
Milwaukee Makerspace, 2517 E Norwich Ave. St Francis where builders, inventors and creatives have 24/7 access to equipment, and training from other makers.
Ayesh remarks about building from wood, “It’s very therapeutic for me. Although it’s work that uses machines and tools, I don’t see it as work. It’s like my time to relax.”
On why he particularly enjoys making tables, Ayesh contends, “They are centerpieces and a talking piece for your living room, and I love when someone has something specific they like that I can bring to life.”
Current projects by Ayesh; a frame made from olive tree wood harvested from in his uncle’s home in Palestine, and a decorative tray embedded with coffee beans.
Makers share and donate tools for everyone to use like this hand made wood mallet (on left).
Ayesh has built round and rectangular Wood Flow tables alike. Some he has incorporated custom designs into, and some he has fashioned beautifully with wood “cookies” or even coffee beans dotting the epoxy. Besides tables and boards, Ayesh has completed desks, cabinets, doors, closets, coaster sets, and even a coffee cart for Chicago-based Nood Coffee.
Tables sometimes take a while for Ayesh to complete. First, he has to cut and flatten the wood into a mold. Then once he pours the epoxy into the mold, it has to sit for five days before the epoxy can be taken out for the table to cure. Then he flattens it further and sands it for hours. Finally, Ayesh coats the wood with a non-toxic, food-safe finish.
He estimates, “From the time I buy a piece of wood until a table is finished and ready to go to its home, it usually takes probably two to three weeks, or roughly 20 hours of work.”
This huge machine can cut a thin layer off the top of a wood cookie.
After he graduated from Marquette University in 2014 with an Engineering degree, Ayesh worked as both a public and private sector engineer for several years. He had taken woodshop classes at Milwaukee Area Technical College on the side, and as a hobby, Ayesh would enjoy doing creative projects that involved assembling, building and renovating things.
“I’ve always been good with working with my hands and fixing things myself,” he affirms. “My mom or sister would want a backdrop or some sort of art thing that required tools, and so I’d make stuff for friends and family.”
Ayesh would also help his father around the house with painting, framing or drywall. He connected with the artistic side of handiwork, which ultimately inspired Ayesh to start creating pieces of his own.
When Ayesh’s wife falls in love with an art piece he has made, like this wood and epoxy table, it goes into their home.
“I bought some pieces of walnut and cherry and maple, and a few epoxy kits, and I started small with serving trays and charcuterie boards,” he continues. “The goal was always to make tables, but I wanted to have the learning curve on something smaller.”
He still has the first charcuterie board he ever made. Looking at it makes Ayesh reflect on how far he has come. “It’s terrible, but when I made it I was so happy,” he remembers. “It was the coolest and best I ever did.”
Ayesh makes the molds used to produce his unique table designs.
Access to large scale equipment at MKE Makerspace
An incredible array of tools that a maker might not have in their home workshop.
COVID-19 quarantine gave Ayesh plenty of time to get more practice building with different kinds of wood and epoxy. He eventually started making tables, and before he knew it, Ayesh moved all his equipment out of his garage and basement over to Milwaukee Makerspace, where he rents out space for Wood Flow to this day.
“I only had one kid at the time I started, and I was cranking maybe ten or twelve tables a year,” Ayesh recalls. “I had three kids when I quit my job to start my own business, so something had to get dropped in the list of priorities, and the tablemaking went down quite a bit.”
Full-time, Ayesh has his own commercial construction and remodeling business, Firebird Construction (previously Ayesh Renovations & Designs). Now that Ayesh has a business partner, however, Firebird has become more self-sufficient, so he has more time for Wood Flow again.
Ayesh most often uses cherry or black walnut wood for his projects. “I have a few local sources here in the Milwaukee area,” he mentions. “There’s a good friend of mine at a mill in West Bend who I buy wood from as well.”
Wood from the olive tree Ayesh’s great-great grandfather planted in Palestine.
In recent years, Ayesh has also been repurposing wood from a sentimental place for him – his family’s home in Palestine.
“My uncle’s front yard had an olive tree that was kind of ruining the front patio and porch area,” Ayesh explains. “He had it removed, and the minute I found out, I called the guy who was removing the tree and told him to cut it into cookies for me.”
Ayesh managed to acquire that wood during a subsequent visit to Palestine, and he has been using it for Wood Flow since. “This was a tree planted by my great-great grandfather,” he adds. “It’s got some family benefit and is kind of nostalgic, but it’s also important for me to keep that memory going rather than letting that tree go to waste.”
Photos courtesy of Muhammad Ayesh
Designs by Muhammad Ayesh; a wood serving tray and table using colorful epoxy.
He loves using olive wood for its sturdiness, and he recently sourced more of it from a church in California, where olive trees gifted by a sister church in Bethlehem had burned in a wildfire.
“I made tables with those slabs and sold all of them,” Ayesh says. “You could see that the wood almost had like a black border around it, and that’s from the burning, so it’s nice to see how it unintentionally gives the table character and depth.”
In addition to custom projects, Ayesh also lists some of his own Wood Flow creations for sale on Etsy.
Muhammad Ayesh at the Milwaukee Makerspace community workshop in St. Francis
