Jayme’s Dice

Description

To celebrate the $30K mark during our original Kickstarter I added a set of 6 six-sided dice called  Jayme’s dice. Jayme’s dice are made from Purple Heart, Pink Ivory, and Blue Mahoe. Why these woods? Well you see Jayme was my mother who passed away from type one diabetes a couple of years back. I got to thinking during that time about what colors of wood she would have chosen for a set of dice. Knowing that my mother was never one to make things easy, she would have said she wanted a set in purple, pink, and blue since those where her favorite colors. Purple and pink are easy since Purple Heart and Pink Ivory have been used for ages but blue would be difficult, or so I thought. This morning I set out to see if old mother nature makes a blue wood. I placed exactly 1 phone call and found out one of my suppliers imports a wood from the Blue Mahoe tree from a single plantation in Caribbean that grows a whole forest of sustainable exotic woods. Notice I said forest. These folks don’t run a tree farm. They sustainably harvest natural trees by select cutting and replanting them in their “ecologically cultivated jungle” that contains many different types of plant and animal life. Turns out the wood is stained blue by the minerals in the ground around the plantation. In other parts of the world the Blue Mahoe has wood that ranges from very brown to even browner. On this one plantation however, the wood’s coloration turns to kind of steel-blue, to violet, blue-green,  light blue and even very rarely royal blue. Neat huh? But what about Pink Ivory? Well it’s pink. Very pink. Barbie Pink. Pink Ivory was a sacred wood to the Zulu chiefs of South Africa. It was said that if anyone other than a Zulu chief was found to posses the wood, they would be executed. At one time, it was said to be rarer than diamonds.   The wood grows in various parts of Africa, and takes hundreds of years to reach a size suitable to make a blank. It turns out however, that it is not quite as rare as we have been led to believe, and nowadays this extremely slow-growing, and exceedingly hard wood is harvested with proper permits from the South African government to ensure a sustainable harvest for decades to come. So what about Purple Heart? Well purple heart is pound for pound one of the strongest woods in the world and is commonly used for heavy construction, boat building, and outdoor decks and stair cases thanks to it’s natural ability to resist the elements. It’s also freaking beautiful. As you can see in the photo to the left. (Coincidentally if you were one of the three that ordered a purple heart dice box it has been cut from this beautifully figured blank.)  It was my mother’s favorite wood. It’s also one of mine. The purple coloration comes from the oxidation of the wood. When freshly cut or sanded the wood is a brown color that turns purple with exposure to air. It takes many many days for the wood to fully oxidize and the deep purple coloration to form. So what exactly are Jayme’s Dice? Jayme’s Dice are a set of 6 dice. Two in Purple Heart, two in Pink Ivory, and two in Blue Mahoe. They will come in an American Holly Dice box which is the purest white wood available in the world. It is also very hard to dry properly without cracking and is therefore quite expensive, though not as expensive as Pink Ivory.