Our rolling pins are not mass-produced, we make them one at a time, and depending on the pattern, it takes anywhere from forty-five minutes to an hour just to burn one rolling pin. That time does not include the prep time to get the pin ready to go onto the laser or the time after burning to clean the pin, wash off the burnt residue, dry time from washing, reassembly, coating with food-grade mineral oil and another dry time for the oil to absorb into the pin.
We take a rectangular pattern (Image 1 below) or image and wrap it around the circumference of the rolling pin. Now this may sound simple and straight forward, but there are variables that make it more challenging. The main one being our blank rolling pins (Image 2). We don’t make our blanks in house, being a small, two-person business, that is not feasible and would add way too much time to our production process. All of our blanks are purchased from the same source and are all the style we have found that works best for our needs. Although they all look the same, they aren’t the same, there may be slight differences in length and in diameter and is even possible to be just a fraction larger in diameter on one end than the other, all of which affect the way the pattern is burned onto the pin. Another variable is if the rotary attachment that turns the pin during the burning process skips a movement, this doesn’t happen often but can happen. We would like to be able to adjust the pattern and the laser settings to be able to have it line up perfectly every time and for the most part, we are able to get extremely close. On the more detailed patterns (Image 1), the ones that have a continuous design with no blank spaces, it is not unusual for there to be a small line where the beginning and end of the pattern were just a couple of pixels off and didn’t meet up (Image 3) or it may be slightly off to one side (Image 4).
Patterns that have several smaller images that are not connected (Image 5), will not have the possible pattern edge line or the offset to one side as in images 3 and 4.
