BEKA Wooden Toys & Products

Beka's Natural Wood products more than meet the bar when it comes to "green", "eco-friendly" products; something Beka started doing long before those terms were used! Beka's classic designs encourage and enhance creativity in both children and adults, encouraging imaginations rather than inhibiting them. You'll love Beka's environmentally friendly approach to manufacturing and to service. It's just common sense, and it shows up in the elegant simplicity of the things Beka makes. Whether you're looking for weaving looms or building blocks; storage carts or tables; classroom easels or art easels for children; a yarn swift for your favorite knitter or a maple train table ..... Beka has something for you.

Minnesota is home to Beka's made in the USA wood products. You'll love Beka's hand crafted Wooden Toys and Art Easels , just as much as Beka's line of home accessories and handweaving looms and accessories.

Beka loves working with hard maple. It is by far Beka's preferred material. People often ask why - so, we thought we’d tell you Beka's reason:

Hard Maple (also called hard rock maple or northern hard maple) is a popular northern tier, deciduous tree. It is the state tree of Wisconsin, Vermont, New York, and West Virginia. Enjoyed for its natural beauty, maple trees are found along city streets, in parks, and private yards. A variety of sub-species are available, offering a range of leaf colors, all of which change in the fall, providing added beauty to the countryside.

Basically a cold weather tree, during periods of significant temperature change, maple trees produce sap that is collected and made into maple syrup. Commercially, hard maple is often used to make cutting boards and counter tops, as the dense wood does not impart a taste to food and it holds up well. As a furniture material, maple performs well, enhancing high quality finishes with a lustrous sheen due to its hardness. Maple occurs naturally in forested rural areas, where it is typically harvested (and re-planted) under the watchful eye of state or county forest management personnel. This forest management system protects against over-logging, and insures material will be available for future generations of woodworkers.

Beka likes hard maple for some of it’s inherent qualities: it has a fine and close grain structure, which reduces chances of splintering; it is heavy, which adds stability to products needing to stand upright or stacked; it is abrasion and dent resistant, insuring durability; it ages well, actually improving over time (woodworkers like to say hard maple products get harder and develop a fine patina over time.)

Hard maple lumber actually helps us provide high quality products that perform well with heavy use. We hear Beka products described as being “heirloom quality”; many of our products have in fact been used by families over generations. It is not unusual for us to get calls from Grandparents, passing their children’s toys on to their grandchildren. Hard maple is truly part of that.