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Cookie cutter artists keep nonconformist edge By David Dishneau BOONSBORO, Md. — The cookie has crumbled nicely for identical twins Bill and Bob Cukla, who started out as drag-racing gearheads and ended up as kitchen-gadget kings.
Cookie cutters, that is. Elaborate, handmade tinware is priced from $6 to $35 apiece in their Hammer Song catalog, and even higher in gourmet boutiques. The witty, finely detailed designs, which include a robed and bearded wise man bearing a covered dish, make it clear the brothers and their wives are artists. Just don’t call them that. “A lot of these other craftspeople, they take themselves real seriously as ‘artistes,”’ Bill says in his blue-collar Chicago dialect. “We’re not.” He drives the point home as he demonstrates his craft, deftly bending an inch-wide band of tin around nails protruding from a plank: “This is mind-numbing,” he complains. It sells, though, and that’s what keeps Bill and his wife, Betsy Ayella Cukla, a formally trained artist, out in the garage behind their rural western Maryland home, twisting and soldering as many as 13,000 cutters a year for sale in stores, by mail and at craft shows. Brother Bob and his wife, Julie Flaherty, also trained artists, collaborate on the designs and make other tinware pieces, from painstaking antique reproductions to colorful jewelry, that the four partners sell. Cookie cutters are Hammer Song’s bread and butter, prized by deep-pocketed collectors who seek them out at shops including La Cuisine in Alexandria, Va. “The designs are so unique and the details are so intricate. You just don’t find that kind of detail in many other cutters,” Stephanie Gorenflo, the store’s merchandise manager said. Cookies made from Hammer Song cutters have been hung on the White House Christmas tree and served by major corporations that pay up to $1,000 for custom designs. After 22 years of crafting cookie cutters, Bill has figured out their appeal. “Women are drawn to a kitchen tool,” he said. “It’s like, build a better mousetrap and they’ll come to your door.” The tool analogy comes easily to a guy who spent his early working years in factories, metal shops and garages. The brothers, 51, built dragsters from their teen years in Bellwood, Ill., to their mid 20s, when Bill wrecked one of their cars at a racetrack and broke his neck. The shell of the car, a stars-and-stripes 1976 Chevrolet Vega, hangs from the ceiling of a shed out back. They gave up racing after that, moved east with their first wives, both of whom were Marylanders, bought houses, got divorced and worked a variety of jobs until Bob, on a visit to Colonial Williamsburg, Va., saw a use for their talents. Gift shops there were selling what he considered poor reproductions of antique tin housewares. “I said, ’I can do this. I can do it cheaper, better and quicker than what you get now,”’ he said. He did. “And if you can do this kind of stuff, word gets out,” Bill said. It did, especially after the brothers and Julie — Betsy and Bill hadn’t met yet — started doing craft shows in 1980. Their wares included cookie cutters, among them a cartoonish moose Bob had made to persuade Julie to bake him some sugar cookies. But it was Julie’s oak-leaf design in 1987 that put the cutter business in high gear. “We started doing the leaves, and then the next year, everyone else was coming out with leaves,” she said. The competition has driven Hammer Song to design increasingly intricate cutters for an expanded range of seasons. There is a New Year’s moose in a champagne glass next to a bottle of bubbly; a curly-haired muscleman in swimming briefs flexing his biceps; a leaping rabbit perfect for Easter baking. “We’re trying to move cookie-eating into other holidays,” Betsy said. Some designs are flops. Bill recalled one of a head-scratching monkey holding a banana in its other hand, similar in humorous spirit to some of their best-selling patterns. “We thought we know enough about the public that we knew what would sell,” he said. They made 100 copies, their standard minimum — and nearly got stuck with them. “It took us six years to sell that hundred,” Bill said. “We still loved the design,” Betsy added, “but it taught us to appeal to a wider audience.” Bob recalled the inspiration for the cutter business, a booth at a craft fair he attended in 1978. “This old Dutchman and his wife had these primitive cookie cutters. They were nowhere near the best thing at the fair, but he had a crowd at his booth. I thought, ’You can be an artist or you can make money at this thing. Or maybe you can do both.”’ (The Hammer Song catalog is available for $3 from Hammer Song, 221 S. Potomac St., Boonsboro, MD 21713) |
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