About Highland Games

About Us, (or rather, me)
The second thing that needs to be explained is our company name, which has become a confusing liability rather than a helpful description, but first let’s deal with the "our" part of "our company name". "We" are an "I". This company is run by one person, me, Steve Cormack. I am the designer, manufacturer, packager, shipper, book-keeper, webdesigner and washer-upperer for Highland Games. But for some reason, it just doesn’t sound right saying "I did this" and "my product is like that" all over the website, so I have adopted what we British call "the Royal We" and referred to myself in the plural everywhere else on this website. Just so you know. Now, about "our" company name. More than 20 years ago, in 1989, I decided I wanted to be self-employed, got myself a workshop, came up with a few toy designs, and called my company "Highland Games". This seemed like a smart idea at the time because I lived in the beautiful Highlands of Scotland and I manufactured games. However over the years, my range diversified, I pruned away some of the game products, and came up with others which have absolutely no connection to games at all. Furthermore, I regularly get requests from strangers wanting to be included in my highland dancing or caber tossing competitions. So maybe some day I’ll change the name to something more appropriate and less confusing...... some day when I’ve got more time to redo all my packaging and literature, paint new signs, animate a new logo, change bank accounts, re-subscribe to organisations, inform suppliers and retail outlets, contact the utility companies, ...........
How to punch penny sized holes in wood jig for making Crafty Coaster converted guillotine for cutting wooden triangles fly press for cutting leather	Highland Games, founded in 1989, is a small business dedicated to original design and quality manufacture. I have been selling my products on the web since 1998. On this website I make available my proven best sellers. I have other items you may be interested in so please feel free to contact me if you want to know more. My product range may be divided into three broad categories, namely *wood, leather* and *resin. The first products I produced, back in 1989, were made of wood. I was looking for durable materials to make a flexagon, which is a mathematical model normally made from paper. Sheets of thin real wood veneer glued onto nylon ribbon proved to be the answer, and once I had invented and developed an entire technology to handle the stuff, I was able not only to make strong, colourful flexagons, but also anything that would normally be folded from paper. Over the next few years, I made and sold a range of these products, and on this website, I offer my two most consistently popular ones, the Crafty Coaster, a colour changing coaster and the Penny Pincher, a magic trick. After a few years of exclusively wooden products, I was researching a new idea which required making rubber moulds of an object and casting it in resin. One day, finding I'd mixed too much of the mould-making rubber, I looked around for something small to use up the extra and spotted a couple of dice on the windowsill. I used them to practice my mouldmaking, then at a later stage of my experimenting, I filled the dice moulds with casting resin. The original idea is still on the back boiler, but the dice turned out to be a great hit with my customers, and thus were born Nice dice, beautiful and unique, and Dodgy Dice, for the tricksters. These dice are made by setting coloured resins in silicon rubber moulds. The resulting casting is ground, buffed, tumbled and polished before having the spots applied, all by hand. By adding colour pigments and other additives, I can produce marbled, spotted, striped or speckled dice. Adding concealed weights or altering the numbers produces dice which favour certain numbers. I got into leather* (nudge, nudge) in 2006, when the leather dice case I bought in from another craftworker became unavailable. It was the only item I sold that I didn't make myself, so it seemed natural to have a go at producing my own version. The original case was rather wasteful of leather and it was the attempt to come up with a more efficient way of making it that led to the intertwined-strap design I sell as a Justin Case. It is the design I'm most proud of. Not long after, I came up with my Funky Fish design, which has also been incredibly popular. It seems people appreciate good design. By comparison with the first two categories, leather is a dawdle. You don’t need to invent techniques, or design and make tools and jigs. You just have to come up with a good design, then refer to centuries of knowledge and tradition for how to make it a reality. I love it. The future is leather. Since 1989, this company has specialised in the hand-crafted production of such weird and wonderful objects that my biggest problem has been making their purpose clear to a prospective customer. Demonstration and word of mouth were my only tools. Now, with the opportunity presented by the internet, I hope to share these delights with a larger public. Browse the pictures and animations on these pages and explore the cunningly eccentric world of Highland Games. Please contact me with any queries or comments. I love feedback.
spring-loaded dice spotters

original designs

in wood, resin and leather