Designed by your child, built for your child.

A six-month season for children aged 10 to 12. Story chapters pose real mechanism problems; your child’s decisions at the workbench become 3D-printed parts in the post; and the parts build, month by month, into one working wind-up creature — wound for the first time by its maker, and no one else.

Join the waitlist How a season works

Sedge, a wind-up mechanical heron, standing low on a plinth with her working side visible: brass wheels, cams and linkages under slate-grey plates.
Sedge, of Patternbook 41 — shown still here. Wound, she stalks, freezes, feints and strikes, exactly as her maker decided.

This is Sedge — one worked season of eight decisions, moving. Yours would move differently.

The whole of it, in three steps

Decide at the workbench.

Each month’s chapter ends in a mechanism problem that will not resolve itself. Your child tests everything, then commits — one named choice, made once.

The Workshop cuts the parts.

Every part is printed to the decision your child committed — after it, never before. The wait is the making.

One creature builds up.

Six parcels, one machine. At the end of month six: the First Winding.

What makes this different

Every restoration gets finished.

A season is six parcels, and the sixth one comes. No open-ended collecting, no part-work treadmill: the season is complete by design, and finishing it is a promise in writing.

The promises, in full →

No two have ever moved alike.

Eight decisions shape the machine itself — stance, temper, strike, rhythm, reach, bearing, plumage, name. Seven of them offer three ways each: 3⁷ = 2,187 mechanically different creatures before the name goes on.

Meet Sedge →

One thing, not another pile.

Each parcel joins the same creature. Nothing monthly to store, nothing to throw away — it accumulates into one wound animal on a plinth, with a certificate.

What arrives each month →

Real mechanisms — cams, gears, linkages.

The story’s problems are the engineering: gear trains, cam profiles, linkages, and last of all the governor. Your child decides them on screen, then holds them working.

The workbench, honestly →

Meet Sedge

Sedge is Patternbook 41, restored through one worked season: low stance, patient temper, a feint before the strike. Every one of those was a decision, and every decision could have gone two other ways.

See every decision that made her →

Screen time that turns into something real.

The workbench is a place to decide, not to scroll: no timers, no streaks, no feeds, and nothing social. Everything decided on screen arrives as a physical part in the post. There is a page for the questions you will actually ask — cost, sticking with it, safety, data — written plainly.

For parents →

THE WHIRLWRIGHT GUILD · FOUNDED 1751

The Guild restores the world’s lost mechanical creatures. The Rolls have been reopened, and it takes apprentices the old way: by restoration, not by application.

Enter the Guild →

Two ways in

The season: £129, paid once, six months — £21.50 a month, and it ends. Monthly: £24 a month, £144 across a season, cancel any month. Same parcels, same promises, either way.

Pricing, in full →

The promises, in full →