BLOOMING LOCAL TALENT | APRIL 2026
Discover the inspiring story Rooted in Sawdust and Story: The Journey of Slagle & Co. Woodworks in this month’s feature.
From a grandfather’s bandsaw to a CNC machine, how one woman’s love of wood, people, and community shaped an art form all her own.
Walk into Carmen Slagle’s backyard shop on any given weekday morning and you’ll hear it before you see it, the steady hum of a CNC machine working its way through a piece of wood that will eventually become someone’s most cherished wall piece. The air smells like fresh-cut wood. Tools hang in careful order above a well-worn workbench. And everywhere you look, there’s something beautiful.
This is Slagle & Co. Woodworks. And none of it, not a single sign, exists by accident.
It Started With a Tornado
The official birthday of Slagle & Co. is December 26, 2015. Not because Carmen planned it that way, but because a tornado tore through the Sunnyvale, Garland and Rowlett areas the day after Christmas, and took everything from a friend she loved.
“Her shop was wiped clean off the concrete pad,” Carmen recalls. “Her cars were totaled. The whole roof was gone. Her and her husband and daughter, they had pillow cushions over their heads. And when they looked up, it was just… all gone.”
Carmen and her friend Michelle didn’t overthink it. They picked up paintbrushes. Michelle lettered Bible verses; Carmen built the signs and painted them. They made five or six pieces, auctioned them off, and handed every dollar to the family who’d lost everything.
What happened next surprised even Carmen. The phones started ringing. People wanted one of those signs. “I told them, I’m not a sign maker, I’m an art teacher,” she laughs. “And they kept saying, ‘We want one like that.'”
So she made them one, and then another, and then hundreds more.
The Grandad Who Started It All
Long before that tornado, long before the first sign was ever sold, there was a little girl spending her afternoons next door at her grandad’s wood shop.
Bill Oliver was a woodturner, one of the founders of the Hunt County Woodturners Club, and the kind of grandfather who let a small child loose with a bandsaw. Carmen grew up living next door to him, and every single day, she was in that shop.
“I’d cut out little cowboy hats and cactuses and boots,” she says, smiling at the memory. “I’d drill a hole in them, paint them, turn them into keychains, and sell them at school. I was doing this in elementary school.”
She still has his hammer. His old toolbox sits on a shelf beside her machine. And when Carmen formed her LLC and had to choose a name, she landed on Slagle & Co. Woodworks, never once realizing that her grandad’s workshop had carried the same name.
“I was standing right here,” she says quietly, “and Atley took a picture of me. Both signs on the wall said Woodworks. And I just, I never put two and two together.”
He passed away when Carmen’s son Easton was just a year and a half old. He never saw any of this. But his presence is everywhere in the shop, in the tools, in the name, in the quiet joy Carmen carries into this space every morning.
“I know he would be proud,” she says.
A Life Built Around Art
Art was never a choice for Carmen. It was the water she grew up swimming in. Her mother holds an art degree from what was then East Texas State, her grandmother was a knitter, her granddad turned wood, and her bonus dad was a woodworker too.
When it came time to choose a direction after high school, Carmen aimed at graphic design. She was close to finishing that path when life shifted. After meeting Jeromy and watching the relationships he built with his students as a coach and teacher, something clicked. She wanted that kind of impact too. So she changed course, pursuing education with an emphasis in art, and went straight from graduation into a classroom in Royse City.
She never looked back. For seventeen years, she poured herself into students. Her goal was never really the color wheel.
“It was always about building them up,” she says. “I wanted my classroom to be a safe environment. I wanted them to leave happy, and to feel good about themselves.”
In 2013, she was named Teacher of the Year at Royse City and district Teacher of the Year. Her speech that night centered on a single image: a blank canvas. “When a child walks into your classroom, they have a blank canvas. And it’s up to you, you can put a negative mark on their canvas, or a positive mark on their canvas. The goal was to help them paint a beautiful picture of life.”
Leaving the Classroom, Finding the Shop
Five years ago, Carmen left teaching. The transition wasn’t easy. “Six months after I left, I still felt like I was on a really long vacation,” she says. “Like I just needed to be going back.”
But the signs were waiting. For eleven years she had cut signs with a jigsaw. By the time she left teaching, the work had taken a real physical toll. Jeromy suggested they invest in a CNC machine. She spent months learning it from scratch, making mistakes, going back, making more. “You have to constantly be growing and learning,” she says simply. The shop they built together went up in six days. It became her happy place.
The Work Itself
On any given day, Carmen is managing a running list of ten to fifteen signs in various stages of completion. Each one is designed on the computer, programmed into the machine, cut, and carefully sanded before it is painted and stained. Carmen is self-admittedly detail-obsessed, and that includes getting inside every individual letter with the sandpaper until the surface is exactly right.
She loves making logo signs. “You see the journey the owner has been on to even have a logo,” she says. “And then I get to be the cherry on top. It’s really personal.” When she hands a finished piece to someone and they start to cry, she knows she’s done her job.
But some of Carmen’s most visible work isn’t hanging in a home or a business lobby. It’s on a wall outside Mona Lisa’s Pizza in Caddo Mills, and it’s been there long enough to become part of the town’s identity.
The first mural came from a school service project called 212 Day, a Caddo Mills district-wide initiative built around the idea that 212 degrees is the boiling point, the place where you go above and beyond. Carmen’s art students were chosen to paint a mural on that exterior wall. The design was student-created, selected through a class contest, and then brought to life by about fifteen kids working alongside their teacher over multiple project days. “It was student-led,” Carmen says. “I just got to watch them do it.”
Years later, it was time for a refresh. A student named Jackson Summers, someone Carmen had taught in middle school, won a new design contest. His artwork was selected, and Carmen teamed up with a fellow artist Emily Jacks to take that drawing and scale it up. Way up. The finished mural stretches over 100 feet long and 30 feet tall, and it’s the one you see today.
She had given the community a heads-up before they started, inviting anyone who wanted to come take a picture with the old mural first. And then they painted. Both murals were student-designed, both were community-rooted, and Carmen was in the middle of it every single time.
People stop and take photos in front of it regularly. Carmen sees them tagged online and smiles every time.
Still Pouring Into Kids
The same is true at her summer art camps, which she and Jeromy have run for fourteen years. Carmen keeps her classes small on purpose, twelve kids at most, so every child gets real one-on-one time. They do mosaic stepping stones, flower pots, and other interesting projects that parents will cherish for years to come. Carmen brings in family and friends to help, turning each camp into its own little assembly line of love.
A recent camp moment has stayed with her. A little girl finished painting her bunny, held it up in her hands, stared at it quietly, and said: “It’s just so cute.”
“That,” Carmen says, “is why I did it. They were all so proud of themselves. That’s the whole point.”
When Christmas Comes
Come October, Carmen starts preparing for her favorite time of year. By the time the Christmas market arrives, the shop has transformed into something that looks less like a solo woodworking studio and more like a family tradition in full swing. Jeromy runs the chop saw. One aunt sands while another stains. Her mother paints alongside her sister, her mother-in-law, and her cousin, all moving together like a well-worn assembly line with Christmas music pouring out through the open doors.
When the market day comes, her mom, her sister, her cousin, and her best friends show up to work the booth alongside her. The pieces they sell, oversized Christmas trees, painted gift boxes, handcrafted seasonal décor, represent weeks of shared work and shared laughter.
“You really see who’s in your corner,” Carmen says. “Everyone shows up.”
Still Rooted Here
Carmen and Jeromy have lived in Hunt County for nearly twenty-two years. She graduated from Caddo Mills and spent seventeen years teaching in the area. Her neighbors are people she can’t imagine living without. She gives hugs to the staff at Lowe’s and Home Depot. She is, in every sense, woven into this place.
“It’s just home,” she says. “It’s family and community.”
The kids who aged out of her summer camps sometimes come back as helpers. And the students she taught years ago in the classroom are now grown, getting married and starting families of their own. Carmen finds herself on the guest list at their weddings and showing up at the hospital to meet their new babies.One afternoon, a former student’s mother stopped by the shop, and Carmen pulled a piece down from the wall that the woman’s daughter had made in elementary school years before. That little girl is now away at college. Carmen held up the project and they both just looked at it, caught off guard by how fast the time had moved.
She’s been thinking about starting regular art classes for homeschool kids, just an hour or two, a couple of days a week, focused on specialty techniques and the kinds of creative experiences that don’t always fit into a standard school day. Her teaching certificate is still active, and the pull toward kids, toward that kind of connection, never really left her.
Her most consistent company out here is Cooper, her dog and self-appointed shop supervisor. She laughs that if fifteen minutes go by without a hug, he comes padding in and just sits there staring at her until she stops what she’s doing. She always stops to give him more hugs.
Talent Worth Celebrating
Near the end of our conversation, Carmen gets quiet. A little emotional, which surprises her. She was talking about leaving teaching, about how much she loved it, about not wanting to waste whatever talent God has given her.
“I just pray I’m not wasting it,’ she says, and the tears come before she can stop them. ‘I feel like God had me teaching for a reason, and now that season has shifted. I just want to make sure I am still listening, that I am exactly where He wants me to be.”
She looks around the shop, taking in the hammer on the wall, the sign her daughter Atley made that reads ‘Carmen’s She Shed,’ the cabinet doors waiting to become Christmas trees.
“I’m not unhappy,” she says finally. “I love being out here.”
That may be the truest thing about Carmen’s story. For all the beautiful signs she has made, and there have been hundreds, this is bigger than woodworking. This is a story about talent nurtured over a lifetime, about family influence, faithful work, and small-town relationships. It is about a woman who still gets emotional in her own shop, wondering if she is using her gifts the way God intended.
The work she does is not casual to her. It matters. She wants it to matter.
And maybe that is why it feels the way it does. Carmen loves the moments when a finished piece moves someone to tears, or when a business owner sees their logo turned into something real and tangible for the first time after everything it took to build that business. And when a child walks out of camp clutching something they made with their own hands and beaming with pride, she knows she has done her job.
So what does she hope people feel when they experience her work?
“Happy,” she said. “Just happy.”
That answer sounds simple. It is not. In a world that rushes past the handmade and the heartfelt, making something that leaves people feeling happy is no small thing. It is a gift. The kind that lingers on a wall, in a memory, or in the quiet confidence of a child who realizes, maybe for the first time, that they made something beautiful.
That is the kind of talent worth celebrating. And it is exactly the kind of talent worth beginning April with.
About Slagle & Co. Woodworks
Slagle & Co. Woodworks is a custom wood sign and art business based in Hunt County, Texas. Founded by former educator and lifelong artist Carmen Slagle, the shop specializes in CNC-crafted wood signs, logo pieces, nursery signs, closing gifts for realtors, and seasonal décor. Carmen also runs summer art camps for children and is exploring ongoing art classes for homeschool students. Slagle & Co. serves individuals, families, and local businesses throughout the Hunt County area and beyond.
Find Carmen and her work on Facebook and Instagram, or reach out directly to commission a custom piece.
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