How She Turned Her Dining Room into a Woodworking Business: Ashton's xTool P3 Story

Business Snapshot

• The Craft: Custom wood signs and home decor — door signs, miniature house replicas, lake maps, cutting boards, and coasters — each hand-finished with sanding, painting, and assembly.
• The Production Change: The P3's larger working area means bigger jobs don't need a conveyor, and its automatic positioning system (ACS) removes the measuring Ashton says she was never good at.
• The Numbers: Cutting-board orders alone brought in more than $4,000 in the first four months, and the machine paid for itself within a year.

Ashton McClure works full-time at a grocery store.

In her dining room, a machine the size of a small table hums in the background — cutting the wooden signs that are quietly becoming a business.

What began as a way to decorate her son's birthday party has grown into a home decor business built on custom house signs, lake maps, cutting boards, and the kind of personalized gifts people keep for years.

From Birthday Decorations to a Woodworking Business

Ashton's first machine wasn't a laser at all. She started by hand-cutting Mickey Mouse Clubhouse decorations for her son's birthday party, and she has been crafting ever since — through a Cricut, a short run with sublimation, and a Glowforge she remembers mostly for its customer service.

A friend bought her the xTool P2, and later told her about the xTool P3. She bought the P3 not long after it launched and hasn't touched the P2 since.

The proof came quickly. Her first custom house sign was a replica of her mother's lake house, and her mother's reaction made her fall in love with the work.

Inside a Home Decor Business Built on Custom Signs

Ashton M Studios makes the things people hang on doors, walls, and countertops. Custom house replicas are the centerpiece — layered wood signs that recreate a family's home down to the roofline. Around them sit door signs, lake maps, engraved cutting boards, coasters, and classroom welcome signs for teachers.

She works with three independent designers — in the United States, the Philippines, and Ukraine — to turn a customer's idea into a clean design file, and has lately been doing the simpler designs herself.

Orders come in at a steady trickle of five or six every couple of weeks. She batches her cutting and painting on weekends. And she is careful about what she shows online, sharing finished work on her personal Facebook and the xTool community without giving away the full design.

Why the xTool P3

The P3 solved a problem Ashton didn't have room to work around. Her studio is a dining room, with no space for a conveyor attachment.

“I like the bigger space,” she says. “I also like that I could do bigger projects and I didn't have to pull out the conveyor.”

The bigger bed meant she could skip the conveyor entirely — one less thing to fit into a room that was already full.

No Measuring, No Math

The part Ashton likes least about making things is measuring them. The P3's automatic positioning system, ACS, takes care of that.

That ease is the difference between a machine she uses and a machine she reaches for first — the reason the P2 now sits idle.

$4,000 in Four Months

Ashton first saw someone engrave a cutting board in a YouTube video. She found a board in her cupboard, had a friend make the design, and put it in the machine.

“I was in awe,” she says. “This can make me some money.”

Within four months, cutting boards alone brought in more than $4,000. The machine paid for itself within a year — even while she kept her full-time job and worked on the business in the gaps between shifts.

How She Prices Custom Work

Ashton prices deliberately. A finished piece sells for $50 to $300 depending on detail; a custom house sign with four layers of wood, matched colors, and hand-finishing runs toward the top of that range.

Materials for a typical piece cost $15 to $20, and a design file can run from $5 to $90 depending on complexity. She prices below many peers on purpose — not because the work is worth less, but because she wants customers to come back.

A Bigger Bed, and Something to Fall Back On

Ashton's wish list is short. A bigger working area — she has asked for something like 36 by 30 inches, so a full 18-inch circle fits without splitting it — tops it.

Beyond that, she is building for a longer arc. Her son is ten, and she wants the business to be something he can fall back on, a way to make a living on his own terms.

“My art expresses me more than my words,” she says. “You must see my art. Here you go.”

Continue the Journey

With the xTool P3 at the center of it, Ashton M Studios is proof that a woodworking business can start small — on a dining-room table, on nights and weekends — and grow into something real.

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See more of Ashton's work on her Facebook page.