The Allens mark the passage of time in eras – parts of their lives consumed by one project. There was the boat-building era, the gardening era, the boat-rebuilding era and the storytelling era. Now, as George and Georgene Allen approach 80 and their daughter Kathy hits her mid-40s, the family is well into the toy era.

At Creeping Thyme Farm, the family homestead in North Brooklin, the Allens create simple, handmade, hand-painted wooden toys. They’re the kind your grandparents used to play with – the kind that people now call folk art.

“It’s a slice of old-time Maine that’s quickly dwindling away and it’s a family thing,” said Bill Petry, co-owner of Sedgwick Antiques. “They have wonderful, handmade wooden toys … they become kind of a folk-art collectors thing if you will.”

In a sense, that’s what they are – a throwback to simpler times. Using wood cut, dried, cured and carved on their property, the Allens create tough, solid toys that are meant for kids to play with. They sign them and date them, so that people can collect them, but the toys aren’t like porcelain dolls that sit in a cabinet. They’re built to become heirlooms.

“We sign everything, assuming that someday they’ll be antiques,” Kathy Allen said.

Petry, an antiques dealer, buys some of the Allens’ toys for collecting, but he also gives them as Christmas gifts.

Every year, Creeping Thyme Farm has a holiday sale, and every year Petry leaves with an armload of toys.

“To me and to the community around here, [the sale is] the way Christmas shopping should be,” Petry said.

This year, many people on his list are getting “very colorful and pretty” birdhouses. He bought a chicken coop with chickens, a rooster and a fox outside for his baby nephew.

“I do know what to collect and I think a lot of their things will be folk art that people will be buying 20 years from now,” Petry said.

While the Allens’ creations may become highly collectible someday, for now, it’s a way for George and Georgene to keep busy after retiring. Kathy, her husband and daughter help out, as does her sister Judy, who lives in North Carolina and lends the family support when she’s there and an extra set of hands when she visits.

“When we … retired we got into it a little bit more,” George Allen said. “It was something to occupy our time and to keep active, you might say.”

Wooden toys were a natural fit for the family. They had plenty of wood on their property. Georgene worked with children as a teacher. Kathy now teaches at Brooksville Elementary School and she has a degree in art.

George knew plenty about woodworking from his days as a boat builder. Over the course of several winters in the 1980s, the Allens built a pinky schooner, the Summertime, in their yard, with help from students at The Apprenticeshop in Rockland and College of the Atlantic in Bar Harbor. Much of the wood came from the Allens’ property. The schooner now sails out of Rockland.

He rebuilt the oyster schooner Richard Robbins, then served as the captain during summer vacation cruises out of Rockland.

“That was an era,” Georgene said.

And that led to another – the storytelling era.

“He had old stories, so when he got his own schooner, then he began to tell stories on his own,” Georgene said. “He had a captive audience.”

George then joined other Maine storytellers on a “Bert and I” recording, and later produced “Half-Truths and Whole Lies” with Paul Sullivan.

George Allen has plenty of stories to tell, whether about his family’s roots, boat building, toys, or life in North Brooklin.

George and Georgene Allen, both 78, are true Mainers. He grew up in Brooklin, she in Blue Hill. They were “in the gang” together in high school.

When George returned from World War II, he went to College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, Mass. Georgene worked in a plant in Hartford, Conn. The two would visit each other on the weekends, and later married and returned to Maine. He built, rebuilt and captained boats. She taught school.

Their small, gray cedar-shingle house sits on land that was given to the Allen family by King George III. Kathy, her husband and their daughter also live on the property.

“I just think all of that sense of humility and history of Maine all comes out in their art,” said Mary Gallant of Anderson, N.C., who spends summers in the former house of E.B. White, across the street from the Allens.

The location of Creeping Thyme Farm isn’t exactly easy for customers to find. It’s more the type of place that someone stumbles upon. The road that leads to North Brooklin is curvy and narrow, with thick woods that occasionally give way to head-turning views of the ocean. It isn’t the type of road you want to drive on in bad weather.

A big, hand-painted sign tells you when you get there. A long driveway leads to the Allens’ house, tucked among towering pines, logs, a shed, and on this day a blanket of wet snow.

When you get there, you’re still not entirely sure you’ve come to the right place. But a look at the windows, glowing with yellow light in the cold, gray afternoon, tells you this is it. The panes and sills are filled with whimsical ornaments, angels and Santas.

Inside, everything’s warm. A wood stove lies just beyond the door. George Allen makes tea. Every inch of the kitchen table is covered with a village, wooden barnyard animals, “build-its” (a cross between a puzzle and building blocks), boats, Santas, heart-shaped pins and a bright red Noah’s ark with Noah holding an umbrella. Tiny spotted chickens and roosters in every color imaginable perch on a small table in the living room. The Allens decorated a tabletop Christmas tree in a bay window with tiny buoys, lobster boats and birds.

“It’s fun to make so many different things,” Georgene Allen said.

Her husband agreed.

“To put something in production and do something over and over, then that becomes monotonous. I don’t mind working because there’s something else I can do all the time,” he said. “We always try to think of something new.”

They add a few pieces each year, and weed out the ones that don’t work. This year, for their annual Christmas sale, the Allens made a Santa juggling snowballs. In addition to that sale, Creeping Thyme Farm also sells toys at farmers markets in Blue Hill and Deer Isle. The Allens don’t sell their toys in catalogs or stores.

“It is more of a relationship. It’s just so fun to know people like what we make and not just send it off to a store,” Kathy Allen said. “Word of mouth really for us has been the best.”

Gallant, who has lived in E.B. White’s old house for 15 years and has known the Allens for most of them, was there when the Allens started making the toys about seven years ago. But she didn’t know about it until a few years later, though, when a friend told her. Now, she’s one of Creeping Thyme Farm’s biggest customers.

“I just think it’s so fantastic that George cuts the tree down, planes the wood, cures it and then makes the toys,” Gallant said. “I’ve got a whole mantel of Santa Clauses, I’m crazy about that dory, and the roosters and the chickens are just hysterical. Everybody I’ve taken over there leaves with a chicken. I like practically everything they do.”

Creeping Thyme Farm can be reached at 359-2067.