Wow.  Two posts in as many days.  I’m sure everyone out there is stunned.

But it is just really exciting when things actually start to mesh and workout.

I know I mentioned previously that I wouldn’t bore you with the details of our blog outage.  So I won’t give you details.  But part of the problem was the amount of images we generate and the willingness (or unwillingness, depending on your point of view) of our hosting company to allow us to continue.  So, in order to continue to offer customers and clients as many images of our work as possible we found a neat little work around.  Flickr.

Now we’d had a Flickr account for years, but never really used it.  Turns out the good folks at tantannoodles have a great little plug-in for WordPress that allows you to store and retrieve images off site on your Flickr account.  Presto!  We’re back in the image producing business.  Impressed?  I was.  If you are still as fuzzy as I was when it was explained to me let me give you an example:

This is a nine foot long custom Codfish we designed and created for the new Main Street location of Nantucket Looms.  If you’re on island drop by and see it in the window – provided it hasn’t found a new home by now.

Still not convinced?  O.K. we’ll try another one, but this is the last one:

This is the window display piece we did for our June gallery show at City Folk Gallery in Lancaster, PA.  It is a solid tabletop swan with a crooked neck position and ‘flying’ wings.

A few months back I would’ve hesitated to post these images on our website because of the server limitations.  So they would’ve been filed, only to come out when a client asked to see other fish or other swans we’ve done in preparation for ordering a custom piece.  But now I can throw caution to the wind and toss images around willy-nilly like Annie Liebowitz playing 52 pickup!

So as long as I have the time for updating this site (unless I can train someone in the studio here to do it!) we’ll be posting more images.

And I apologize for giving out boring details.  But you did get two posts in two days out of it didn’t you?

Jac

Well, after a not-so-brief outage we are back at the keyboard again.  I won’t bore any tireless readers out there with a detailed description of just what happened to the blog section of the site, but let’s just say the learning curve was steeper than I anticipated back when I announced that we’ve gotten the hang of the new blogging software. Thanks again to Jake of  KREKURA webdesign for all his help.  There is literally no way we could have pulled the blog section back up without his help. While we may have been dark we certainly weren’t idle.  In the two intervening months we exhibited at two shows: one at City Folk Gallery and a benefit show for Small Friends on Nantucket, on Nantucket Island.  The Nantucket show is part of the reason for the blog outage, as we were out of the studio for two weeks around the show weekend (I know, two weeks on Nantucket in July, isn’t life great?) and consequently out of the studio.  Time was short, and this blog section was expendable. If you want to see images from the Nantucket show click here : So, after we returned to the studio in late July we went immediately into panic mode – mainly due to the backlog of Gallery orders that came in late this year as a result of the current *ahem* economic uncertainty.  Most of our seasonal customers ordered later than usual, and that put us under more pressure.  The blog sat and waited again.  Now we are facing quite a few commissions from customers and the website can’t wait any longer.  In order to provide the level of design service our clients expect we need to update their project pages here.

If you have a custom order with us and your page isn’t updated (or even up yet!) have no fear.  It may be that we are just slow, but it could also mean that we are waiting for some additional information from you.  So check your email, voice-mail and snail-mail to see if we’ve contacted you asking for measurements, pictures or something less mundane.

Enough housekeeping.  I’m not good at it and don’t like doing it.  So let’s move on, shall we, to something I think that you’ll like better – pictures!

These are brand new images of some new work and some old work.  We’ve set up a photo area here in our showroom and are working on getting the bugs out of the setup.  So you, lucky reader, get to see them before we add them to the webpages they belong to.  Over time we will gradually be replacing the old images, often shot with a digital camera at a show or right before the work went into a carton for shipping, with new and more detailed images.

In the ‘old’ days of the web we shot images for our own records, never worrying about the backgrounds or color clarity, as simple records in case we needed to reproduce a piece.  The amount of new pieces we do in a month made getting professional pictures of everything completely unfeasible.  The images we took, coupled with our paper templates, worked great as a record in house.  Not so great for web publishing.  Especially now, with digital camera advances and storage as cheap as it is.  So look for a gradual improvement in the quality and quantity of the pictures.

That’s enough for now.  We’ll be sending out another newsletter in the next week or so.  Thanks for visiting!

Jac