It may seem that we totally went away for a couple of months.  Off to some warm tropical isle perhaps.  But no, we were always right here, in (currently) snowy SE Va.

I was tempted to title this post ‘A funny thing happened on the way to blog’ mainly because it was funny in an ‘oh crap, what’s going on’ way.  I’ve mentioned before that we are adapting to the new website (almost a year old now!) and one of those adaptations is having two different areas to keep an eye on.   In the old days of the 90’s we had a host for the site and used Frontpage (go ahead, snicker if you want) for updates and maintenance.  It’s essentially the same now, with Wordpress taking the Frontpage role – sorry Mr. Gates, but using the same host.  Well Jake at www.krekura.com did a great job setting up the site for us, but for some reason our site decided to save a complete version of itself every 12 hours or so.  The end result was that late last year we were up to almost 40 gigs of storage on a shared server and climbing.  Our hosting company was none too pleased.  After many hours on the phone with vague, disinterested IT guys we finally landed one who opened up the ‘guts’ on their server and discovered the over zealous code.  It was changed, and the superfluous backups were deleted.  And there was much rejoicing in a shared server somewhere in Massachusetts or Kentucky or wherever.

Now, the reason I’m going into this is because we were extremely tentative in putting up new info on the server, since we couldn’t figure out what was going on.  We even did a work around with Flickr that works really well, and we will utilize that in a way you’ll see soon.

So, we had a couple of months of new images and new items that have now migrated from our studio desktops to the server in Kentucky or Kashmir or Kalinda or  wherever.  Instead of doing a single page for the new items we’ve turned it into an Easter egg hunt by hiding them in plain sight in their respective categories.  And you may also notice that we found a neat little trick that allows up to pick the thumbnail image that will be displayed in the various ways on the site.  So no more fish midsections or odd choices making you wonder exactly what the larger image is supposed to be.

That’s it for now.  No pictures on the update as they are all (mostly) in bed in the categories where they belong.  Plus I’m tired of editing.  Check back soon for some pics of SNOW!  (like 75% of the country hasn’t seen that already this winter!)

Jac

Well, shucks.  This was supposed to be my Halloween update but for some reason *cough*toomanyshows*cough* I didn’t get to it by my self proscribed deadline.  So here it is now.

Thanks to a heads up from Carl and Suzanne I learned that one of our crows (the Slat Tailed Crow to be precise) was in an exhibit at the Ward Museum in Salisbury, MD called Clever Corvids. They were also kind enough to forward some excellent pictures, which I added to our online photo album and are now posting them here for your enjoyment.

The show runs through the 29th of November, so stop by if you are in the neighborhood.  And visit our Flickr photo stream for more pictures from the show.

I’ll be back with many more posts in the next day or so – including news about our Holiday Open House Thanksgiving weekend!

Lots and lots of of shavings!

I know it doesn’t look like much in the thumbnail picture, but the pile of shavings that came out of our most recent swan carving was almost three feet high and four feet square!  It never ceases to amaze me how this huge volume of wood shavings can be produced from a swan that only measures 32″ long.  And only about half of that distance is hollowed, since we don’t cut into the tail section, and the wings on this particular swan don’t get hollowed out at all.

In the ‘old’ days we did this work with a hand drill and an adze, but now we clamp the ‘body’ of the swan to be hollowed into a cradle and then use our large drill press – with an equally large forstner bit.  The drill press takes all of the elbow grease out of the initial work, but we still need to go in with hand tools and clean the area out smooth.  The tricky part is not getting too deep in any one area and creating an issue with any of the detail carving still to be done.

So, after the hollowing, and the carving, and the sanding, and the painting we get this:

That’s it for now.  I’ll be back later with a show update and an possible newsletter sighting!

Jac

Wow.  Feels like just yesterday we were having drinks poolside in Nantucket and now it’s October.  The calendar pages really do flip faster as you get older.

And speaking of older – (nice transition huh!)  here is an older work that we were recently asked to do again:

This is part of our ongoing effort to replace older, not-so-good photos with newer, better pictures.  We’ll have some more soon, as we get ready for the next marathon of shows.

Speaking on which – our next show will be in Boston on Halloween weekend, followed the very next weekend in Greensboro NC for the Saltbox’s 35 year celebration show (graphics here soon – as soon as I can .jpg some .pdf files) then followed the next weekend with the Wilton Historical Society Show.  That’s right – three shows in three weeks.  A first for us.

After that we take a break until Thanksgiving, when we’ll have a Christmas Open house here in the showroom on the farm.  Joining us will be Debbie and Donnie Rogers and possibly a few others – we’re still finalizing some details.  Then we’re all clear until the first weekend in Dec. for the Merion Cricket Club show.  That one is a benefit show with proceeds going to charity.

I’ll have all the dates and graphics put up on our News Blog page soon.  I really should add a Show Schedule page but we’ve already got enough going on with the site, I really don’t want to add any more.  If I keep going I’ll need to issue the visiting ISP’s balls of twine so they can find their way back out.

More later, got to go carve a couple of swans.

Jac

After an exhausting round-trip to Ohio this past weekend we are back and back to work.

The show was huge fun, with lots and lots of people (many of who were decked out in support of Ohio State – Columbus being a college town after all) taking in the sights and sounds, and even smells – of the fair.  Speaking of smells, our booth was located almost equidistant from the Bar-b-Que concession and the kettle corn seller.  The weekend was like getting caught in an olfactory tug of war. One nostril pulled for the strong, smoky BBQ, the other for the warm melodious scent of the popcorn.   I didn’t get a chance to try the ‘Que, but the kettle corn – being easier to eat surreptitiously in the booth- was a hit with Tricia and I.

Before I get to the pictures from the show I want to take a second to let you know about an event going on right now over at Traditional Folk Art.com.  We artists are having a sale to benefit the American Cancer Society, and I want to make sure my readers (all two of you) are aware.  Here is the relevant graphic:

Click Here: if you want to see the work on sale.

Make sure you head over there and take and look.  And if one of the original pieces for sale strikes your fancy – so much the better.

Now, back to the topic at hand – the Country Living Fair.  It was great fun, and one of the best run shows (thanks Stella Shows!) that we’ve ever done.  Not only was it easy to set up and tear down, but having it in Ohio Village, coupled with the decorating talents of Country Living Magazine made it a visual treat.  So not only were we tempted by the delicious smells floating around the village, but the displays and booths were equally appealing to the eyes.

The only drawback, for us anyway, is that with a large crowd you don’t get the opportunity to interact with customers the way a small, intimate show will allow you.  So there were probably dozens of customers who had questions or comments but were unable to communicate them due to the crush of buyers looking over our booth.  But never fear – the WEB is here!  If you missed the chance this past weekend you can make up for it now by looking over the show pictures and emailing us with any questions you might have.  Plus, there is a lot more to see on the web than there was in person at the show.

So without any additional prattling on by me, here are the pics!

The other unusual thing about the show was the number of visitors to our booth who asked to have their picture taken with our Headless Horseman.  The first few were a novelty.  The next batch was a bit unusual.  The remaining people posing just stumped us; until a nice lady asked to shoot an image of it, then explained that on Halloween the Ohio Village has a program about the Headless Horseman, based on Washington Irving’s classic story.  So unwittingly we had displayed a piece that fit into the local narrative – completely unconsciously.  But what was so special about the explanation was that the kind woman explaining was the actual  ‘headless’ rider in the pageant!  If memory serves I think she was eating kettle corn when she told us.  At least my nose thinks so.

Jac

Howdy from Cloumbus Ohio!  We’re here exhibiting at the 2009 Country Living show at the beautiful Ohio village.

Before we got here we stopped in at Around the Bend Willow furniture for a brief respite before the craziness of set-up and show started.  While there I saw this:

This may look like a crow silouhetted against the early morning sky – and it is.  It’s just nt a real crow.   This is a special flying crow we had the last time we visited Ohio for a show.  Rounabouts 2004 or so.  The reason this is so remarkable is that I had completely forgotten about it!  It was ’sold’ to our friends and put up on their potting shed and put out of our minds.  I didn’t even get an image of it before it was sold.  It was a real surprise to see it sitting calmly up there, waiting for me to finally make up for lost time and shoot a pic of it!

Here’s another pic, this one a quick cell-phone job from setup day at the show.

Once I get back to the studio I’ll upload more images from the show.  Time is short here in Columbus and bandwidth is slim, and I want to save what little is left to update some client’s commission pages.  So enjoy the two pics and sit calmly and wait for the rest.  It won’t be long.  I promise!

Jac

What a washout!  Labor day and today were just chock full of liquid sunshine.  Today didn’t bother me too much since it was a normal workday here in the studio, but yesterday was a bummer.  It was our last day in Nags Head, NC (that’s the Outer Banks of NC for those of you unfamiliar with the town’s location or moniker) and being our last day it would’ve been nice to get to the beach one last time before summer retreats behind the steady advance of crisp frost and colorful leaves.  Hopefully there will still be a few beach days this fall, but with our show schedule this fall spare time here on the farm is few and far away.  But we can hope.

Speaking of schedules: I’ve started to add our fall schedule to the News Blog page of the site.  Visit there for all the current info about dates, times and maybe even some promotions.  Since we added the schedule we moved the last show’s images away, but I’m posting them here for continuities sake.

These are the images from the Small Friends Show on Nantucket this past July.  I’ll be adding individual images into their respective categories as time permits.

So what did we do on a rainy back-to-school-back-to-work Tuesday?  We created stuff!  Specifically we finished up this custom commissioned 40″ Codfish (say that three times fast!)

And we assembled and shipped this piece for a client in Canada:

It is a wall mounted piece of driftwood with shorebirds perched on it – obviously.  But this one was special due to the absolutely perfect way the driftwood lined up on the wall.  It made it easy to orient and attach the birds, and is balanced so well it hangs with a single corrugated picture hanger.  This is a special work, since I doubt we will be able to find driftwood exactly like it again.  But finding new and unique bases for this type of piece is what keeps out work interesting, and hopefully keeps you, faithful reader and customer, coming back.

I’ll do some more updates later, but the rain has slacked off a bit, and it’s time to go and check the rain gauge to see if it’s hit ‘biblical’ yet.

Thanks for reading.

Jac

…to point out that it technically wasn’t two posts in a row to end out the month of August.

Seems that I started a post, realized that the new Flickr plugin wasn’t working properly and bailed out on it, but only after having published it to see if it was in fact working correctly.  Once the plugin was working I went back to it.  Then  I just edited the previous post, which was earlier in time.  So from my point of view I did two new posts in as many days, but the website didn’t show that.

Oh well.  All that really matters is that everything still works, and we’re starting to seriously plow through the image archives and start uploading and adding images en mass to this section (the blog) and in turn add individual images to their respective categories in the main section of the website.

Here are the most recent uploads to our Flickr page, soon to be divided and conquered to their proper individual pages – enjoy

The next thing to look out for will be a new newsletter, as well as a show schedule page.

Due to the downright weird year we’ve been having (weird in the sense that there’s a large recession bearing down on all of us!) we scheduled more shows this fall than normal.  Unfortunate for us, but good for you, the public.  Since we did this foolhardy thing we plan to make the most of it and try and see as many customers and clients as possible between now and Christmas.  So keep an eye out for the schedule, and don’t be surprised if we show up at an event near you!

Jac

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