Our News for 2012?

Well, actually it should be for late 2011, but we did get the legal niceties settled until almost the end of the year, and we were so busy dealing with the fall-out from the ‘news’ that I held it until 2012. If you happen to subscribe to Pendleton Home catalog or have been by Pednleton Woolen Mills you might already know that our owls were featured in all four of their fall/winter issues last year.

Those are ours, and the catalog they were featured in was Pendleton Home Catalog. So thanks to Pendleton we spent the period from August 2011 to, well, now, making owls. And more owls.

And our Owls aren’t just popular with Pendleton’s clients. The new items we designed for Lancaster Market are out now, and guess what? More Owls!

We worked hard to make sure our owl designs are different from our hand-crafted owls. If you look close, you’ll see that our hand-carved owls have hand-blown crystal eyes, and are much larger than our mass produced, cast owls. Our hand-crafted owls also come in many different paint patterns based on the different species of Owls. We’ve always branded our hand carved pieces, but now we add a special logo sticker to the backs of every piece just to make sure there’s no confusion about where an item of ours originated.

We’ve got a few other Owl related news as well. The images below are of our newest Owl creations- Flying Owls. These are based on a famous Native American pictograph/petroglyph inscribed on a rock in Colorado.

These were fun to make. They have hand-carved faces; carved deep for more personality, with the aforementioned crystal eyes and wings hand cut from tin salvaged from an old barn here on the farm. The two pictured are a Snowy Owl and a Barn Owl, but they could (and probably will) be painted in every species imaginable.

Since I’m on a roll with the web stuff today I’ve also updated our 2012 show schedule here. Keep an eye on it as we may add or drop some fall shows depending what our loyal customers order from Pendleton’s 2012 Home Catalog, which will feature some exclusive items we’ve designed just for them. Check in periodically for details.

Our News for 2011?

We’re designing for Lancaster Market!

If you’ve ever seen one of these:

Church Card Holder

…or bought one (Thank you if you did!) then it might surprise you to know that we designed it.  It and hundreds of other items over the last ten years.

Some of you may know we’ve been licensing some of our ideas going all the way back to 2000 or so.  We never really hid that information, but neither did we advertise it.  Our adventure in licensing started back in the late ’90′s.  We were exhibiting at a trade show in Philadelphia in ’98 or ’99 and Tricia and I counted about eight or ten booths that carried direct copies (or items derivative of ideas) we had originated.  Needless to say it was a bit frustrating and discouraging.  After checking with our attorneys we discovered that pursuing legal action against the myriad businesses that were using our ‘property’ illegally was just not economically feasible.  So when we were approached to design for a company here in Southside Virginia we jumped at the chance.   We figured that if so many companies were copying us then we must be doing something right.  We created quite a few popular items in those ten years, along with some that didn’t quite find the market that we hoped for.  But all in all those nine years or so gave us a valuable education in what worked and what didn’t.  From those years of design  experience we were able to tailor our handcrafted work to be less like the work being imported from overseas, which lead directly to the ‘Commissioned’ segment of our business.

We met Lancaster Market at a similar trade show about ten years later and found that we had similar tastes and goals.  Starting early in 2010 we started designing the first of the items featured, the ‘Night Owls’.  Incidentally I’m fairly confident that they garnered that name from my habit of emailing and updating our website after midnight – although they deny that Other creations flowed naturally from the collaboration, including the Christmas Caribou and some fun ‘Jac’ -o-lanterns.  There are more coming, but I’ll let Lancaster Market spring the surprises.

Over the last ten years we have worked hard to keep our handcrafted work separate from our design work.  We may sell some our design items but we will always let you know, clearly and obviously.  The items we design for mass production are items we couldn’t make here in our studio efficiently or economically enough to compete with off-shore labor, but don’t want to leave on the drawing board.

Make sure you check out their website and let us know what you think.

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What is one of the most frequently asked questions at shows?

When we exhibit at a juried show we are limited by our booth space at to how much inventory we can bring and comfortably display.  So about 5 years ago or so we started bringing a laptop and monitor to show a visual slide show of all the different items that we’ve done.  It worked amazingly well.  But, one of the most frequently asked questions at these shows was ‘Are all these pictures on your website?’  The answer was always ‘No’.  There simply wasn’t enough space on the servers to host them all.  But, times change, and data storage has gotten cheaper.  So we have started to put up our legendary slide show on the internet.

Just click the icon above to get started.  But be warned, there are 150+ images in this album, which are our most popular items.  There are at least this many more – mainly one-of-a-kind commissions and gallery and show pictures that we especially liked.  Those will go up later this week, when I have time to finish re-sizing and watermarking them.  So check back in for another installment soon.

Enjoy!