Mark your calendars! February 25-March 20 at Together Gallery. A fabulous tale of folk, myth and tales of the sea to be viewed, loved and wanted all for your enjoyment! Join us for a salty good time, and leave with a little more hair on your chest-tattoos free of charge! Keep your eyes open for our four foot anchor, complete with a two headed serpent. Here is the official press release, with more information on Jolby’s website.

While we are optimistic about this year, we have come to the realization that the lovable, children friendly Dolls for Friends that we have worked so hard to create is more than likely coming to an end. The CPSIA is knocking at our doors and we have decided not to answer. We have spent the last few months pondering our future in the plush arena, and while we have made the decision to carry on where so many others have not, we are faced with the sad realization that we are being governmentally (we can still use made up words) forced to grow up.

With the start of 2010 we have officially moved into a new arena. We will be expanding our focus to work more on illustration and film projects, while at the same time, taking our plush goodness and enhancing those skills and marketing to grown up kids. We will elaborate a bit more on this in the coming weeks, but suffice it to say, we are evolving. We will remain the Dolls for Friends that we have come to know and love, but we’ve officially applied for the installation of chest hair. Here’s to a wonderful and exciting decade.

We had pretty much forgotten about the upcoming press when Colby (of Jolby fame) dropped us a line (and photo) showing us that we actually ended up being the ONLY photo used to publicize the show. “Man that is awesome…” quickly turned to “Holy Crap, that’s crazy!”

Thank you to Portland Monthly and for its support and for thinking we were worthy to represent the craft community here in PDX. Thank you to all the other fantastic artists in this crazy, awesome town as well. We happily live in your shadows.

It’s been just over a month and half since we decided to join the Twitter brigade and peep portions of our work and personal lives on the interbew. During that time we’ve seen the number of followers grow from just a few hardcore DFF lovers to a mob 160 strong. While we have a long way to go to catch up to some of rockstars tweeters, we have really enjoyed sharing little snippets of our lives with everyone.

Twitter has provided us a great opportunity to open up and share our ideas, thoughts and work. We have so many new things planned for the rest of the year and some great new giveaways that we are looking forward to sharing with all our friends. So, thanks to all our followers for taking an interest in us and the work we do. Without all of you we would just be a couple of weirdos sitting in a room making dolls for each other.

Erin just published some words on his site about the new business cards we produced for DFF. You can read the full post about the project on webclique.net.

Dear CN (the network formerly known as Cartoon Network),
I don’t even really know where to begin. To say that I’m more than a little upset after looking at the summer line up and the distinct lack of just about everything “cartoon” related would be an understatement.

I used to look at Cartoon Network as a beacon of hope amid a dank, depressing let down of what is currently passing for cable tv programming. I looked forward to each new season with great anticipation because of the creative genius that was being displayed time and again in purchasing ground breaking and entertaining animated shows. The network, in my opinion, was finally broadening the market and minds of a nation that has frankly lost its ability to laugh and enjoy life.

Shows like Foster’s Home for Imaginary Friends, Powerpuff Girls, Chowder, Flapjack, Ed Edd and Eddy, Dexter’s Laboratory, Samurai Jack and many others came to define a new era of great American animation. What happened?

This latest round of shows has gone completely against the grain of everything your network has stood for since its inception. Gone are the ballsy choices, the defining new shows, the groundbreaking animation.

The sad fact is that this nation has more than its fair share of luke warm, watered down reality television. It doesn’t need another one contributing to the thousands of hours of worthless, meaningless triviality that are already spewed forth each “season”. Honestly, reality television leaves about as much impact on television history as a wet noodle thrown against a wall-when its done it just rolls down onto the floor. Is that what you want to really be remembered for?

What is almost worse to me in this whole situation is that the network is now heading to the beginning of the line-impressing and molding young minds to believe that reality shows are what they should EXPECT and CRAVE from cable programming. Are you prepared to be a part of that?

Please don’t become another MTV. Do you remember when it was called Music Television, before they became a wasteland of reality shows force feeding a nation of young listeners into the mold of what the corporate douche bags claimed was “good listening and viewing”?

Your network has established itself as a leader of quality, groundbreaking animation. You’re not cattle. You don’t have to follow the herd.

Sincerely, A concerned fan

Not to use too many (or two many) quotes, but… “I love it when a plan comes together!”

This being our first ever Dolls for Friends giveaway (and something that we have wanted to do for quite awhile), we were not quite sure how to proceed, what piece to make and how best to reach our peeps with this special little giftie. But, about 3o seconds after signing up for Twitter, I think we knew the vehicle. Twitter is an amazing tool (as I’ve shouted from my soapbox in other posts), and we are so happy to do a giveaway for the people who find us important enough to include in their daily lives. So without further adieu, here is our new (or perhaps your new) friend, Lucias.

Lucias is our newest friend, and let’s just say he has a way of “seeing” past the issues and into the heart of a matter. This “eye”deal quality has made him a valuable assett to dozens of fortune 500 companies over the past two decades. He is a whiz of wall street and has been called by Young Entrepreneur magazine, “…a cash machine”. Although, never confirmed, it has been said that Lucias is so good at his job that he is number two on Alan Greenspan’s speed dial (again, this has never been confirmed). What we do know about our new friend Lucias is that he is a wealth of information and is quite a bit of fun to play Monopoly with (because money is at the center of the game, I imagine). There really is nothing bad to report on little Lucias, with the exception that he goes through quite a bit of disposable contact lenses, which he kind of leaves all over the place. At any rate, he is sure to be the “apple of your eye.”

Now, here is a quick rundown on how to get your hands on this little loverly:

1. Be an existing follower, or follow us on Twitter by Friday (@dollsforfriends)
2. Tweet about the doll or express your interest in participating this coming friday (June 19).
3. Make sure your tweet uses the special hash mark (#dffgive1). This will let us know that you are participating.

On Friday at 3 p.m. (PST), we will randomly draw one winner from the list and announce and DM the winner to get addy information for shipping the piece out. This will become a regular event for us, so if you don’t win, don’t worry, there will be plenty more chances to get in on this sweet, sweet candy (thank you Mr. Zap Brannigan). Thank you again for letting our weird little lives entertain you.

We love the opportunities that Twitter provides as an outlet for feeding the need for immediacy, harmless voyerism (who’s working on what project and what’s going on in their lives at the moment), and the general thirst for information overload.

We are still nailing down the details, but our current plan is to post next week with final details on how to participate and photos of the piece we’ll be shipping out.

In the meantime, you can follow us on Twitter by looking up our username (dollsforfriends) and you can track comments and updates on the giveaway by searching on the phrase #dffgive1.

We’ve been looking forward to doing a giveaway for a longtime and are excited about finally getting around to it.

If you would like to follow us on Twitter, we would love that so. Our shiny, new url is located at: http://twitter.com/dollsforfriends.

Three new friends: Opal, Gladys and Elliott. You can see the photos and read their stories on our Flickr page, and you can check them out on our Etsy shop.