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.

To say that 2009 was the biggest pain in the a** would simply be the grossest of understatements possible. Yes, there was turmoil, there was stress, there was… the CPSIA. And yet, despite our near suicidal state, we have emerged from ought ought nine with our heads held high, ready to get back in the game and whoop the crap out of the one zero.

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 a nice little surprise in November as we were asked to submit a photo for Portland Monthly magazine’s December issue. The photo was going to be used to help publicize Crafty Wonderland’s December holiday show, which we were so happy to be a part of. We thought, “Wow, that’s awesome that they want to include us in a set of photos for the show”, so we eagerly packaged up a set of pics and sent them over for selection.

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.