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.

We were fortunate enough to be the first artists to be featured in a new series of interviews over at the wonderful Portland Craft Mafia website. We joined the PDX mafia a few months ago and have really enjoyed being members of our new craft family. The interview features some of our insights on the industry, the inside scoop on how we work and some of our likes/dislikes in the areas of food, music and magazines.

It arrived today. Wrapped in plastic. The one, the only Computer Arts Projects-all the way from jolly old England. Not just any issue, but THE Character and Toy Design Issue. The issue that features none other than….DOLLS FOR FRIENDS!!!

I am telling the truth, by the way. Some of our little guys were featured in the November issue of CAP! And it’s such a pretty magazine too. Glossy pages, fancy colors, and really cool artists-people much cooler than us! We are truly honored and blown away to have been a part of this awesome publication. It’s funny because we really stress if our sales are down, second guess our work, and are always critical of everything we make. Not that this changes anything, but it’s really nice to think that somebody likes us!

We truly love what we’re doing, you never know how things are going to turn out, and we have plenty of plush orphans lying around to prove it! But in the end if you get to make something that makes you happy, and makes someone else happy too-it doesn’t get any better.

A huge thank you to everyone that continues to support and befriend us! Especially Kate Evans at CAP for including us in such an awesome publication!

Cheers!

Erin’s take on the CAP interview can be seen on his website, webclique.net.

The catalyst driving the change is that we are being featured in the upcoming October issue of Computer Arts Projects magazine.  Being featured in CAP is something that we have wanted for a long time, so we thought we’d pull out the stops and do some remodeling. Turned out kinda nice, huh?

We were contacted the other day by the auspicious Love and a Sandwich letting us know that an article had been written on the Crammed Organisms event for Fiber Arts‘ Sept/Oct issue.  She said that some scans of the article had been posted on Flickr by another plush phenom, Moogan Creations, and that the pieces we had done for the show had been included.

We practically burned up the interbew making our way over to see the new scans, and were so not disappointed by what we saw. There on the first page were three of the five pieces we had done for the show featured ABOVE the title of the article. Our jaws literally fell off our faces and onto the floor. Getting press is always a wonderful experience, but we’ve never been placed above the title of anything before. It was a warm, fuzzy moment for sure.

So, we did what every self-respecting plush designers would do when they get some good press. We hopped on the Fiber Arts site and purchased about a million copies of their magazine. Oh yeah, it will probably be their highest selling issue ever. I just hope we have the storage room for the 58,543 boxes that are being shipped to our studios.

Craft Flickr Pool Weekly Roundup (June 14, 2008)

National Hot Fudge Sundae Day (via nowpublic.com) – We were asked to contribute a photo of a recent trade (between us and the fab Love and a Sandwich) to a story on National Hot Fudge Sundae Day.

Meet Sam and Pete (We made their “Plush Goodness” section)

Tinymeat (Friends are good to have)

Pop’s Book Shop

Thanks again to everyone for your support.

After spending some time talking it over, Jill and I decided that we would like to work with them on the piece. Our reasons were simple; beyond the obvious press benefits we would receive by being featured in this wonderful publication (we did some research on them before committing, and visually, they rawk!), we want to support and contribute to the amazing arts dialogue that takes places every year through the myriad of electronic and printed media around the world.

Overall the piece was wonderfully easy to put together in terms of answering the questions from the interviewer. What proved to be a tad more difficult was the collection of pictures they were looking for to accompany the piece. We had to assemble nearly a dozen high resolution photos of our studio space, the work and ourselves. Some of the photos we had, while others we had to setup and shoot on the fly. We were in a mad rush because we only had a total of three days to put the entire piece together in order to hit the editorial deadline. Yet, somehow we managed to coalesce our work schedules to get everything done in time.

We are not sure when the issue is supposed to come out, but we have been promised that a copy will be sent to us from our new friends at City Pictorial. So, now we wait with baited breath for the arrival of the publication and hope that our answers translated well into a language that is fundamentally more complex, intricate and beautiful than our own. Sadly, though, we might never know unless we can find someone to help us with the translation. Hmmm. Any takers?

So, When I came across this post in Spanish on Forest Eyes I was stoked. To see someone sending us a little love in another language was quite wonderful and unexpected. Thank you Forest Eyes for the kind words, and thank you for adding in the translation so we knew what was being said. We were featured on Taggy in Japan a couple weeks ago, which is awesome because we are total anime and manga freaks, but it was in Japanese, so we could not understand anything that was being said. Hopefully they liked us because we get our plush feelings hurt easily. Hee hee.