Photo Roundup from the first week of April

All these pictures were taken on my iphone and processed with instagram. You can follow me if you want too! My user name is redherringjeff.
We're really into "back to basics" toys around these parts. This wooden train set is AWESOME! There are tons of parts (and available expansions) so it is able to be put together in several different layouts. Plus, the pieces are easy enough to put together that even Olive can do it.
Abby's tiny hands peeling the backer paper off of foam star stickers. It's amazing how much time this activity takes her, and fascinating to see how she arranges her stickers on the paper. Often it's in rows, but just as often they are all over the place.
Abby's clothes hanging cheerfully on the clothes line. I just love that little splash of color in the yard.
Several months ago, Abby and I went to story time at the library. We heard some camping stories and did a craft. Abby's campfire is pretty awesome, I think.
Abby and Olive in their new Easter Dresses.

Until next time, take care and be good.
Your friend,
Jeffrey

Daily Life, 100 Themes: 8 Innocence

Amy is usually the one who gives the girls a bath. Sometimes I read, sometimes I catch up on facebook, and sometimes I'm down in the basement lining up my work schedule for the night. One thing that I can pretty much count on though, is Olive running to see me as soon as she gets out of the tub, with her towel hanging by it's hood on her head...butt naked. Those little visits, and the joy on her face always crack me up, ha-ha-ha!

As usual, the rest of the Daily Life illustrations have been archived on the Red Herring Illustration facebook page. Thanks for stopping in! Until next time, take care and be good!
Your friend,
Jeffrey

Photo Roundup from the last weeks of March

All these pictures were taken on my iphone and processed with instagram. You can follow me if you want too! My user name is redherringjeff

We were borrowing Amy's parents car while they were in Hawaii, so the girls and I were able to make it out to the park more often. I miss having two cars...
Mrs Handmade, all set up for our first show of the year.
We met my friend Leighton Conner of Hex games and his family at Laumier Sculpture park this weekend. Here's our two abbys sitting on what we think must be a giant robot that was buried and is waiting to awaken and save Saint Louis.
Olive looking at notebooks while we wait for Nana and Daddy Jim to finish shopping for a picnic.
I finished four new Ghostbusters marker sketches.
And finally, a photo/ideaogram that my friend Holly made for me on facebook. We all had a good laugh over it!

Until next time then, take care and be good!
Your friend,
Jeffrey

What I Think About In The Yard

Hi all! Mr Handmade here. Today I was working in the garden, it's past time to start my planting, and I'm still scrambling to get it in a position to grow anything! My yard is on a pretty big slope, so this year I decided to rethink my garden set up and begin terracing it. It's a combination garden and landscape project, really...

The first terrace will have 1 garden bed, and the picnic table that I got for Christmas in it. Basically, this will be our base of operations, and will offer somewhere to sit and rest, or play, or draw during outside time. The second and third terraces will each have two beds in them, and the fourth will be a patio area just below the fire pit. This is my plan, and now that the framing on the bottom terrace is done, all I have to do is move the rest of this bit of yard. Yay!
So here it is from above as of about a month ago. I had the front edge delineated, but most of the rest was looking kind of bleak. It's amazing how much the green changes how it all looks now.

When I'm working by myself, I have a sort of long-running, inner dialogue. My daily life is an ongoing story in my head, that involves me, hobbits, like the illustration at the top of this post by Alan Lee, for the Lord of the Rings...The Millenium Falcon, super soldiers, spies, farming, my daughters as adults...It sounds like an odd mix, but the story evolves as time goes by. Ha-ha-ha!

The reason I bring this up, apart from wanting to talk about digging up my yard, is that I wonder if this is a pretty common thing among bloggers. That constant thought in narrative form sort of lends itself to blogging. I mean, we talk to ourselves anyway, so we may as well let other people have a peek behind the curtains too, right? The funny thing is that I had no sooner begun to think about this than I stumbled upon some examples in blogs that I follow.

First on Fat Mum Slim she talked meeting bloggers in person. She talked about how bloggers like to share, and how they get it. "It" being that spark that happens between like minded people. She also talked about something that I worry about a lot, but in such a positive way. She mentioned that when you meet fellow bloggers all the groundwork has been done. I always feel like it would be odd meeting someone for the first time, and already knowing them like they were an old friend.

The other was on Connie to the Wonnie where she made a great little cartoon illustrating this thought. You should go check it out. :)
And finally I'm leaving you with this picture of young Wyatt showing what Uncle Jeffrey hath wrought. Ha-ha-ha! Until next time, take care and be good!
Your friend,
Jeffrey

Daily Life, 100 Themes: 7 Bliss

I don't want you to get the wrong idea. I love my girls dearly, but it's very difficult to set up the perfect train set up with two little girls moving things while you're trying to think. For awhile, this train set was all I could think about, and I was a little surprised at how much fun it was!

I'm transitioning some content from my other blog, you can find the first 6 of the 100 themes here.

Until next time, take care and be good.
Your friend,
Jeffrey

Handmade Family: Past, Present and Future. Part 3.

Hi all! Mr Handmade here with Part 3 of Handmade Family's Past, Present and Future. Amy and I have been talking lately about our goals for the coming year. It's important to pay attention to what we're doing now of course, but having something to look forward to and something to work towards is how we will grow. Both as partners and as a business and family.
One of the big goals is to get our website, www.handmadefamily.com in working order. Late last year, we started making headway on this front. Deciding what kind of content we were after, and what features we would like to include. The things that ended up being most important were to have an integrated blog, an online storefront, and galleries to show our work. It still needs a lot of work. Mainly, I need to take a ton of pictures and get the galleries set up...speaking of pictures, that leads me to my second goal. Keeping this blog updated with content regularly.

I think I promise myself this every year, but this year I swear it's going to stick! My plan is about trying to keep it simpler and to commit to certain concepts. The first thing is that I am officially letting go of my other blogs, "Penny Candy and Shady Characters", and "Take Care and Be Good". I'm consolidating them into this one so that I won't fall back into the "I feel bad about not updating there, so I won't update here either" trap. Second, on Mondays I will update with a weekly photo roundup of 5 photos from the previous week. I am committing to this, but not to writing anything about the photos. :) On Fridays I will post artwork, either something that I drew during the week or something the kids did. I also plan on reviving the Daily Life Comic Diary. I miss doing it, so will add it to the Friday posts as I can. These two posts will be constant, and both Amy and I will post real articles about projects, events, the community and the handmade lifestyle as we can...hopefully pretty regularly :)

Amy's major goals are to get our inventory tracking under control and to organize what items we have where. Selling in three shops, plus our website, etsy and shows has made keeping track of inventory kind of tricky, but she's been logging everything and it has already become soooo much easier to find where things are, and to know what needs to be made. It's also really helping us to see what our big sellers are. That'll really help us to get ahead of things for the holidays this year.
Finally, we are doing more shows this year. I'm already getting an ear full about the number of shows I have us booked for. We're going to be busy! Related to this is my goal of having new products to offer at shows every quarter. This is probably the most unrealistic of them, because of juggling freelance work and family, not to mention working the shop and shows. We have several ideas for things I'd like to make, and put more inspiration on my pinterest board every day, so we'll see how it goes.

It doesn't look like a whole lot as I look up and scroll through this post, but I have a feeling that I've committed my self to a lot of changes and a lot of work. You know what though? I'm looking forward to it, and that's one of the greatest things about being in this business. I know it's the end of March, but we'd still love to hear some of your goals for the upcoming year! Let us know in the comments, and as always thanks for stopping by!

Until next time, take care and be good.
Your friend,
Jeffrey

Handmade Family Past, Present and Future Part II

2011, a year in review.
Hi all! Mr Handmade here, with part two of the Handmade Family past, present and future. I think by all accounts, 2011 was a very good year for us. We're both really excited about how far we've come, and all the super supportive people we've met, and are looking forward to what's next...but I'm getting ahead of myself.
Our year started off with the decision to combine our etsy shops, "Abigail Olivia" and "Red Herring Illustration" to start Handmade Family. Our work is not the same but the sensibilities behind it are so they go together just like we do. We felt that this would also give us each a push as individuals to apply to be a single vendor at Fusion together. This was a huge step for us, and we set about defining our handmade branding including a logo, banners, business cards, promo packet and Facebook page...and of course starting this blog. Finally, we invested some of our tax return dollars into fixtures that we felt matched our internal branding for our shop displays and some new tools. Investing in your future can be difficult, because there's no guaranteed return. It's scary, but I'm so glad we did it!

Building up inventory can be daunting, to say the least. Amy spent the next couple of months making new product as I worked on our web presence and some new illustrations. Part of being a part of a co-op is that artists are always joining or leaving to do something new. We love meeting all the new artists and being happy for our friends when they make the next step towards their dreams. Late in the spring, one of our new friends, Jessi, left the shop to start her own store, I Am What I Am On Main Street. It's super cute, and in a great location in downtown Saint Charles by Picasso's coffee shop. Just as we were getting a comfortable amount of stock into Fusion, Jessi asked us to be a featured artist in her shop. What awesome exposure that would be, and it would be a great chance to work with one of our friends again! So it was set that we would be the featured artists for the month of August...and we were scrambling to get enough product to cover our stock at Fusion, our Etsy shop, and I Am What I Am. Whew! Amy did such an awesome job making sure there were plenty of capes and blankets and beanbags, and I managed to get 6 new watercolor paintings. At the end of the month, we'd gotten such a positive response from shoppers (and not bothered Jessi too much) that she asked us to stay on as consigners. YAY!

A lot happened in the fall. Ha-ha-ha! buoyed by our success in shops, we figured it was time to start doing shows...But where to start? Well, I've been going to Archon, a local Science Fiction and Gaming convention, for about 10 years and participated in the art show twice, so this year I got a table in Artists Alley and sold some drawings, postcards and commissioned sketches. It was a lot of fun, and always great talking to people. Meanwhile our friends Melissa and Andrea of Villa Design and Zenbot Baby, decided to kidnap Amy to participate in the Tower Groves Farmers Market. From there we went on to do Artropy, and a couple of vendor fairs at United Services, the preschool where Amy works. Shows are tiring, but so much fun and so worth doing, and I'm glad we made it through the first few in our first year, because now we can build on that experience.

I'd expected things to quiet down after Christmas for a little while (I think everybody did) but here we go, full tilt into the new year. Freelancing has kept me busy, so I haven't had much time to develop new products, but I have managed to squeak a couple of things in. Besides that, I've been writing weekly posts on the Fusion Blog, which is part of why I've been so inconsistent here lately (sorry about that, it's not that I haven't been thinking of you all). I've also been working on our new website, handmadefamily.com which has an integrated blog, shop and image galleries. We're really excited about it, and looking forward to it being actually finished!

I know I'm forgetting some things, but it has been a great and exciting first year! Thank you all for sharing it with us, and for supporting us! Next week I'll talk a little bit about our plans for the coming year in the final segment of Handmade Family Past, Present, and Future. Until then, take care and be good!
Your friend,
Jeffrey