Amy's blog

Sarah of Small Fox! Congratulations Sarah—a small herd of alpaca are headed your way. Your name was picked randomly from all the wonderful people who commented.

Thank you to everyone who visited—we really appreciate all your kind words, thoughts, and constructive feedback. We have a lot of exciting things planned for Crabtree Studio, so we hope you'll continue to visit.

Also, we've added lots of new items to the shop today—mostly bags, but a few plushies as well. Please check them out!

Welcome everyone! We have been working around the clock behind the scenes here for quite a while, and today is the big day. We're finished! Hooray! Please let me be your guide as I show you around our new digs.

First, you'll see the look of the site changed. The last site was graphically pretty (round corners, lots of graphics, etc.), but it was all hand-coded and difficult to manage. Plus we were hosting the site ourselves and, if the power went out here, everything went down. So we've switched to a hosting provider and are using Drupal as our blogging system. This has taken away some of the pretty bits (at least for now until we really understand Drupal and CSS), but has given us so many additional features that I'm happy with the trade off.

The blog has a great new editing tool that will hopefully help us post more often. There is a recent posts section on the left to help people navigate the latest posts. We also now have a true archive (again, over on the left), which will allow you to actually go back through all our posts. In the past, we had turn the posts off when we no longer wanted them to appear on the main page (the only page we had), so the old post would just disappear. That's not the case anymore! You will also be happy to see we have an RSS feed for those that prefer to be notified of new material. We also have comments—yay! Please tell us what you think of the new changes.

However, the biggest feature? WE HAVE A STORE AGAIN! Our last online store was also hand-coded and a beast to update. The new store is wonderful—there are categories and navigational features like handy little menus and breadcrumbs that help you find our items easier. For instance, the New Items category will let you easily see what's new to the store. We'll be adding new items regularly, so please check back! Another great feature of the new store is our shopping cart (Ubercart), which lets you purchase more then one item at a time. We've changed how shipping works too, to make it more affordable and to allow you to ship more then one item in one package. We still use PayPal to handle credit cards and other payment types; it's secure and simple to use.

Many other little things have changed in the background that you might not notice. Our Gallery (images of past creations) now takes you to our Flickr images; it's faster, and we found we were updating Flickr much more often then our own Gallery (again, because it was hand-coded). We still have Custom Order and About Us sections on the top right. And on the lower left there is a Check Us Out At section for a list of where you can check out our items in person; stores such as Crafty Planet, I Like You, and the gift shop in the Wausau Center for the Visual Arts (CVA). This section will also list craft shows and any other place where our work is represented.

So, if you are visiting for the first time, hello! But if you're a return visitor, please check out all the new changes. This is still quite a work in progress, so if anyone finds a broken link or something that doesn't work quite right, leave a note in the comments or email us. Thank you so much!

Here are some new alpaca, sheep, and rabbit photos.  Many of these will be available at Johnstock.

Crabtree Studio will be at Johnstock! this Sunday, May 18. Johnstock! is part of Art-a-Whirl weekend in Northeast Minneapolis. Lots of great local crafty vendors will be at Johnstock! Saturday and Sunday. Crabtree is participating Sunday only because of a conflict of schedules, but it should be lots of fun nonetheless. Northeast is such a wonderful area (and is Jessica's home turf), and we'll be right across the street from Crafty Planet, which will be having its official Grand Re-Opening this weekend. Come on out and see us!

Here are some new knitting bags that will be available. They have lots of pockets and built-in needle holders in the flap. Both are lined in awesome fabrics I got from Crafty Planet. Check them out:

We'll be showing off more new critters later this week, so stay tuned.

When Jessica and I were just getting started, we needed some really nice pictures of our animals. Unfortunately, it was winter, snow was on the ground, and it was so grey and icky outside. So, with the magic of Photoshop and some pretty pictures for backgrounds, we made much nicer pictures then we could have possibly taken:

These were a lot of fun, but looking back on them now, you can tell they were fake pictures (plus they took hours and hours to make). Nowadays, I like our own actual shots. As Jessica said earlier, they're difficult to take, and we look pretty silly running around state parks with elephants and across fields with sheep. The pictures turn out amazing in the end, however, so it's worth it. The alpaca picture down below in the Shepherd's Harvest post is one example. We'll be posting more examples soon!

(The pictures used as backgrounds can be found here, here, here, here, here, and here. All were used under a CC licence and credit was given. We did not sell or make any money on these images, just used them as a background for reference shots.)

This elephant is doing double duty for me. I wanted to make a new elephant for the Softies Central Awards in the elephant tribute category. I also wanted to make a really nice stuffed animal for a silent auction and fund-raising event at my son's school. So this elephant was created. I love him dearly and didn't want to give him up. I know I say that quite a bit, but it's true of all my creations that I invest lots of time and energy into!