Wait List/ Pre-Order, Etc..

Holy cow, this wait list is proving to be a force to be reckoned with!

At this point, if your name was posted on the wait list blog, you should have gotten an email from me regarding the wait list and/or pre-ordering. Or both. If you are on the blog list and didn't get an email, please let me know! It has been so long that emails are bouncing back, have changed, I can't find some folks, etc. I pruned the list of everyone I've contacted so far (I think, lol).

I've been at the computer for 3 hours this morning, so I need to take a break and get some knitting done. I'll be back for a second round of wait list stuff this afternoon.

Thanks for everyone's continued patience!

Customs!

With all this talk of Classic Crankys and houses and Kindergarten where are all the May customs? Well, I have to admit that in all the excitement of the beginning of the month I have fallen pretty hopelessly behind. But with the customs I have finished, it kind of seems like a jungle around here!

Mr. Hippo:



Mr. Lion:



I've never done a lion before so I was a little nervous, as I always am while working out something new, but I really love how it came out. I think the colors are perfect for this little Panthera leo.

These will ship tomorrow and I'm hoping to start invoicing for the first batch of Classic Crankys and open the next 100 or so on the wait list for pre-orders either tomorrow or Thursday. I am supposed to touch base with my "Peru guy" Thursday, so I hope to know more about turnaround time then.

Tomorrow will be another busy one. I'm hoping to meet a local customer and her wee beastie for a little photo shoot with the Peruvian Crankys sometime in the morning depending on weather and the mood of my little Crankymodel. I have to clean the house, which has fallen into some serious disarray, so that my land lord can come in and photograph it to put on the market to rent. I need to get a sitter for Henry on Saturday after his soccer game so that we can start going through the boxes and boxes and boxes in the basement Clean Sweep style. I need to wrap up the first wave of wait list orders, get invoices out and get them ready to ship. I have to get the bum done on Skye's Princess Monster Skirty at LEAST. I have to do a repair on the knees of another pair of well loved Crankys and get them back in the mail.

Whew!

The Big Week!!!!

Holy cow, but last week was a big one!

I have been hemming and hawing about whether blogging about it would be a big jinx (we're big on jinxes around here) and have decided that my faithful blog readers will send out all sorts of positive energy and vibage into the universe thereby nullifying the jinx factor and tipping the scales in our favor (see what my poor husband has to put up with?) so... we put a bid in on a house last week and it was accepted. We have an inspection today, bank stuff this week and if all goes well we will close on or before the 8th of June. That's all I'll say for now, but all good thoughts and quick closing vibage will be happily accepted!

In addition to that, we registered henry for Kindergarten on Friday! His new school is only about 2 blocks from the new house, so that is another big fat plus. We can walk every day if we want! He was whisked away and given a little placement test to make sure he didn't have any serious delays, I filled out a mountain of paperwork, and we were done! Very exciting.

Also very exciting...


Drumroll Please!


Badabadabadabada BUM...

I got my very first shipment of Peru longies on Friday afternoon! They look great and I am very excited to get them moving out to all the folks on the wait list! I have a little photo shoot planned soon, but I can't wait so here are some pictures:





And here's the dealio:

I already emailed the first 100 people on the wait list to see who still wants a pair. I gave everyone a 3 days window to respond, after which time I will start filling orders according to their place on the list. I will then start taking pre-orders from the next 150 people or so, so I can put a nice, big order in with the cooperative for the second shipment. I'll be asking for a deposit for these pre-orders, and will fill them as soon as possible depending on how quickly I can get my next shipment in-hopefully within a month. This way I can order exactly what I need instead of guessing at it and making people wait even longer. Right now I am limiting orders to one pair per person, but that might change later if I have a nice steady stream coming through.

So if you are on the wait list keep an eye out for an email in the next few days.

Whoopee!

Happy Mother's Day!

Well, it's kind of cold and rainy here this morning so we sent Kyle off to LEAF without us. Henry had a hard time being away from his LEGOs yesterday (right now he's playing with a Star Wars set Uncle J recently sent him and I can hear him saying "Luke, I am your father" every 10 seconds or so) and I'm not in any hurry to get out in the mud, so we are going to go out just for a few hours in a bit. Kyle had to get out there for a shoot and I don't have to work at all today so we are lollygagging behind him.

Yesterday morning we were on our way to LEAF and, as per usual, we were listening to NPR (Weekend Edition) in the car. There was a story about a circus family that had been on world tour since 1997 in a lime green double decker bus that only goes 33 mph and were finishing up on the eastern coast of the US before heading back to England for good (or a while). It was a great little story and it sounded like a show I'd love to see. Literally 5 minutes later we pulled up the LEAF driveway/road to see a giant, lime green double decker bus parked in the grass by the main parking lot. So. Cool.





Unfortunately, Kyle only had 30 pictures left on his card and still had a performance to photograph so he couldn't take many pictures. They were very old school circus style- very funny- and also did a great high ropes act that we didn't get any pictures of. If you are lucky enough to see the lime green double decker bus roll into your town, I would run not walk. It was a wonderful experience.

Henry, of course, got his bi-annual Spiderman face painting:




When you look at that picture you see my amazingly gorgeous child smiling back at you. When I look at that picture I see the 2.5 hours it took us to get the paint to come off last night. By the time we left the festival it was smeared halfway across his face. He caught a glimpse of himself in the mirror
getting into the car and declared "I'm starting to turn back into a man!".

He is reading this over my lap as I type. HI HENRY!!!! ("How come it says 'HI HENRY'?")

Time to go...

AWOL

This is LEAF weekend so we will be nowhere to be found for 2 days. I know I've been scarce anyway as of late, but I'll be back with a big fat update on Monday. Pinky swear. But for the weekend I'm... busy.

Sabra's Monster Princess Skirty Longiesamabob...

I have no idea what to call a skirt over longies. Is there a name for it that I just don't know? Skongies? Longirty? Hm.

Anyway. I think it came out pretty dern cute. It was based on the skirty over shorties (skorties?) that I made for Nic and she gave me some notes that I think made this one even better. Note to self: send Nic some chocolate or something. I messed up and forgot that there was supposed to be a wink involved so I have to fix that before shipping in the morning, but you get the idea.




This morning was gorgeous so we hopped in the car and drove up to Mills River for a little hike. Henry brought along his light saber that Dr. Rob gave him post-shots last week just in case we ran into Darth Vader on the trails...








I might be a bit scarce this week. As some of you guys already know, I work with the outreach arm of a local music festival the week before and after the festival happens, and it is next weekend. I'm going to be spending the week going into classrooms and observing and photographing artist residencies and performances. I think I have 10 of these to do over the course of the week, so it's going to be busy. Add to that Henry's kindergarten registration (at his second choice school, we didn't make it in to numero uno), looking at houses and finishing up getting specs for this month's custom orders and you have very little blogging time. I hope everyone has a wonderful week!

Sleepovers! Iron Man! Josh Ritter! Exclamation!

Last night was a veritable whirlwind of excitement in the ole Crankypants HQ. Hang onto your hats ladies and gentleman, Kyle and I went out on a date. Not only a date, but an uberdate. Henry had a sleep over with his friend Hana and we were going to go to a fancy dinner and then to the Orange Peel to see the amazing Josh Ritter play. Halfway to Hana's house, Kyle was struck with a brilliant idea. Instead of wasting time with a fancy pants dinner, we could drop Henry off and rush across town to see an early screening of Iron Man, then rush back across town and make the show in time for Josh Ritter to come on stage. Hmmm... on one hand I had good food, on the other hand I had Robert Downey Jr. So yeah, we went to the movies. And it was worth giving up dinner for. I am not generally a super hero type of girl (unless Buffy counts) but it was a really great, fun flick.

We got to the Orange Peel while the opening act was still on. I don't know who she was, but I recognized one of her songs from an ad on TV. Possibly Target, iPhone, Mac, Volkswagon... I don't know. One of the "Lookit us! We're hip!" kind of ad campaigns. Josh Ritter was beyond wonderful. During the show I was distracted by two things. One: the bass player looked like a kind of goofy, moustachio-ed version of Henry's pediatrician. Two: the girl that was standing directly to my left was texting the whole. time. I kept looking over and wondering what was so important that she had to text her friend in the middle of "The Temptation of Adam". And then I thought how disrespectful it was to be texting in the middle of someone's set. And then I though 'kids today don't know anything but instant technological gratification'. And then I thought 'Oh crap, I'm officially older than dirt. I'd better run home and take my Geritol before turning in'.

Gah.

OH. And I have a new little thingie over there to the left. If you are reading this in Feedburner or Bloglines you wont' be able to see it, but it's there. Henry and I have stepped up from reading the 28 page kids picture books to chapter books at night before bed. I thought it might be fun to post what book we are reading as we move through them. For our first ever chapter book we picked James and the Giant Peach by Roald Dahl. It is a bit more violent than I remember and there is a bit of name calling and things, but Henry is really enjoying it. If I read fast enough and with enough feeling I can edit here and there when I really need to, though I haven't felt the need to do it too much. Mostly I just wanted to skip over some of the nasty things the two Aunts said to James at the beginning. We're round about page 100 now, so a few more days and it's on to something new. Any suggestions?