Pregnancy

No calm down mum, I am not about to annouce you are becoming a grandmother on a blog, but I have discovered the perfect pregnancy journal for when the O'Day/Pawley baby does arrive.

This journal has no pre-printed information, so you don't need to fill out a checklist of how you are feeling, or if you happen to miss an entry it is no big deal!

You can write as often as you like, or as little, as the designer says it is your journey, it is your story, so you want a journal that can reflect that.

They are available in 4 different covers, and we will have all four in store.

Ever since I heard of the idea of writing a journal while you are pregnant, I have loved the concept, what a perfect gift to give to your child on the 18th or 21st, or perhaps even when they are expecting their first child. It is also a great chance for you to write down everything you are feeling so you can reflect on all the positivness when you are up at 3am for the 5th day in a row!

We will have these in store shortly, along with the matching bookmarks, so you can jot down names when you think of them.

The art of letter writting

In the age of emails, and needing answers instantly the age old tradition of writting letters seems to have died off somewhat.

This is such a shame, I remember the excitement when I was growing up to wait to see if I had a letter when I got home from school, which was largely from my penpal in the UK. These days it seems that the only letters that I get have a plastic window in them and come from a man called BILL....

This is why I was so excited when I discovered Write to me.. Write to me is made up of two very talented girls who bring us the most gorgeous letter writting sets and journals, I fell in love when I first saw these products on line, but when Anna dropped them into the gallery on Thursday they were even more divine in the flesh...

Write to me make a range of products that include wrapping paper with matching card - I love the one above, with the Love Tree products, as well as the letter writting sets at the very top which include 20 cards and matching envelopes.

I now need to touch base with that long lost penpal, and again anxiously wait by the letterbox for an actual letter...

fun photos

We thought that we would take some new photos of our kids specimen designs, and thought what better way than to actually have some kids in the photos, here is a sneak peak!

Shyla was a bit dubious at first, how good does the mural that Angeline painted look....
We then started to warm up once the products were in the background, Shy started to warm upThen the fun times started...we then took a couple of paper butterflies outside to play and take some photos, luckily Neivh doesn't share her mums fear of moths - it always amazes me how someone so terrified of moths can spend hours and hours handcutting butterflies...

Exciting Happenings

Some times good things all happen at once and unfortunately I can't give too much away here, but more details will follow over the coming months.

This week we have found out that we are going to be exhibiting at a well known gallery in Fitzroy for two weeks, we were approached by the curator of the gallery and were only too happy to accept! The ad will be in next months art almunac magazine so keep an eye out for it!

We also had a meeting with a major homewares store in Melbourne this week, and they have confirmed that they would love to stock our products, which is great - They literally gasped when they saw the new song birds, and fell in love with the morphis range, so we will be in the shelves in those stores in 3 weeks (once we have finished cutting everything!)

We also have the business awards night tonight where we have been nominated for three awards, so fingers crossed we are lucky enough to win won!

Lastly we also were approached by a couple of magazines this month and sent off some products to be photographed, including my new favourite the squirel, so 7 of our products will be in the mags next month - I will upload photos from them once they are published!

As I said this week has been a lot better than the last one, which is nice!

Song Birds

We have an exciting meeting tomorrow with a store in Victoria that has a few show rooms around Melbourne, and have been busily preparing new products which we can show them, which is where the show birds designs have come from. These will be shortly making their way to the webstore:
I think they look just gorgeous, and can't wait to the rest of the series are finished!

We have had a big couple of days, which I will fill you in on a little bit over the next couple of days...

On the front of the person copying our design, we have just the best lawyer who is drawing up papers to serve her for a breach of not only copyright laws but also the trade practices act, for a breach of section 52 - which is misleading and deceptive conduct, as she hasn't contacted us the lawyer will be serving the papers on Monday, and I must admit I can't wait!!!!

Sadly though it appears that copying our designs is not enough, we have seen that she has also some designs that look scarily like the talented Lisa from the Red Thread - I can't actually believe that someone has the nerver to copy a few artists and pass them off as her own...

We also have some exciting news about an exhibition that we are going to be having at Brunswich street Gallery in May, I will post details of the opening closer to the date, but we are busy busy busy cutting at the moment!

Alice in Wonderland

Now i know wall decals have been done to death, and we are all familiar with them, but last week I came across some Alice In Wonderland decals that just got me so excited!

We have been working with Paul in the US to create a whole series of Alice in Wonderland decals that will only be available in our gallery, at this stage we have about 10 designs finished that will be in the gallery in about 3 weeks - here is a sneak peak!

Disappointing

Sometimes I get so disappointed in people, we have recently been made aware of a person who has copied not only our product (which is bad enough), but who also has copied our brand names "Baby Butterfly" and "Paper Papillons".

I thought that this was pretty bad, and in the interest of good faith we sent her a letter outlining our concerns in relation to the naming of the product which went unanswered, and has now forced us to engage a lawyer, which is distracting to us from our own business.

When I thought it was already bad enough, today I found out she was approaching some of our retailers with her product, which she claims in hand-cut despite the fact that they seem to be of an identical shape and size to this paper punch...

http://www.joann.com/joann/catalog/zoomImagedetail.jsp?PRODID=9932161&imageType=m&itemType=sku

It is frustrating that someone can claim them as handcut when we actually spend hours with our trusty scaple cutting them out...

Anyhoo I am sure that Karma will result in a postive outcome but it sure is a painful thing to have to deal with!

Next post (which I will do tomorrow), I will update you on our visit to SA which was amazing!