It’s been a busy summer so far. We celebrated my birthday here at the studio with a fantastic chocolate cake that was so good we all had to leave early so we could go home and lie down for a while.

Jan had decorated the table with little paper crown confetti and she had cherry jellybeans in little crown cups for everyone. VERY cute, of course, because as you know– Cute-R-Us.

Just last weekend I had a mini-book signing at Tony’s newsstand outside of our studio. Some of you may have seen it when you toured the studio during the Workshop. There was a local food festival (CWE Art Fair & Taste) going on, so we thought it would be a good idea to sign my new cookbook, Fan Fare: 120 Family Favorite Recipes. It was a good idea and we had a lot of fun, but it was hotter than the hinges of Hades, as my mother would say, and at times I seriously wondered if I would live through it.

You can buy the cookbook under much cooler circumstances by ordering it from my website. The first 10 people ordering STARTING TODAY will receive a signed edition!

I’m off for a brief vacation–YAY!– but will be back soon with more news. Don’t forget to go to Michaels and pick up the new tins– they’re really (altogether now) cute!

~Mary

Here’s a little something you might be interested in. I’m doing a bunch of new Easter/spring cards for Papyrus-Recycled Greetings, which will be available this coming spring. I had the idea for one of them during one of our staff meetings in which we were discussing how many cards we needed to provide QUICKLY to PRG– the operative word here being QUICKLY. Here’s the doodle I did on our agenda:

I thought at first I would do it in flat colors with just markers on colored paper…

But I decided it looked too washed out (although it might be good for a fabric design). So I redid it one more time in the old-fashioned way— pen and ink, markers, and colored pencils.  I like this one the best… 

What do you think?

~Mary

We have lots of good news here at the ol’ studio.  First of all, we hired the wonderful and completely charming Amy Medhurst as our new Director of Licensing and Marketing.  The first time we all met her we felt like she had been here forever.  She fit right in, and since she seemed not at all offended or confused by our comments and jokes and the general mayhem that goes on here on a daily basis, we hired her on the spot. A good thing we did, too, as she has already brought several good things to the table (more on that as soon as we sign on the dotted lines) and she has also raised our visibility in the marketplace.  This is VERY good, since we had actually been asked in the past couple of years if I had died.

The other good news is we have just signed a contract with Papyrus-Recycled Greetings for greeting cards.  I had a wonderful run for many years with Sunrise Greetings, but I felt like it was time to shake things up.   I want to make sure the cards are available absolutely everywhere, and we’ll have that with Papyrus-Recycled starting in spring 2011. In the meantime you’ll still be able to get my cards at Barnes and Noble, Office Max, and at many of your local post offices and stationery stores.

And the rest of the good news is that we just have a lot of great new products coming out– a ton of fun things at Michaels (you have to hurry- this stuff sells out really fast!), the world’s cutest, if I do say so myself, figurines from Bethany Lowe and Katherine’s Collection, and of course the new Fairy Tale book, all coming out this Fall.  Stay tuned for more exciting new developments!  I LOVE new developments!

~Mary