We have scrubs! For all you hard-working nurses, hospital and medical personnel, we have just cuted up your world considerably. Our new scrubs from CID/Wink are available right now exclusively at Life Uniform stores and through their website for 90 days. After that, they’ll be available at all medical uniform stores.

When I was in the hospital last year, I came to depend on the kindness, attention, and professionalism of the nursing staff and all the other members of the staff that make a stay in the hospital bearable. And since your allotted time with your actual doctor is limited to about 30 seconds per day, you know the sight of these other folks in your room, talking, listening and generally taking care of you is welcome, indeed. So anything I can do to make them happy– well, it’s the least I can do! (Actually, my doctors were great. However, they would not be caught dead in these outfits, so this blog is not for them.)

The design team at CID understands the importance of these people too. It’s so great working with them. They even created a ME themed room at their headquarters and evidently their enthusiasm paid off– the scrubs are flying off the shelves! Here are a few of the designs available and a photo of the Inspiration Room where they were created.

If you have any great/funny/inspirational tales of nursing that you’d like to share in the comments section below, I’d love to hear them.

~Mary

As some of you may already know, my greeting cards are now being produced by Papyrus Recycled Greetings. This is good news on many levels– my favorite level being that I’m now getting lots of calls from family, friends and even strangers saying “Yay! I found your cards in my local drugstore/grocery store/Walmart/Target, etc.!!” The last several years you could only buy my cards at Barnes and Noble (where they still can be found) or in a few random post offices. So this is great news for me and, I hope, for you. Some people have even sent me one of my own cards to tell me they found it somewhere in their neighborhood!

Another reason to celebrate being published by PRG (which is owned by American Greetings) is that it’s just such a joy to be working for a company that is so invested in its’ artists and writers (more about this in a future post!). It’s very inspiring to work for such a supportive group of people and I hope it shows in the cards I’m now making. At first we went with a few older designs just to hit the ground running with PRG, but a lot of the brand new designs are now finding their way to the shelves. Here is just a small sampling of my new drawings that’ll be coming soon to a card rack near you!

Let me know what you think.

~Mary

It’s a common thing in the art licensing biz to design something, get all excited about it, send it off to the manufacturer and then promptly forget all about it until it comes out a year or so later. Of course, then you get to get excited about it all over again, which helps keep this business interesting. For instance, when my Fairy Tales book came out last fall, I was surprised–“What?? This is just coming out now?? This old thing??” But it’s so fun because then I get to see people’s first reactions to it, as opposed to my old reaction, and the whole project takes on new meaning. I’ve always felt that a piece of art just isn’t quite complete until someone sees it. Just my opinion.

A while ago we partnered up with a manufacturer called Anatex to make some childrens’ play furniture that is as cute as we could make it. Well, they’re available now and I get to get all excited about it again! I just recently received my sample set for myself.

So I am going to take one of these table and chair sets to my backyard and set it under our huge, gorgeous, flowering dogwood. Mikayla and I will invite all the little neighbors over and give a project I did a long while ago a whole new life.

It’s the little things…

~Mary