We broke out the Plastilina last night for a little crafty time before dinner.  I made a teeny tiny Christmas scene, our 4-year old made an elaborate mermaid sculpture, and our toddler successfully held fistfuls of clay without eating it!  Hooray for the fun!

The time has come to head to greener pastures...Trussart Designs is moving north to Oregon!  We are so excited to be moving to our new location with more warehouse space and green grass!  Even though packing up our warehouse and preparing everything for the move is indeed exhausting, happily David isn't literally going to carry it all on his back to Oregon (that's baby in the picture, with lovely California brown grass).

We'll be back up and shipping June 24.  Until then, happy trails to you and yours...

Scary bear sculptures not withstanding, we had a great time in Denver for this year's joint NAMTA-CHA show.  Venturing outside was risky with hot weather one day and snow the next, but inside the company was fantastic, Thanks so much to our friends at AMEP!!

We are excited to be visiting Louis Armstrong's hometown with the National Art Education Association this week.  The NAEA chose New Orleans for its national convention, and aside from today's ferocious downpours, they just couldn't have picked a better town.

OK, with a title like that, I'm expecting a slightly more...fun/shocking/risque photo too, but I find it remarkably difficult to talk about a trip to Las Vegas without shouting the above headline.  One more way to horrify the kids I guess...

We joined our dear friends at R-Biz for this year's Toyfest West in Vegas this week.  Always so great to meet with customers old and new and hear what they have to say about business, product, and life!

We always think that the end of December is going to be quiet here at Trussart Designs - retailers have all of their holiday product, everyone is busy with their own end-of-year projects.  Surely that means slow days to catch up on paperwork, maybe consider cleaning the office...or just my desk.

But no.  This December we created a new catalog.  Our lovely partners in Austria did much of the work, but it was a bit of a mad scramble to finish before the holidays.  It was all worth it to see the UPS driver lugging box after box of pretty new catalogs just in time for the winter trade shows and our busy season.  Hooray!

I think it all goes back to my Aunt Lou.  Her arrival for Thanksgiving was always announced right at the door with a distinctive and surprisingly authentic "gobble gobble gobble!"  Now I have a hard time passing the wild turkeys hanging out with the cows across the road without my own explosive gobbling.  I tell myself the kids think it's really funny.

So I suppose it's no surprise that when we looked at our TruTru Animals line, we found the turkey just missing.  Five short months and about a hundred emails to the designer later, and he's finally arrived.

We designed him as an improvement on a game we play at Thanksgiving: make feathers out of construction paper & popsicle sticks, poke them in a flowerpot that's had a turkey head and wings glued on, everyone secretly writes what they're thankful for on the feathers throughout the day, and we take turns reading a feather's thankfulness message and guessing who wrote it during dinner.  Great game - something to do while waiting for everything to cook, none of those high-pressure moments at the table when it is your turn to say what you're thankful for - but how to hold on to those thankful thoughts?  What do you really do with a pile of popsicle stick feathers?

Enter the new TruTru Turkey.  His back feathers are individual pieces where all of those thoughts of thankfulness can be written.  We'll be each making a turkey, and putting our feathers in a bowl before dinner to keep the game going.  After everyone's messages are matched, we'll glue the feathers onto our turkeys.  Best part?  Ok, there are two:

1. This turkey is way cuter than any flower pot we ever managed to convert into a turkey.
2. You can keep the whole turkey, thankful thoughts and all, to decorate and remember next year!

Gobble Gobble!

Had a great time meeting with the team of Park Avenue Associates at the Seattle Gift Show just the other day.  Took this fabulous shot of their showroom...can you see it...right over...there!  Three guesses on where I had to go to get this much detail on the Pacific Market Center?

Just finished up the summer San Francisco Gift Show and before I could even pause to reflect on it, we are off to Seattle for our next show.   Lots of beautiful things in San Francisco, but it seems my favorite was the ceiling!

OK, I am ridiculously in love with these little watercolor pans.  We brought in Jolly's new TwinTabs watercolor set this spring and really like it's flexible, modular design with a separate mixing palette built right in, but love, love, love the paint itself!  Not only does cover beautifully with great, vibrant color, but it's just plain pretty with its swirls.  Why have a boring flat color pans when they could be swirly??

Now, (OK, in two weeks when the shipment finally arrives) we're adding the replacement color pots.  Yep, find yourself in a green period, using up all of your greens while the other colors sit beautify to the side?  Just buy the replacement green pots and keep on painting!  The individual colors pop right out of the paint tray to receive our new, almost here, replacement pots.  

My only concern is that I'll spend more than an afternoon out in the warehouse cracking open each box just to "ooooh" over each color's serpentine perfection...