They always say that when raising children the hours are excruciatingly slow and yet the years fly by. Whoever they may be, isn’t that the truth? My mind is boggling that the little numsi’s are 2 and 4, and what blows me away most of all is not that my oldest will soon (ish) be 5, but that my youngest will be 3. When did that happen? Seriously, when did my cuddly little baby get so tall and opinionated? Where did my little girls go? And who are these boisterous, loud (so very, very loud) stubborn, opinionated kids in my house? Strange indeed. On the plus side, they are very funny, we were talking the other day about how I’m English and their Dad is Danish. I asked the kids where they are from, and numsi2 said IKEA. Which, you know is almost the truth.
Anyway! Back to shop news, it seems impossible to believe that February is almost over, again, where did it go? We’ve had more illness- pneumonia wiped out myself and the kids for a couple of weeks- and lots of snow (Hello Minnesota), and I feel a bit like a hamster on a wheel. I’ve been running and running but time keeps running faster. So the shop updates are long overdue, my etsy site is still tragically empty, my big mailings are yet to go out…But! There are new things going on, albeit very behind the scenes. I’ve arranged a few giveaways with some very exciting blogs for the coming months, I’ve finished a few new designs, my online catalogue seems to be becoming an epic to rival War and Peace, but at least I am on the closing stretch at last, and I am scheduled to partake in April’s T-Shirt Mart at the Walker Art Center, here in Minneapolis. I’m super excited about that, if all goes to plan numsi should be branching out into adult wear. Which would be fantastic because I seriously have nothing to wear.
Speaking of t-shirts, I recently made the first numsi custom order, answering a Tweeted plea for Valentine’s Day gift help from a fellow Twin Citian, toy designer, artist and blogger extraordinaire, and all-round awesome lady, Mari from Small for Big. She was looking for an I love you shirt that was mod + cool for her daughter, and I had alot of fun making one:
Obviously I haven’t yet managed to put up information for custom orders online, all in good time, but if you have any requests I would be more than happy to work with you. Please send me an email, or tweet me, or Facebook me or whatever you like.
So before I go, would like to leave you with a quick taster of the new designs coming soon to numsi. Any day now, we’ll be seeing more tufted deer, piggies, zebras, ostriches and gibbons around here. Stay tuned, it should get interesting!
Well hello peeps and a very Happy New Year to you all! I hope 2010 is fabulous for one and all and that we all end up in a happier place than we started. It’s been busy busy over at numsi HQ, working on wholesale stuff- still. It always amazes me just how long everything takes to get done on the admin side. Also, things just got super hectic in my other life as an installation artist with tectonic industries, where we just started a fellowship. For our year-long project, we are blogging the Oprah Winfrey Show in real time at www.anotheroneyearproject.com. This is taking quite a chunk out of every evening, but hopefully as my typing skills improve there will be less post-episode editing which needs to take place; we can but hope.
I am hoping to get lots more pieces of text wall art made for Valentine’s Day, photograph them and get them online in the next day or two. I am working on you + me, me + you, I love you, I like you, you are my sunshine and a couple of others. Any suggestions, please let me know! I have a spot on the Valentine’s Day Handmade Gift Guide over at IndieSpotting, featuring the text works as shown above. 
Other than that, like so many others, I am struggling to come to terms with the heartbreaking news from Haiti. If you have not done so already, you can text 90999 with Haiti as the message, and $10 will be added to your phone bill and donated to the Red Cross. I was also pleased to see that our local co-op, Mississippi Market are asking people to round up their grocery bill to help out. It is amazing how convenient donating has become, and it really seems that the element of ease is helping people give with a sense of urgency, and perhaps it allows people to keep on donating small amounts. I am very pleased to say that we have donated one of our new numsi gift sets to the Indie Fixx Haiti Relief Fundraiser Auction. Each day Jenn over at Indie Fixx will showcase some donated items which readers can bid on in the comments section. All proceeds go directly to the Red Cross. Please bid generously and check back regularly. Every bit helps the unspeakably terrible situation over in Haiti.
Final news, on another note entirely I met with the most lovely photographer yesterday, a recent graduate of Minneapolis College of Art and Design where I am sometime faculty (my adjunct hours can’t even really be described as part-time). I am very very excited to hand product photography over to her- I can’t wait to see the images she takes!
OK, back to work- I am embracing Twitter in a much bigger way these days and it is amazing how one feels so much more part of a community of like-minded people. It is indeed an awesome awesome thing. Have a good one people!
PS. Coming soon…
Well well, what a year! I’m not sure it was exactly the Best! Year! Ever! for the numsi family, but it was a year, and we are all older and maybe a little wiser. Our biggest ordeal was moving house to downsize financially, which I am very pleased we did, but we do acutely miss our old neighborhood. However, not losing sleep every time the mortgage is due is a good thing, so all in all it was a smart move. What else? Well, the difference between having a one year old and a three year old versus a two year old and a four year old is huge. This year they can both put their winter gear on, both get themselves dressed, and we play board games and memory games. And maybe 75% of the time numsi1 and numsi2 play pretty nicely together- when they are not chasing each other round and round and round the house screaming. Tonight they trooped off to bed saying “Happy NuNu” which was pretty sweet.
I am really excited for what the future holds for numsi. I have some great packaging “things” for making some beautiful gift sets. I am very much looking forward to sorting that out. Currently I am frantically working on a wholesale catalogue, price list and order form to send out to various people who expressed interest in stocking numsi products when visiting us at the Walker Art Center. And I have a magnificent to-do list to work on for marketing and so on and so forth to try and take this venture to the next level.
But tonight is New Year’s Eve which for me goes one of three ways.
Tonight was supposed to be a trip to stay with friends, but our smallest has a terrible cold so we have gone to Plan C. So now I am going to look for planners, one of my Most Special Things. Sad but true!
Happy New Year one and all. May 2010 bring everything you ever wished for (if you wish for gifts and clothing for babies and kids, we can help you there!)
Hello and wow, what a week that was running up to the crazy holiday weekend of December 4th-6th. I took numsi to the Walker Art Center for Friday, Saturday and Sunday, I had magical helpers take numsi to the No Coast Craft-o-Rama for Friday and Saturday, and I met someone wonderful who took a box of stuff down to Rochester for me so that I could participate in Sunday’s winter trunk show. Phew. It was a little on the exhausting side, but a really great experience, all in all. I met some lovely people with great wares at the Walker, including John Danicic my immediate neighbor selling the lovely Stirsby; mine has had some heavy use already and I believe I may have solved at least one gift-giving dilemma. It was lovely to meet a twitter buddy, the delightful Michele Heidel of Fennel Studio my saviour in the trip to Rochester dilemma. I saw Michelle again this weekend at the Monster Drawing Rally at Midway Contemporary Art and I am hoping that she is one of those people I will just keep bumping into! Fab girl. I was fortunate enough to be situated opposite Caitlin Wicker’s phenomenal Sweater Toys which were a feast for the eyes, and also diagonally across from the gorgeous clocks of Pilot Design. All in all, it was a great experience and setting up shop in the cavernous Target Gallery was both a treat and a delight.
But now, back to business! I am in the process of uploading images of all the new stuff that got created for the Weekend of Crazy. T-shirts, calendars, mirrors, magnets, message blocks.. they aren’t going to upload themselves, fabulous as they are and all. So stay tuned as I slowly plough my way through them. I am also working away on a wholesale catalogue and order form for all the lovely people who made enquiries about stocking numsi products. Busy busy. Finally, I signed up for Free Shipping Day, which means that anyone in the US can order from numsi on December 17th and get free shipping on their order with delivery guaranteed by Christmas Eve. As alphabetical luck would have it, we are currently positioned next to Nordstrom, which can be no bad thing… fingers crossed all those seekers of Nordstrom goods will be dazzled by the lovely green-ness of the numsi logo and forget where it was they were headed. In a sort of Jedi mind-trick type way, one would hope. And so, maybe I should put the countdown widget here… for the next three days at least.
Stay Warm!
Well well, I have to freely admit that I have updated this blog more in the last 24 hours than in the whole history of numsi. I have The Fear I suspect, the adrenaline rush of having to get everything together in two weeks for No Coast and the Local Artist Mart at the Walker Art Center. I do have big plans for this blog, well medium size plans at least. Ok, let’s be honest, my plans at this point are simply to update it regularly, to link to things I like or things that are intriguing or helpful or whatever. So they are small plans… but at least I have good intentions. In theory at least.
Another thing I am going to do once the crazy settles down a bit is to post photos of my new studio. We moved house in August and converted part of our basement into the new and improved *numsi HQ. It is truly amazing what a LOT of white paint and an Ikea laminate floor and a door can do for a poky Midwestern knotty-pine panelled basement with bar. My admin center is now a former bar, I like it.
In the meantime, between producing the 2010 calendar, designing and ordering lots of pretty new packaging (oh t-shirts, you will be so happy in your new box homes) and working hard on new cards, magnets, mirrors and a mobile design, life is pretty hectic. Weeks of illness have been sweeping through the house so the website updates are a little further behind than I’d like. So in the meantime, here’s a tiny glimpse into some of our new t-shirt designs. I hope to have them online by the end of the week, please check back soon.
If you are around and about in the Twin Cities on December 4th and 5th, you should get yourself over to the Midtown Global Market for the annual No Coast Craft-O-Rama. It’s huge and last year when we participated it was heaving with people despite the extreme snow conditions. I personally will be over at the Walker Art Center for the Local Artists Mart, but my trusty peeps will have a stand of delicious numsi goodness at No Coast. Please come on over to E33 and Shop Local, Shop Awesome.
A list of the vendors can be found here. Personally I am looking forward to checking out Penguin & Fish (stuffed unicorns? My 4 year old would explode with The Happy. Plus, they’re called “Wake up Charlie. Let’s go to Candy Mountain”- hilarious), and excited to revisit perennial favourites Zeichen Press, Fantastic Toys and Nate’s Custom Sewing. Why don’t you come on over?
Mark your calendars! December 4th, 5th and 6th are going to be extremely exciting for those of us up here in Minnesota. numsi will be in attendance at the Walker Art Center Local Artist Mart
from 12 noon-4pm daily.
I am super excited to be participating in this event. The Walker Art Center is such an important and phenomenal venue in the contemporary art scene and and it is an honour to be selling there. Please come by and say hello and finish up your holiday shopping.
Well well well. It seems that we have sold our house and numsi HQ. We have a move out date of August 17th which gives us 6 weeks to the day to find a new place. Deep breathing….
Today numsi joined forces with the good people at the Handmade Toy Alliance by becoming members to help protect people making handmade toys and products for children from going out of business. As a parent of two children under four, I know that the safety of our children is of paramount concern. No one wants their children to be anywhere near lead, let alone playing with toys painted with it. However, I believe that the new regulations and requirements of the Consumer Product Safety Improvement Act (CPSIA), whilst well-intentioned, are sweepingly over-reaching and in ill-conceived.
From the Handmade Toy Alliance’s website:
The United States Congress rightly recognized that the Consumer Products Safety Commission (CPSC) lacked the authority and staffing to prevent dangerous toys from being imported into the US. So, they passed the Consumer Product Safety Improvement Act (CPSIA) in August, 2008. Among other things, the CPSIA bans lead and phthalates in toys, mandates third-party testing and certification for all toys and requires toy makers to permanently label each toy with a date and batch number.
All of these changes will be fairly easy for large, multinational toy manufacturers to comply with. Large manufacturers who make thousands of units of each toy have very little incremental cost to pay for testing and update their molds to include batch labels.
For small toymakers and manufacturers of children’s products, however, the costs of mandatory testing will likely drive them out of business.
A toymaker, for example, who makes wooden cars in his garage in Maine to supplement his income cannot afford the $300 – $4,000 fee per toy that testing labs are charging to assure compliance with the CPSIA.
A work at home mom in Minnesota who makes cloth diapers to sell online must choose either to violate the law or cease operations
A small toy retailer in Vermont who imports wooden toys from Europe, which has long had stringent toy safety standards, must now pay for testing on every toy they import.
And even the handful of larger toy makers who still employ workers in the United States face increased costs to comply with the CPSIA, even though American-made toys had nothing to do with the toy safety problems of 2007.
The CPSIA simply forgot to exclude the class of children’s goods that have earned and kept the public’s trust: Toys, clothes, and accessories made by small businesses where the owners are personally involved in the creation of their goods. The result, unless the law is modified, is that handmade children’s products will no longer be legal in the US.
If this law had been applied to the food industry, every farmers market in the country would be forced to close while Kraft and Dole prospered.
The consequences of this law are enormous- imagine all the small businesses out there whose creativity and innovation will be suffocated under the burden of testing and labelling. Imagine who will be able to survive the demands of testing- the huge corporations who mass produce items will not be enormously affected by this ruling. A $400 test on a run of thousands of t-shirts is maybe not such a big deal. A $400 test for a one-off or a limited edition handmade garment? A big deal- a very big deal. Already our local stores selling handmade children’s items no longer stock some of the most wonderful wooden toys made in Europe. The manufacturers adhere to the more stringent safety standards found in Europe, and yet they are withdrawing from the US market in droves. This is a loss for everyone.
Here at numsi all of our products are made from safe, tested materials known to contain no lead or pthalates. We would never make anything that was in any way harmful to us or our children. Although I am collecting the certficates of compliance from each of my individual sources, the CPSIA will dictate that each and every numsi product variant (each colour, each design) will have to be tested by a third party lab and labelled accordingly in order to comply with the law. Currently, there is no amendment that states that the burden of testing be placed on the manufacturers of the raw components rather than the assembler of the components- we need change to allow combining tested items together without the requirement to retest. Too many businesses will not be able to continue producing goods without investing tens of thousands of dollars into third-party testing and labeling, just to prove that things that never had a single toxic chemical in them still don’t have a single toxic chemical in them.
Unless there are substantial changes to the law, at a minimum it looks like numsi will no longer be able to produce safe, stylish, chemical free clothing for our kids.
What can you do?
