My Favorite Mirror BLARGS about it.

If you have a car, or a home, or a top-secret diary, or a padlocked trunk or the key to someone’s heart, chances are good that you could use a keychain. Why not try one of ours? They are ultra-cute, you know! They feature tons of great images from tons of great artists, all of them awesome individuals. We’re working on getting the site totally updated with all of the designs, so keep checking back! We should have them all up by next week!

This fella here is by Berkley Illustrations, one of our NEW ARTISTS! Be sure to check out all of the animal portraits, they are a good group of wildlife, if I do say so myself. And I know all about wildlife. We are, afterall, the keepers of the Suspendered Yeti and the Ghostbustin’ Gator. (It’s a long story, but all true.)

Oh, and also? Spend over $20 from NOW (7/23/08 @ 9pm EST) through August 1st and we will throw in a FREE one of a kind magnet. YAY. FREE! YAY! FREE! YAY! $20 and you get something FREE!

I could not be happier to be back home.  We were gone WAY TOO LONG and I am never going to do that jazz again!  Seriously.  I hate to feel like I’ve been derailed, you know?  We were gone for 40-something days.  30 or so nights of sleeping on an air-mattress.

So I am working on a big site update now - those of you who have not gotten your orders yet, rest assured that we are going to make every effort to ship them out on Monday.  Thanks for your patience with our ‘vacation’ type thing.   I’ll post again with the new artist news, but those of you are sleuthy can go and figure it out already.  =D

Winnie the Pooh said that no one could be uncheered by a balloon.  Balloons are old and busted, LOLcats are the new un-uncheerers.  Wait.  I just confused myself.  My point is, this is hilarious.

more cat pictures

It reminds me of our Future Crazy Cat Lady collection at MFM.  Check them out along with a bunch of other mirrors, mousepads and coasters for animal lovers.

Whew!  Our blitz of the east coast is almost complete!  We just have the 4th, a house warming party and a christening and then our stint here is donezies until the holidays.  It’s been fun visiting our old stomping grounds, but we know now that we wouldn’t want to move back, as much as we love being able to hang out with our BFFs whenever we wanna, it’s just too expensive to live here in South Jersey and that’s really sad.  I know that no one likes taxes, but what you see here is making it cost-prohibitive for even lifelong residents to remain!  And people seem so angry.  Lots of INSANE drivers, too!

I am ready to be back in full force so we can ship things out lickety split, add all the new amazing stuff we’ve got for you all and to start planning the next round of shows!  I’m even gonna put a bunch of stuff on sale when we get back, maybe even before we get back… maybe even starting TONIGHT!!  It’s all left-overs from the shows, we always bring so much more than we need, so now we have tons of really great things all ready to ship.

Crafty Bastards was wonderful.  Miserably hot, but we survived, had awesome neighbors and then had din-din with our favoritest most funnest craft-show buds of all, Jessee & JC from Art School Dropout.  I love those two!   I’ve been a fan of Jessee’s work since waaaaaay before I ever met her in person, and she’s a super-star!  Even Fred Flare thinks so!  Check her out, she’s one of their Next Big Things this year.

That’s all for now.  The zoo pix are up on our flickr, by the way.  So dig my mad monkey photog skillz by clickin’ here!  See ya later.  xoxo.

Being away for a solid month and then some has it’s down-sides.  Like when your Comcast bill gets neglected before you go out of town and while you are out of town, you find out that your service has been disconnected!  Oh my.  We have the Triple Play, so our phone #, cable and internet all got das boot, apparently our phone was the first to go - which is kind of bad but not the end of the world, but my email also died and I could not log in.  So it only took about 2 hours of back and forthing it with the Comcast people to get our email back up and running.  2 hours and $416!!  We had to prepay for next month, too, so OUCH!  But I can check my email again and hopefully respond to everyone that still needs a reply!

Renegade was fun again - though hot and then rainy.  We were next to the awesome Emily and Nick of Endless Hats (from whom I gots me a hat!) and also awesome Sue and Nate from Giant Dwarf & Secret Lovers.  It is great to spend hot and rainy days near people who love to laugh.  It makes it a kabillion times better!  A big shout out to Jen O (you know who you are, Girl!) for stopping by and sayin’ hi.  You ROCK!

We got to meet Ryan Berkley, who is our newest artist, and his wife Lucy.  Nice, nice nice!  You might recognize his great illustrations from Etsyland - he’s not yet up on the site!  Hang tight, muffins, we’ll have his stuff up as soon as we get back home.  Believe me, we can’t wait!

Got to be INSANELY jealous of the mogo girls who are some of our very favorite show-buds!  They just bought an old hardware store to live in and work from!!  DREAM!!  DREAMY!!!  This is definitely one of our fondest wishes in life, to revamp something that’s not intended to be a home into a home/workspace.  Go Dabney! Go Ann!  I can’t wait to see pics!

Anyway, here are some pictures from Renegade of other people’s flickr accounts! 

Of course we totally forgot our camera, which is a shame, because we got the craziest hotel room this go around! Seriously? King size CANOPY bed with GOLD LAME’ CANOPY!  It was nuts all the way.  Another couple I chatted with in the elevator told me that they didn’t have a canopy bed but did have an exercise bike in their room.  How very unusual the 5th floor turned out to be.  Besides the gold lame’ canopy bed, there were bits of nacho chips on the floor in our room when we got there with little ants crawling on them - sorry that we barged in on their party!  Also, disappearing bath water.  So very strange indeed.   The bed, as ridiculous as it was, was SO AMAZINGLY comfortable that it really (NO - REALLY!) puts our air mattress here to shame!

Today we took a day trip to the Cape May Zoo.  Took TONS of great pictures.  Will blog about THAT tomorrow with links and everything!

Ha.  Here we are on vacation and feeling out of sorts.  It’s hard to break your routine, I guess, and I miss all the WORK.  THEREFORE - starting tomorrow, June 4th, we will resume shipping on ALL MOUSEPADS and most coasters.  We don’t have all of the files we need for all of the coaster labels, but we do have most of them, so feel free to email us to ask if we can ship.  If we can’t - you may have to wait til we return to Indiana.

We can ship SOME mirrors, as well, but that’s really limited to whatever we’re bringing to shows.

Anyway - we’ve tackled two of our four craft shows and met a lot of nice folks in both Chicago and Philly and are looking forward to meeting all the Brooklyn and Silver Springs folks in the next few weeks.

As always, we brought our digital camera with us but neglected to take any pictures whatsoever!  We are not master bloggers, obviously!  Oh, how I long to be good at such things, but alas.  Maybe one day.  Maybe in the next few days I will blog about the shows.  Yeah.  Maybe!!

Wow, this week has been crazy with people writing in asking how they can become one of the artists featured on MFM.  I mean, it’s been more than usual.  We have a section on our site called ‘Licensing Info’ but I guess it’s a little hard to find, so I figured I would post it up here, too.  Are you ready?  Here it goes:

Thank you for your interest in working with My Favorite Mirror.  We often get asked if we are looking for new artists.  The short answer is YES, ALWAYS!  At present we are working on a backlog of new artists who will be joining our site in mid 2008.  We will be open to future artists as of August 2008.

Because we do get a high-volume of artists and designers wishing to license with us, we have decided to create this page to answer most of the questions we are commonly asked about working with MFM.  So let’s get to it, shall we?

First of all, MFM is just two people, Kellee and Matt.  We are sometimes VERY busy, especially during our show seasons.  We handle all aspects of the business day in and day out.  So even if we do wish to license your artwork, we can’t promise that it will go up instantly.  It can take months to get everything all hammered out.  So be patient!

We do work with all types of artists from anywhere in the world.

As far as what we’re looking for:

• Artists or designers with an extensive, consistent portfolio
• Artists or designers with a style that is completely unique to anything we currently feature on our website
• Artists who blog regularly and aren’t afraid of shameless promotion!
• Gallery showings, Etsy popularity, etc, etc a plus

If that sounds like you, feel free to submit 5-15 mirror ideas featuring your designs to us via email.  If we are interested, we will be back in touch as soon as we can to let you know further details such as royalty rates, terms, etc.

Basically, if you are serious about your work and people seem to respond to it, say hello.

We are not looking for anime’ themes or styles, x-rated art or overly commercial looking things.  We know there’s definitely a market for those things, they just don’t fit what we’re trying to do here at MFM.  But, remember, we do private label and are always happy to help you establish a product line that you can market as you wish on your own website, at shows or on sites like Etsy and eBay.

And on that note - why should you choose MFM to manufacture your private label mirrors and mousepads?  Well, MFM is our only job!  We devote 40+ hours a week to bring our products to the world.  Some of the most talented artists of our generation trust us with their artwork, and so can you.

So there it is.  Please stick to these guidelines.  We appreciate your enthusiasm, but we cannot reply to everyone that writes.  We definitely will respond if we are interested.  If you don’t hear back from us, feel free to submit more design ideas at a later date.

Here are some other tips:

• If you have submitted your artwork for our review and we have not replied, please refrain from sending us multiple follow-up emails asking us why we have not responded and/or asking us why we don’t just TELL you yes or no.  It’s bad form and will definitely be memorable, but not for the right reasons!
• Do try to show us that you are trying to market your work yourself.  For instance, you sell originals or prints, etc, either through your own website or another.
•  Keep in mind that we are working with some of the most talented artists out there.  At this point, we want to enrich our roster with other serious, working artists.  This isn’t to say that we don’t work with new artists, because we may, but from our perspective, we have to feel that there is a market for your art with our customers.
• And finally, if you have worked with another company in the past who licenses artwork for MIRRORS, we will not be interested in working with you.  It’s nothing personal against your artwork, it’s just that they are our competitors and have modeled their business after ours, at least in part, and we just feel it is in our best interest to avoid any confusion for customers.

We hope this helps!

You may have noticed the banner on our front page telling you that we will be gone from May 21st until July 7th. And you may be thinking “What in the…???”

I know, we will be gone a LONG time, right? Well, we’re hitting the road for our summer show season and that’s going to take us to the east coast for 3 different shows, so we’re going to be hanging out in South Jersey (our old stomping grounds) for all of June and the first days of July.

This means we can’t ship orders until we get back. We just won’t have access to all of our supplies while we are on the road. It sucks that we have to go on this hiatus, but the cost of gasoline, not to mention all the wear and tear we’d put on the car driving back and forth from Indiana are pretty good reasons to take an extended ‘vacation’ even though it’s not like a sittin’ on the beach sipping margaritas type of vacation. There will be SOME beach involved, but probably not nearly enough!

We’re bringing the kitties with us, too, so we’re in for QUITE an adventure. Oh lawdy, lawdy. What have we gotten ourselves into?

Without further ado, here’s our beloved Show Schedule. Maybe you can come out and say ‘O HAI’?

• Constructor Craft Fair - Berwyn, IL : Sunday May 25th from 12 - 8pm
• Art Star Craft Bazaar - Philadelphia, PA : Saturday May 31st (11am - 7pm) & Sunday June 1st (11am - 5pm)
• Renegade Craft Fair - Brooklyn, NY : Saturday June 14th & Sunday June 15th from 11am - 7pm both days.
• Crafty Bastards - Silver Spring, MD : Saturday June 28th from 10am - 5pm

If you can make it out, you will see lots of old favorites and NEW exciting products like KEYCHAINS and something else TOP SECRET!

For those of you who don’t know, My Favorite Mirror is just 2 people. Two CRAZY people who are doing a lot of traveling and craft-showing from now until mid-December. We drive out to all of our shows, so that means that we are going to be on the road quite a bit. And yes, this does and will impact our shipping schedule, so please bear with us as we scurry to get all of your packages sent out in time for the holidays. Your orders are VERY important to us. We do hope that we can meet all of your expectations.

So here’s a little run down via calendar of possible ship dates. If you are a google user, you can subscribe to our calendar by clicking below:

If not, here’s a screen shot - just click to make it pop open.

We will do our best to get your orders out by the next ship date, but it’s not always possible.

LAST DAY TO ORDER CUSTOM PRODUCTS for holiday shipping: DECEMBER 14th.

Please also note: The last day to ORDER in time for us to ship by the USPS’ cut off times for holiday delivery: DECEMBER 18TH. We cannot guarantee that your order will actually ARRIVE in time but we can guarantee that we will ship it by December 20th, which is the last day the post office says to ship for pre-holiday arrivals. If you need a guaranteed delivery date,we recommend upgrading to Express Mail.

If you have any questions, feel free to get in touch. Thanks for another great year!

We just made these adorable mirrors for Paper Doll in Chicago (one of our favorite shops) 7 year anniversary!

The star of these mirrors is the ‘venerable house pug’ Maude. I got to meet Maude personally this September and I have to say, she is quite venerable. Wait. What’s that mean? Maude is all kinds of things. And now she is a star! Visit Paper Doll at 2048 Division Street in Chicago and collect all three designs!

Like these? We can create a special mirror just for you. Really.