The Crafty Toads

Those of us who work in retail follow a different calendar than the rest of the world. In the fall when homeowners are beginning to decorate for Halloween, we are getting advertisements for Valentine's Day. Next week, we will attend NY NOW, a wholesale gift show, where we should be planning out Christmas. We, most likely, will be oohing and aahing over Easter.

As a maker selling our own items online, we need to have our Easter items up in the next week or so. Since we sell...

At a class recently, people started talking about everything except the topic at hand, as they are want to do. One of our friends described a project she was planning out for a temperature blanket. The idea is you knit a row (or crochet a block) for each day of the year in colors corresponding to the temperature of that day. Since you can't have a different color for every temperature degree, you map out blocks and match them to colors. For instance, anything in the 20's will be one color, the 30's will be another color, and so on up, and down, the...

Because we like to keep everyone informed ....

Those who have been with us since our Fragile Earth Stuffed Animal days may remember our mascot Clive. Clive is a Cordy Roy Aardvark from Jellycat and he has traveled many places with us. 

He loves the theater!!

And he's always a hit at the Javit's Center for the New York Now (gift show).

We decided that our social media posts were missing a little pizzazz and checked to see if Clive...

Yesterday, we held our first quilting class at Toad Hollow. Most people attending were complete novices so Nancy, our instructor, began at the beginning. She brought some partially finished blocks to show us color theory and the importance of finding fabrics that work together.

We were starting with a simple 9 square block. From her quilter's bible, 5500 Quilting Block Designs by Maggie Malone, (which you know we now NEED to get!) Nancy showed us that there are over 1000 variations of the 9 square block. 

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