Handicraft Café is Live Online!

After lots of hard work and some delays, Aubrey and I are proud to announce the Beta launch of Handicraft Café!!

The launch means that we are open for online shopping! We're still constantly uploading and entering inventory and photos. And of course, some tweaking to the site here and there. There are still some missing photos and some photo distortion in the thumbnail view, but everything else seems to be in working order.

One of the most exciting features of the site for me is the multiple search functions and options. You can search through the customizable drop-down menu (pink), the keyword search (green) or through our detailed category lists (purple):


Another feature of the shop that we're very excited about is that we're going developing symbiotic and mutually beneficial relationships with artists of all kinds, with the majority of artists located locally to us. Zona Sherman, aka TwirlGirlFibers on Ravelry, has bravely volunteered to be our guinea pig first fiber artist tester. So far, we have uploaded and processed 6 of her yummy yarn creations. Future developments for the consignment section include adding more artists and bios of participating artists.

Acknowledgments: Many thanks to our friends, especially the wonderful local knit community and our special friends at All Things String for their constant support and encouragement, to Ben for helping Aubrey with all the Photoshopping, to Anna for our logo and to Mike and Derek for all the hours of web design programming and debugging! And of course, extra thanks to our significant others for supporting us in doing our own thing (and continuing to write those mortgage checks).

Threesome

About a month ago, I finally sent off the pattern and yarn to my test knitters for "Threesome" for Handicraft Café. Several months earlier, Zona and her family were kind enough to volunteer to be my models for the original hats. I specifically designed the pattern so that a knitter can knit 3 hats with 3 balls of yarn and get 3 very different looks. The resulting hat ensemble is a coordinated set for a family or to be distributed among friends.
My wonderful testers, Amy and Veronica, were not only speedy, they also gave great constructive feedback and did a wonderful job on the hats.

Over the weekend, I brought the fabulous hats to at get-together at Aubrey's. A couple of friends loved the hats so much that they immediately put them on and struck some fierce poses. In particular, they loved the color combination that we had Veronica knit. The impromptu photo shoot yielded a slew of fantastic, silly and funny photos. But unfortunately, it was a little dark and the results were not superb, even with some photo editing.

Derrick and Julian even dressed an orange with the baby hat and mounted it on a bottle of Heineken. And after working hard to show off his debonnaire style and poses, Aubrey thanked him with a massage, which resulted in a rather pornlicious snapshot.

As fabulous as some of these photos turned out, I don't think we could use them in the final print pattern - the resolution is not good enough for print, and they may just be a little too risqué for more conservative folks who want to knit a tame family project. However, some the the photos may end up on the Handicraft Café site as we continue to work on the programming for the search functions in the e-shop and the rest of the website. I think Derrick just started a new trend for all our future photo shoots. We may just have to enlist his modeling skills for the hats Amy made and some other upcoming projects. :)