Nut and Bee will be taking a shipping break from Friday 15th to Monday 18th January. Orders received after 12 noon on Thursday (New Zealand time, convert to your local time here) will ship next Tuesday. I should have some email access during that time, but replies may be a little slower than usual. Thank you for your patience :)

Spider Drop

I never thought I’d be drawing spiders for N&B, given that I am very very frightened of them, but I was curious to see if I could manage it. I figured if I made the eyes googly enough they might not be so bad, and thus far I have not startled myself!

In The Intergalactic Sea

Froggy Blossom

I bought these treats for the kittens because I could not resist the name:

MILKY FLAKE-UMS! Don’t tell me you could walk past that on the shelf!

They turned out to be the most well-received of all the treats we’ve tried, and are always nommed with gusto, even though they smell and taste like nothing more than little pieces of ice-cream cone. (Yes, I tried one…) They must have some special magic cat ingredient :)

Double Swirl

• Six new rubber stamps
• Flat Flop Pug write-on labels
• Four new buttons/magnets

It feels nice to put up some new designs, it has been two months!

I bet I’m going to get a flood of out-of-office auto-replies from the mailing list this time, lucky vacationers :D

Over the last few days I’ve been doing my annual check of sales and statistics and spreadsheets. I like to take stock at the end of each year and freshen things up to make way for new offerings, and that means quite a few designs are being discontinued from the lettersets and write-on labels. They are all marked on their respective product pages now, and will disappear as soon as current stock runs out. In addition the 4×6″ versions of prints are now discontinued, though I can still produce these by special request if you email. I’ve also had to make minor adjustments to the prices of a couple of items but most are unchanged. Some of my suppliers have raised their prices but in most cases I’ve been able to compensate by purchasing larger quantities, hooray!

Now this is uploaded I may just go back to bed for a long-weekend sleep-in… mmm…

I’ve been reminiscing, as tends to happen at the end of a year and particularly the end of a decade, and it struck me how the time around New Years 1999/2000 was filled with change and possibility. In the space of three months I met JSR, sat my Bursary exams, finished high school, and started University. I was only 16 at the time, and it was so exciting to move from the dictated routines of school to making my own decisions and functioning more or less as a grown-up.

Now New Years 2009/2010 feels like another turning point as we get ready to welcome the bean. We’ve spent all this time as a couple, and in just two more months we will suddenly be a little family. It’s hard to imagine how different things are going to be, but I definitely feel ready to tackle the challenges.

My hopes for 2010 are very simple: to have a healthy baby, and to find a way to juggle our new lifestyle and keep N&B thriving. It’s going to be exciting, I really can’t wait :) Happy New Years, everyone!

Milky Treat

Penguin Show