OakMyth

Lots and lots of good news in our neck of the woods .

We've been offered booth space at the Oregon Country Fair; Huzzah!! We'll be sharing with a lovely lady named Maeve, who makes gorgeous dolls and puppets, in booth #109

In preparation for Oregon Country Fair, June 1st we will retire all of our Etsy listings (except for the tutorial and scrap sale listings), so please plan accordingly. More updates and new masks will be posted on our facebook fan page here: www.facebook.com/oakmyth

There are so many new and exciting mask designs & projects coming up. We've been ordering glass eyes, making rainbow animal masks, and just getting bigger and bolder as time goes on!

May has been surprisingly good for us. Plenty of sales despite the shop being empty for several months AND this is usually our slowest time of year. Makes me optimisitic about continuing this business

How are all of you?

-Ashley

WOOHOO! Considering we've been told by many to expect a few years of denials before an acceptance, the fact that we were accepted on our very first application definitely has put us in a good mood!



This is a HUGE festival in the pacific north west and we have heard nothing but good things about the explosion of color and creativity.

We still have to search for booth space though! If we're lucky, we'll be assigned a 1 year only booth, but otherwise we'll have to share space with another vendor. So, if anyone is vending at this festival and would be interested in sharing space with us, please let us know!

Thank you to Talty for featuring our beloved Fire Bird mask! We are always appreciative of the traffic DDs bring in

The fire bird mask is probably our most complex and difficult design, and even though it's a few years old we've only ever made 2! Layering 8 ounce leather with all of those fine little detailed cuts is not easy

I'm hoping to make another one soon though in an icy blue color combination

We're starting the process of signing up for 2013 festivals, and making some significant changes to our usual festivals. If you have any suggestions, please let us know!

Also, we'll be announcing the festivals we are signed up for after applications for said festival are closed. It's for safety reasons that I won't go into haha.

Anyway, please let us know if you know of any west coast festivals you think our masks would be a good fit for

Features:

Eve and I have been ordering our various feathers from featherstore.com www.featherstore.com for over a year now, and for the most part things have been going well.

This last purchase will, however, be our last.

On October 5th, we placed an order for several ostrich feathers as well as some white turkey plumes and silver pheasant tails. The feathers were to be for a custom snowy owl mask that was needed by October 24th. On their website, they state that all items that are in stock will ship within 3 days, and all of the feathers we ordered were in stock. Because all of our previous orders arrived within two weeks, we didn't expect to have a problem.

However on Wednesday the 17th, we STILL hadn't received a shipping notice. We checked our business email's spam and all the usual places that emails could disappear to, but with no luck. So, we contacted their customer service.

We purchased some less than pretty feathers from Michaels, and the buyer agreed that that was the best option. There was no way featherstore could get our feathers to us in time for us to ship the mask anyway, so we didn't have many other options.

On Thursday we got a reply from featherstore that said:

"I believe your order was already sent out.
You should've received an email from us through Stamps.com, FedEx or UPS with all the tracking information.
Please check your email as it may have possibly ended up in your spam-mail."

Eve responded immediately saying that there was NO tracking number in our spam and asked them if they could actually check on our order. [Instead of this "I believe..." nonsense.]

They never replied to the second message.

On Saturday the 20th, we finally got the package, and ohhhh big surprise... the tracking number shows that it wasn't shipped until after they got our first email!

So instead of admitting that they goofed, they were misleading and didn't give us the tracking number so, I can only assume, we wouldn't know that they forgot to ship our order. Needless to say, we aren't too keen on continuing to purchase feathers from that website, if our money would be supporting that kind of shady customer service.  



The silver lining here is that after hearing about our story, a dear friend who volunteers at the Wildlife Waystation in Los Angeles has been collecting the molted feathers from their non-migratory birds to ship to us. They have LOTS of large male peacocks as well as some white peacocks (which, I am certain will look lots better than the bleached peacock feathers we had been getting from Featherstore).

Still, she can only collect when they molt or fall out naturally. With that in mind, we are on the look out for some other humane feather sources we can purchase from. If you know of any, please comment and let us know