In December we participated in Jimdo's 2011 Holiday Bash. Not only did we donate gifts for the occassion (3 Kingdom Classics shirts) but we won a prize too!

Our prize is a packet of custom postcards made by a sweet little girl named Sonja and her mom. Sonja suffers from acute lymphoblastic leukemia. She and her mom, Elena, use their Jimdo website to help pay for medical cost buy selling pictures, postcards and books.

We are so happy to have to have won this gift and wish Sonja and her mother Elena the best of luck. You can read about Sonja's story on their website.

Below are pictures our postcard. We can't wait to use them!

EsJay Designs is participating in the 2012 Penny Harvest Run for Change. The Penny Harvest is an educational, not-for-profit organization, which specializes in creating and managing service-learning programs for young people. Their most popular and best known program is the "Penny Harvest", the largest child philanthropy program in the United States.

Now, we're not the best runners, in fact, we may walk most of the route =], but we have teamed up with Common Cents because we believe in their cause and support the kids of New York and all over the country.

We believe that the children of New York are an untapped resource for change in our community. Every child has the potential to make a difference in someone’s life, whether by planting a community garden, painting a mural or collecting donations for a local shelter.  Often, our kids are on the receiving end of charitable actions; rarely are they seen as a group able to tackle issues such as homelessness and hunger. However, children all over the country are doing just that through their participation in the Penny Harvest.

By donating to the Penny Harvest you are empowering children and teens to continue making a difference. We are happy to be given the opportunity to raise funds for Common Cents and I hope you will join us in this effort.

How you can help:

• You can donate to our team's page
• Donate to Sandra's Page
• or Join the EsJay Team and ceate your own page

Thank you so much!
 
Sandra and Joe (Es & Jay)
 
Thank you so much!
 

Fables Vol 1

We're introducing a new segment in our blog we're calling "Stuff We Like." Here at EsJay Designs we're self-proclaimed geeks, but we bet you're wondering exactly what do we geek out about. Well, we'll tell you!

We'll start with me Sandra, the "Es" in EsJay. I'm a huge fairy tale geek. My love for Beauty and the Beast, Snow White, Pinocchio et al, started with Disney movies. When I got older I was shocked to learn that Walt Disney did not single-handedly create all of the wonderful stories and characters that I fell in love with as a child (fraud). I was also shocked to learn how dark and gruesome fairy tales were before they were watered down for kids.

Fast forward to 2008/09, I discovered Fables, a comic by Vertigo (a sub-division of DC comics). At first I was hesitant to read the series. I mean, if it ain't broke don't fix it- am I right? I don't generally read a lot of American comics to begin with and I wasn't sure if my first series should be about revamped fairy tales that I'm already familiar with. But curiosity won out and once I read 1001 Nights of Snowfall I was hooked!

Fables is about your classic fairy tale characters, starting with the European fables (Snow White, Cinderella, Sleeping Beauty etc. etc), who are driven from their homelands by the evil "adversary." There's raping and pillaging--basically genocide--happening in all of these kingdoms. You don't know who or what the adversary is, all you know is that while running for their lives, these characters somehow found a magical passage that connects their world to ours. They find refuge among us "mudanes" while living in exile for hundreds of years. Their new home, Fabletown, is on the Upper West Side of New York City only, mundies don't know that they're there because of a powerful spell their group of witches and wizards placed over Fabletown. Ole King Cole is the elected mayor but the town is really managed by his deputy mayor, Snow White. All of the other fables have regular jobs and/or own different shops in Fabletown (Cinderella owns a shoe store called "The Glass Slipper"). The most interesting character is Bigby (aka the Big Bad Wolf). Normally he's a bad guy, but in Fables he's the town's sheriff. But how does a wolf police humanoid fables? Especially when other fables who can't past for human, like the three little pigs, are force to live on Fabletown's annex upstate known as "The Farm" (also enchanted and hidden from the mundies)? I'll leave that for you to find out.

I absolutely love this series! I got three of my friends hooked and I embarrassingly gushed about my love for this book to a student at the high school where I work. The poor boy hadn't even started the volume but I went on and on about how awesome it is (I hope he read it).

If you like fary tales as much as I do or if you just like great story telling, I highly reccomend this book; volume 17 is slated for July--plenty of time to catch up (that felt like a Reading Rainbow segment).

Side Note: All of my knowledge about the origins of fairy tales was gained from a book called "The Witch Must Die" by Sheldon Cashdan. 

EsJay Designs is participating in the 2011 Holiday Bash sponsored by Jimdo. We use Jimdo to create our website and the online store for our Kingdom Classics t-shirts. 

As part of the celebration, we are givng away all three of our Kingdom Classics designs. That's right, you'll get Great White Mike, Lion Helmsley and Sliverback Joe for free! Whoo!

Just leave a comment on Jimdo's blog post and you'll have a chance to win.

One thing I'm learning as a budding entrepreneur is, there are other budding artists or entrepreneurs willing to lend a hand (one hand washes the other). Thanks to Joe's friend Lee and his little sister Sue, we were able to schedule another photo shoot. This time in a studio with a professional camera and models!  The studio was Le Image in Dumbo, Brooklyn, very posh area for those who aren't familiar. The building itself was right by the water so we had an amazing view of the Manhattan bridge. This was going to be awesome!

Joe and I had a 45 minute commute so we needed to leave early. For some reason I was convinced that the shoot was at 4:00, which meant we had to leave at 2:43 exactly (according to Google). But we were stalled by a phone call from one of our models. All of a sudden he had questions AND he wanted to bring a friend with him to also pose in the photos. Joe and I were like "What? Who is this person? We don't know if he'll fit the shirts." etc. etc. Needless to say, we did not leave at 2:43, and being the anal person I am, I was worried that we would be late and hold everything up and waste everyone's time. Lee was supposed to have another shoot scheduled with other models right after ours so I was really nervous that we would eat into their time and that they would be upset and it would just be a bad day! Drama queen, I know, but I wanted our first professional shoot to go well. This was all pro-bono and I didn't want to make a bad impression. When we got to Brooklyn two of our models were running late as well, so again, I thought crap, we're screwed. I asked Joe to call Lee to let him know that they should start the other shoot first so that we didn't hold them up, but Lee's phone went to voicemail, maybe they started already?

When we finally got to the studio we opened the door and saw that there was another group in there. Confusion. Were we at the wrong place after all? I checked message from Lee only to see that the shoot was scheduled for 4:45, not 4. Not only that, our female model was only a few blocks away. Whew! Crisis avoided, right? Let's get some snacks and wait for the others to show up! Which is what we did.

Five o' clock rolls around and Lee and his folks show up, then our male model, sans friend. We were a little behind, but things were still looking good, so let's do this! ... But wait, where were the other models? I had two guys with me (including Joe) and 1 girl (Joe's sis). The other female models were Lee's friends so I had no way of knowing if and when they were coming. One girl shows up maybe 20-30 minutes later. She's the redhead Lee showed me weeks before. Sweet! I have the perfect shirt for her. As soon as she came in I grabbed the shirt I wanted her to wear and got her into hair and makeup while Sue was taking photos of the other shirts. Things were going well, music was playing and we were making due with the models we had. Everyone was having a good time. Meanwhile, we were still waiting for the other model to show up to wear the third Mood Swings shirt. But she was late, really late. So, yours truly had to step in and model in the shirt instead. I was not prepared to do this, but when you're just starting out you have to be ready for whatever situation comes your way. "Rolling with the punches" has always been a motto of mine, why stop now?

After the shoot we headed over to Brooklyn Bridge park to get a few more shots outside with the sunset. Finally the other model shows up. We took a few photos of the girls in the Mood Swings shirts and then we went our separate ways, but not before learning that this was Sue's first photo shoot and congratulating her on a job well done. If we weren't so tired I would have suggested we get drinks, but Dumbo is expensive and it was time to go!

Now that we have some professional shots of our shirts (Kingdom, Kingdom Classics and Mood Swings) I have more images to create flyers and postcards with. I also gave each of the models a shirt to keep. Hopefully they will wear them and tell their friends about us! 

Be sure to check out the video of the shoot below: