We're growing and moving...our last post here

The last year has been an exciting whirlwind. We're growing and moving....

First things first: we have a beautiful new web site and blog — come visit! We're sad to say goodbye to our old blogger blog here, but we needed more room. Thank-you to everyone who has visited, commented and written to us here.

We're moving in other ways, too: you can also see us moving — animated with traditional stop-motion here ....

We started as a series of postcards in clothing stores, became a popular book series and now we are jumping into stop-motion animation with our new interactive stories which we are developing with the award-winning team at Loud Crow — the team behind Peanuts' A Charlie Brown Christmas, Richard Scarry's Busytown and Beatrix Potter. We're so happy and excited to join their family.

For us, this has meant an amazing learning curve, especially learning to work with a larger team when we're so used to just working together — as two friends. Also: learning how to make stop-motion-ready art; learning how to direct ; learning how interactive storybook apps work; learning how to balance our family life in whole new ways and, possibly most challenging, understanding twitter.

The results have been rewarding and amazing. Our first storybook will be available on iTunes this fall. It's better than we could have dreamed. You can see how proud we are, above. Those are dolls of us! We had a cameo in one of our new stories.

On top of all these things we have brand new pinterest, twitter and instagram accounts — we'd love to see some friendly faces!

We'll have lots of new crafts, updates and more, starting in September. It's going to be an exciting time, please join us!

Photo credit, bottom photo: Lori Kiessling

Sunny and Windy in the woods

In 2000, before we had a publisher, we put out a set of postcards with pictures from Windy and we sold them at Eugene Choo and Dream in Vancouver. We included in the set two snapshots of Windy and Sunny posed sitting on logs (well, sticks really). We called the two pictures "Windy in the countryside" and "Sunny in the countryside". But it's funny, when we came across the old digital files, they were called "sensitive_windy.jpg" and "sensitive_sunny.jpg". We named them that because we thought they looked like "sensitive" folky musicians, especially with the lens flare. This was a joke we had forgotten until the files showed up.

(In the spirit of the olden days, our link to Windy today is from our first review by Shift in Japan. Ah, back in the days when Judith had just opened her studio, Steedman Design, and Robin was still studying design at Emily Carr.)

Edited to add: We still sell the books at Eugene Choo and Dream!

R & J collections

We have new activities to package and post, but in the meantime we thought we would show you this surprisingly accurate portrait of us. In fact, here are some samples from our collections...