Are we really retired?
Josh and I have decided to step back from the faire for now. This has everything to do with our full time jobs and the fact that working 80 hours a week is not something either of us want to do at this time, and nothing to do with the faire “wanting our location”. We have had an excellent relationship with the faire over the years and thank Scott and Heather for everything they’ve done to grow the business in the last 15 (I don’t know, it all runs together) years.
For the past 23 years, we have had the pleasure of seeing you all over the normal 11, 12, 13, or 9 weekend faire season (and Celtic fling) at the Pennsylvania Renaissance Faire while still working full time jobs that pay our bills. As we’ve gotten older, it’s become more work than fun and we’ve had to make choices that affect our business in a negative way in order to keep the aforementioned full time jobs in good standing. As of this past winter, we’ve decided to sell our shop at the faire. Our contract with the faire gives them right of first refusal when we decide to sell the shop and the faire exercised that right so you will be seeing their honey shop there this year.
Josh and I still have full working leather shops and are available for special orders via our (lackluster) website. Our mugs will still be available, in limited quantities, at The Emperor’s Needle and some of our pouches at Up Your Kilt. Most everything else will be available for order via email (help @ sjleather.com) until we run out of cows for leather or finally hit our hands with hammers enough times that we can’t hold the tools.
We thank you all for your patronage over the years and hope to see you in the future when we actually get to walk around the shire and see a show.
Ray Brehm
Josh Soifer
Eric Haug
Jillian Mooney
(I have no idea why this didn’t post in June when I posted it everywhere else. I was busy making mugs.)
The 37th Annual Pennsylvania Renaissance Faire
It’s here. Already for some, finally for others. This will be out 21st season at this Faire. We’ve changed quit a bit over those years, added new products, people, and even parts to the shop. Leather hasn’t changed too much, some refinements have been made in the tanning process, better tools have been developed, and it’s nearly tripled in price, but the same basics we started out with still apply. We’ll be open here for the next 13 weekends and Labor Day Monday, stop in and visit if you’re in the area. See the Faire’s website for details:
About That Time
We’d been kicking around the idea of a new site for years now. The aging code in the old one had been tweaked so many times that no one knew where the canned code ended and the customization began. We’d already discarded the embedded shopping system in favor of Square when they started offering a web based store and we hadn’t been able to get the contact page to work reliably for the last 3 revisions of PHP. The final nail in the coffin came over the weekend when someone told me that email was bouncing. I checked the web site and was presented with a “Unable to connect to database server!” message and nothing else. For the second time, our web host had shut off our service without bothering to invoice us. It was at this point that the old proverb “Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me.” kicked in and I made sure there will be no third time.
Search, search, search, read review, read review, read review, demo, demo, demo, ding, ding, ding, we have a winner. New host, new domain name, new web site and all before August.