Back to Baskets

Many years ago, at a local craft show, I met two ladies who were selling Longaberger Baskets. They asked that I design some tie on ornaments for them, which I did. At the time I was cutting and painting small cut out shapes. That request changed my product line completely. I started participating in shows that catered to Basket Consultants and their customers. Lou and I ended up promoting The Basket Accessories Roadshow which had other crafters who made merchandise specifically for Longaberger Baskets. We traveled to basket loving areas on the east coast, from MA to FL. We always planned the FL shows for the middle of February to get away from the winter here in MD. Of course nothing lasts forever and eventually the "Basket Frenzy" played itself out and we stopped doing the shows.

I do however still paint on baskets for awards for several of the local consultants and have painted some of my own and sold those at shows. I found tub full of vintage Longaberger that I had used as display pieces when we set up for those basket shows.
I decided to paint those and add them to the Country Workshop website.
Sooooo, I was able to get a few painted and up on the site.

While doing the basket shows, we had a non selling website.
Couldn't seem to get a shopping cart installed so we just used it to let customers know where to find us and directed them to selling venues where we had our merchandise for sale. It was an abbreviated spelling of Country Workshop as the full spelling was already taken. Way back when only .com was available. We closed that site down last year when we put up the new website and eventually it just disappeared. About once a week, I do a google search for Country Workshop, just to see where the shop or merchandise may have been mentioned. Imagine my surprise last week when the old site popped up in Japanese. I of course clicked on the link and found that it is now a Japanese porn site featuring pregnant woman. Can you believe that? Can't understand why they would choose that name except that it was a working website for 15 years and they are hoping to trick our old customers into taking a look. Whoa! I looked so I guess it worked! At least I haven't gotten any emails asking if we've gone into a new business.