All Sorts of News...

First, let me begin with this piece of news:  an exceptionally generous and super AHHH-MMAZZ-INNG person backed our Kickstarter project this afternoon with $1,000 dollars.  Yeah, I know.  It took my brain a full 30 seconds to process what I was reading on our Kickstarter dashboard.  And then I basically lapsed into this:

It is a completely overwhelming experience to have someone not related to you by blood or by law believe in your project so much.  I love the principles behind Kickstarter for a lot of reasons, but I think being able to assess and explore grassroots support for a project has to be the very best part of the whole endeavor.

Secondly, we have been working on www.logotournament.com for the past week to bring you a new Peggy Jean's Pie logo.  I wish I had a picture of our old logo for you here, but I don't (Polaroid malfunction?).  I remember plaid and pie.  It served its purpose for Peggy Jean's 1.0 but we knew that Version 2.0 needed a new logo to go with a new look.  Fred Parry at Inside Columbia directed me to LogoTournament.  I thought I was fairly hip on the cool websites to use, but this one completely flew under my radar and it is awesome.  For a flat $275 fee, you enter in all sorts of information about your business on their site and indicate all sorts of your preferences (cool colors v. warm, masculine or feminine audience, raw or cozy...the list goes on and on) with a sliding scale.  Once you have done that, designers from around the world submit their take on your new logo.  As of this writing, we have 74 different designs to choose from and designers from at least 10 different countries.  You can also communicate with the designers during the process and ask that something be done in a different color or tweaked in some way.

The fun part is that you can constantly rank the designs as they flood on to your page.  The interesting thing is that we have several people logging in and viewing the logo options and the rankings keep changing.  We definitely have a top 5 we are considering and we should have a decision and a full release on the image by the end of the week, so you will see it here first!  I certainly have my favorite...as do all the other people who have logged in to look.  The site guarantees you a minimum of 50 designs, which sounds reasonable until you completely cannot make up your mind because there are too many that you like.

And in our final news for the night, we have something really fun to share.  I've been sitting on this news for a week and it has been KILLING ME to not share it here but I wanted to be sure it was a full systems go before letting the cat out of the bag.  Inside Columbia magazine has an amazing headquarters on Broadway that also houses their Culinary Adventure Center (http://comoculinaryadventures.com/) where all sorts of cooking classes are held on a regular basis.  Guess where this is going?

And that's right...we will be teaching a baking class there next Wednesday night, October 23rd, at 6:30 pm. It will make yesterday's wine swilling, Food Network staged television news event look like child's play. This kitchen has all sorts of video cameras mounted for easy viewing and a kitchen stocked with professional equipment.  We are anticipating 36 to 40 attendees, but it can hold up to 70.  Once the link goes live tomorrow for sign-up, I'll post it here and on our Facebook page.  I have no idea why you wouldn't want to come to this event...you will make baby pies and we are bringing a ton of pies for us all to share after our hard work is done!  Also, you will get to see us sweat it out, try not to swear or get the giggles, and roll dough while wearing four inch heels and probably drinking wine.  So, I ask you, what else could you want in this world?  Pie AND quality entertainment AND a bunch of fun people?  Sign up tomorrow so we can do this together.  I'll put the link up as soon as it becomes available from Inside Columbia! As always, remember Kickstarter here:  http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1576929042/bring-back-peggy-jeans?ref=live.  A dollar or a thousand...each backer gets all of our love!