Anne Ragg is on Vacation!

Anne Ragg is taking a break for a while, due to her owner being very overextended... Please come and check up on her sometime in the future, and thank you so much for being interested in her! :-)

Voting Time --- Anne-Ragg Raffle

Alright! It's time to give away the most popular Anne... Sorry, I didn't get nearly as many Annes together as I thought, but kindergarden-k applications were due (which means school tour, after school tour, after school tour, after...). So now it is in your hands. I will keep the list open for 1 week. If you want one of the Annes, just vote under the picture and leave a comment on the day your favorite Anne was posted. On February 20th, 2009 I'll count the votes, put the voters for the most popular Anne in a hat and pull a winner. I will contact you via the blog-id for your mailing address.



So good luck and happy voting!

5th Raffle Anne

Sinje is having a little bit of trouble with the every other day thing... There are too many fires burning right now, like getting American citizenship, and kindergarden applications, and sore throats, and knitting blogs... Too much. She's been running herself waaaay tooo ragged, so now we have really earned our names! :-)

But, nevertheless, here is Anne Ragg #5


Once again, the rules are: Every other day, Sinje will post a new Anne Ragg. Anyone who wants to vote can do so (see the end of each day's post). At the end of the month you have to register for the raffle if you want to participate. The winner gets one of the top three Annes...

4th Raffle Anne Ragg

Yey, we were just included in our second Etsy Treasury!

And here's Anne number four:



Once again, the rules are: Every other day, Sinje will post a new Anne Ragg. Anyone who wants to vote can do so (see the end of each day's post). At the end of the month you have to register for the raffle if you want to participate. The winner gets one of the top three Annes...

3rd Raffle Anne Ragg!

Here's number three of the year:



Once again, the rules are: Every other day, Sinje will post a new Anne Ragg. Anyone who wants to vote can do so (see the end of each day's post). At the end of the month you have to register for the raffle if you want to participate. The winner gets one of the top three Annes...

2nd Raffle Anne Ragg!

Hello, we are the newest Raffle Anne Raggs! We love each other, and swinging on trapezes! We are also very excited to have been listed in our first treasury on ETSY!



Once again, the rules are: Every other day, Sinje will post a new Anne Ragg. Anyone who wants to vote can do so (see the end of each day's post). At the end of the month you have to register for the raffle if you want to participate. The winner gets one of the top three Annes...

1st Raffle Anne Ragg!

Sinje actually did make her first Raffle Anne today and managed to take a pretty good picture of me.



I am very happy about the new black background. Had fun playing with marbles, too. :-)

Again, the rules are: Every other day, Sinje will post a new Anne Ragg. Anyone who wants to vote can do so (see the end of each day's post). At the end of the month you have to register for the raffle if you want to participate. The winner gets one of the top three Annes...

2009 Monthly Anne Ragg Raffle!

Sorry, you guys, but this one is not part of the raffle. I had to let the box appear under every post because of the way blogspot works :-).

Something very exciting has happened. As of January 1st 2009, Sinje will make one new Anne every other day. She will post the newest Anne on our blog. Anyone who wants can vote for us during the month (but only once a day!). You can vote each day, or any day you choose. At the end of the month Sinje will count the votes and determine which three of us were the most popular. Everyone who wants to join the raffle can enter their name. Sinje will then put all the names of the people who registered for the raffle, and pull out a winner who will win the Anne with the most votes. That winner will win one of the three Annes. How exciting is this! We are going to have our very own Anne Ragg raffle!!

It has been a while since we wrote and much has happened! Thanksgiving week was so cold that we could not come out at all. We spent the whole week hauled up at home, but Sinje made so many of us that we came out with three times more Annes than before! Friday after Thanksgiving we finally went out to our stand and spent the whole day in the cold, watching the "After-Thanksgiving-Feeding-Frenzy".


It was fun to watch so many people on the street, but it was still very very cold. Unfortunately, Sinje got sick the next day and felt totally demoralized about having done so much work on us and then having to lie down for a whole week. Then of course, as these things go, everyone else got sick in the household and Sinje had to take care of her family. Needless to say Christmas was here before she knew it. We didn't make it out to our street stand once because of all the chaos. This made us sit down and think very long and hard about our current setup, and it was decided (by majority vote) that we will not be out on the street again until at least April. In the meantime we will try to populate some of the New York Yoga studios. And we have found a new home on ETSY, this wonderful site where high quality home-made art lives and thrives. So please come visit us on Etsy!



Merry Christmas everyone!

Another sunny, windy day. Yesterday we forgot to mention that we are also getting to know Parisa, who sits on the other side of us.

Parisa’s stuff is very cool. She sells necklaces and pillows with religious images on them. Her website sells other non-religious items, but she can’t sell that on the street because it is considered “merchandise”. Religious items fall under the first amendment.

We are thinking of talking her into making some Jewish things, too, so we can give Adam a gift. While we were talking today, one of the vendors from down the street came by. Parisa asked him why he packed up so early and he said all his stuff was broken. Some crazy guy comes by his stand regularly and just kicks his table, so all of his Buddhas fall into the street. The vendor usually calls the police, but by that time the guy is long gone. We felt really sorry for the vendor and were a little afraid that that crazy guy might find us, too.

After the vendor left, we had a funny experience. A man from Kenya and his tour guide stopped in front of our stand. The tour guide exclaimed: "These are dynamic!" And the man took pictures of us, yelling: “I have to send these to Kenya!” We were very excited about this. How cool is that! They’ll know us in Kenya!

It is really getting cold out here--the kind of cold that seeps into your bones! We don’t know what we are going to do about the weather. Why it is so cold even when the sun is out? And why does the sun skip this block entirely, when we can see it shining on the other side of the street? This morning we froze right next to Chane, who sells lots and lots of T-shirts.

They are really funny: “I hate mayonnaise” and “Eat your fucking vegetables”. Chane has a letter from a judge that says his T-shirts are printed art (we agree). We think he’s really cool. He owns three stores in Mississippi and a gallery where he displays pop art. Early in the morning, we often watch his stuff when he gets himself some coffee, and he helps us out when we need to do something urgent ourselves!

This was a very mellow day. Sinje nearly finished Adam’s sweater. She is trying to submit it to an online contest by December 1st. It looks fabulous!

It rained today so we couldn't go outside, but Alystyre called and adopted two of us.

We were very happy because she seemed like such a nice woman. She is a yoga teacher and a screen writer who has lived in Soho for 16 years. She's giving the Annes to her friend, who also loves yoga. :-)

Sinje is still feeling very emotional. She watched The View and heard Whoopie Goldberg say: "Now I can finally put my suitcase down." So Sinje told us, "I'll make you all suitcases, so you can put them down, too." We don't think she meant that literally, but we really appreciated it. At night, Sinje read Faith Ringgold's book about Martin Luther King to her daughter. It's all about his "I Have A Dream" speech, and how he saw the Promised Land but didn't think he'd get there--although he hoped that we would get there someday. Sinje says we are seeing it too, now.

When the kids were asleep, we all sat in silence for a while and thought about all the people in the world who feel oppressed or desperate. And then we sang "We Shall Overcome" for all of them.

Sinje is crying. We are very puzzled about this, as is she. We all thought that she would be jumping around after Obama won, but she just went into a state, and today when she woke up she started crying. She thinks these are tears of relief, realizing only now how scared she has been about what could have happened, and how angry and sad she feels about what has happened over the last eight years. But there is much more there. We'll find out about it over time, I think. For now we just have to live with a very emotional owner who keeps running out of the room quickly, so her kids won't see her burst into tears again. But Sinje was also really happy. So happy that she decided to take us out onto Prince street today to dance, even though it is not Thursday yet (our usual day out). Tomorrow it's supposed to rain anyway, so we were thrilled. At 2 p.m., a very nice woman with the beautiful name of Alystyre stopped by and wanted to take two of us with her. She didn't have any money on her, though, so she said she would try to call Sinje tomorrow to arrange a meeting (in case it rained). What a nice end of the day... :-)

Election day! We are all very very nervous. All day we have been praying. We have been so busy that we haven't even noticed that none of us have gotten adopted today. A couple of people wanted to, but one woman had a grumpy husband who shook his head and another had no cash.

Sinje is feeling a bit shaky today because of the election. She has been wearing her knitted coat and a couple of people stopped dead in their tracks (the coat looks pretty spectacular). One woman wanted to order one and have Sinje send it to Texas. Now that made her feel a lot better, even though we won't know how we will all feel at the end of today when the election results come in. All day we have been praying: "Go Obama! Kick that man's &*#!"

Today was the first day that we played on trapezes.

Wow, is that fun! We love flying so much that it is hard to take turns, but there is only room for two of us at a time.

A few very strange things have happened since last week--or rather we don't find them so strange. Slowly, we have begun to take over Sinje's life. She created an online shop for us on Etsy. I, for one, showed her how to use the "move" tool in Photoshop so she could make us a really great banner for her store. She also learned how to take fabulous pictures of us on a spiegelreflex camera. She's never used one of those before! And, one of us snuck in and replaced her screen saver. Boy was she startled when she saw me making a summersault on her desktop.

Sinje scratched her head over and over again and said: "I didn't do that!"

We also helped her navigate through the Diamond District yesterday. Sinje was trying to find some brass chain for our trapezes. She got so freaked out by the weird characters on 47th street that she nearly bolted and headed home. There was one guy with wild glasses who yelled at her, "We buy gold!" and tried to pull her into a store. When he opened his mouth all his teeth were covered with gold and diamonds. No tooth enamel anywhere. A couple of diamond store guys whispered, "Only for you..." and tried to touch her. No one seemed to notice Sinje's wedding band. But, Sinje was fascinated by the diamond-shaped street lights. "Diamond District? No kidding! Everything here is diamonds."

Sinje ran in and out of stores asking for brass chain, but all she got was people trying to sell her gold, silver, or diamonds. When she was just about to give up, we said: "Just one more store, PELASE! We want to swing on trapezes today!" Someone at one of the stores had suggested 46th street, so we walked one block south. Suddenly we found ourselves in mecca! The store had everything we needed: all kids of metal chains, connectors, even trapezes. Sinje couldn't believe it. We bought lots of stuff and got home on time for her to pick up her daughter from Pre-K. Sinje thinks this is all some freaky chain of coincidences, but we know better. So today we told her, don't worry, we will all get adopted. We're just getting ready. It seemed to make her calm down. Now if we could only pull some strings for this election! We hope the praying has helped.

Today was cold (37F BRRRR), but really sunny. We tried out a new spot a couple of buildings over, thinking there would be more sun there, but we were mistaken. Turns out the sun is in our old spot form 10-12 and in the new one from 12-2. Sinje's husband, Adam, came to visit us. We really like him. He is a fantastic cellist.

About twenty minutes after he came, the sun went away and he helped us move back again.

People gave us a few thumbs up and a yoga studio owner from Brooklyn wanted to know whether lots of us might be willing to move in with her. We haven't been to Brooklyn in so long that we got really excited abut the idea. Later we talked to Erin. She was standing next to us today. Erin sews animals onto onesies and T-shirts. We really like them, but they are a little too big for us. Erin got really excited when she heard that some of us are going to swing on trapezes soon, because she has a spiral staircase in her apartment that she says looks kind of barren. Next, we'll be flying. We can't wait!

It rained so much on Tuesday that Sinje decided to take us out today instead, but we didn't even get out the door. We were all packed up and ready to go when it started drizzling. So we went back upstairs. That was not the end, though. Sinje ended up taking us up to Harlem where we got to dance on a gigantic bed where she took pictures of us :-)

Cold, cold, cold. We have to get warmer clothing. Scarves? At least it was sunny. We came out to play at 10 and played until 2:30 today, even though it was so cold. A few people noticed that we come in all colors now. There are so many of us!

Kids like us, too! Everyone wanted to know if Sinje had knitted the coat she was wearing (she had). So now Sinje is thinking of selling her coats and putting them on the table with us. She thought about this once before and had a photographer take a picture of it (on a model).

We hope we will still have enough space, and we are a little worried that Sinje won't need us anymore, but once again, she reassured us that we are all very much loved. Besides, she said that there are complications with selling coats from a street stand. Apparently you have to have a kind of vendor's permit that is only given to war veterans. You can't sell anything but art on the street unless you are a war veteran? That is so strange. It's the city's way of making sure the streets are not flooded with random people selling random stuff, Sinje explained to us. She smiled and said that she might not be allowed to sell her coat on the street, but no one could forbid her to promote it!

Today was cold and wet. We went out to play, but we froze in the wind. A couple of people said really nice things about us, but no one really wanted to stop in the cold. Then it drizzled, so Sinje wrapped us up and took us home. Bummer!

What a great day! Sinje came in the morning. She was feeling very low, but we were all happy to see her. She said she was stressed out about money and feeling like a fool sitting with us on Prince Street all day, just talking to people. We told her that we enjoyed playing on the table and that we loved the people who stopped to look at us, so Sinje took us out to play. Then it began to drizzle and we heard Sinje making plans to meet with her husband for lunch--uptown. She said she was going to pack things up. Just then a guy stopped dead in front of us and said: "I love these!" He was fascinated, and before we knew it, he carried one of us off. This was our first adoption. Right at that moment it stopped drizzling. Then two more of us were adopted, both by the same woman, a yoga teacher from Italy. Yoga in Italy! Suddenly, Sinje was just as sunny as the weather. Her husband came to visit downtown and gave her a huge hug. She seemed so glad that some of us had left that we began to wonder... But she reassured us that we are all very much loved and that she will miss all of us when we are adopted.

Today we experienced something unforeseen. Two very nice African American women came by, smiled, and asked Sinje: "Are you going to make these in brown, too?" Wow. Sinje did a complete spin of her head. It hadn't even occurred to her that we are all Caucasian. We live in New York where so many colorful people walk around, but we don't reflect that. Sinje was embarrassed. How can we all be born in New York and be completely homogeneous? She needed to change that immediately. We were really excited: we were going to get to k now lots and lots more Annes.