Let's hear your ideas bitches!

New Fabric style coming to Lucky Fiona Collars! We need some creative ideas of a perfect name so put on your thinking caps and let's hear the best you got. Winner will not only win this fabric style collar in any custom size they indicate but also have bragging rights that they are a creative genius in the world of dog & cat wear. The print is a repro from the 1940's so keep that in the back of your noggins! Comment here your suggestions or on our new Facebook Group "The Head Bitch ~ Musings of my Life Gone to the Dogs"

Head Bitch Facebook Group

Lily will be deciding our winner, so please try to impress her.

Finding a Needle in a Haystack Would be Simpler

Last September while enjoying our local dog park in The Springbrook Prairie Forest Preserve Miss Lily lost her collar with all her tags. Alex and I noticed as she pranced over to us her overt nakedness and scouted the area to no avail. Alex quipped at the time "Lily! Do you think we run a collar company or something and we can just whip up another collar for you?" (Yuk.Yuk.) I immediately thought...screw the collar, what about the tags?


I should mention we are blessed with a 36 acre fully fenced park with grassy areas, walking trails, tall prairie grass, trees and if you're lucky (luck being relative to if you are the dog or the person who has to clean the dog) after some rain...mud bogs. Lots of interesting terrain to cover. The next few visits I looked again in the general region she zipped around previous where I know she had her collar and then all of sudden did not. Nothing. I finally conceded defeat, reordered a new fancy name tag for $20, ordered another Home Again tag for $12 and paid my $10 to the county to get a replacement Rabies tag since you have to have one present to use the park. Good thing we get a discount on actual dog collars (ba-dum-da-dum) as the tags alone for her little collar-losing adventure added up and sadly Lily still has no credible income to cover the cost. Learning from our $42 mistake, we now leave one ID tag on the dog's collars (just in case they wander out of sight) when we go to the park with their name and our cell number on it. The Rabies and Home Again tag I clasp on their collar with a quick release loop that I remove when we enter the park. I keep it on my person in the event the Squirrel Police are checking dog park passes and rabies tags so we are legal and all and snap it back on when I leash the dogs to leave. Easy peasy and if we lose a collar again in the dog park confines I'm only out for one tag. 
I know some of you are reading this and thinking "Just get one of those cheapie PetSmart token machine ID tags-made-while-you-wait and call it a day sister." Um, hello. Have you seen our beautiful Lucky Fiona collars? Do you think I'm going to hang a crappy piece of tin on one of them? Exactly. Further you may be saying "Well the dogs are microchipped dummy, do you really need a tag ballyhooing their microchip number?" To which I say...um, I say, well, okay, I um, have nothing to say to defend that. Except I am anal retentive and think my dogs are such perfect creatures that everybody would want to steal them and I have an irrational fear of them being kidnapped by a sinister Cruella De Vil type who may just be swayed to not mess with them when they see the actual tag saying they have microchips. I know I am not the only one who feels this makes perfect sense. (am I? Hello?)


So imagine my surprise this past week to get a message on my cell phone. The caller's number was blocked as I guess they must be super important or famous and did not want me to be able to call them back. (Oprah? Have you been hanging at Springbrook with your spaniels and goldens? You have free time now.) This was the message:


"Hello. I'm at the park over here and I found your dog's collar. I'm going to put it on this tree here near where it was on the ground. Bye."


Sigh.
I listened to the message several times trying to decipher if perhaps there was some cryptic message I was missing. Nope. Pretty much the stupidest message ever. Hey genius, the dog park is 36 acres. You went through all that trouble to block your number when you called me so I think you are techno savvy enough to understand I cannot see you over the phone to know where you are placing the collar. There are many trees in a Forest Preserve, bub. The collar was lost, so indicating you are putting it on the tree near where you found it on the ground does not really assist me in locating it. 
Even more distressing is I went to the dog park that same day and in vain looked for it fully expecting to find the collar and tags. I did not. I used logic like "Maybe it's near the entrance?" and "Gee there are some picnic tables where people can sit near those trees, that's a good place to put a found object." Nothing. I looked at every tree along the main walking trails. Nothing. 
All I can say Oprah is that $42 may not be a lot to you, but it is to us poor working class Joes. You're just lucky I get the collars at cost.

The Bitch is Back. My New Blog.

I'm not Stella. I haven't had my groove back for some time. That's the thing about your groove, sometimes it gets so lost you don't even have the energy to go looking for it. Dang, my groove was halfway through Iowa before I even knew it was missing. I could review the laundry list of things gone wrong... health, wealth, death. If my life was a game of Pyramid the $25,000 answer would be "Words ending in "th" that have attributed to me being bummed out the last year." So now is a time to be picked up by your boot straps and sing a little song and go forth with a smile, right? Right. Right? Sigh.
First of all I had to Google the term "picked up by your boot straps" to even know what the hell it means and how to do it. This should be a person's first red flag that it's not as easy as it sounds. So I went in my closet and found the only pair of boots I own with actual boot straps.
 My white Doc Martens from when my Dublin wedding in cough, gasp, holy-crap-it-was-that-long-ago 1994. I placed my feet in them and pulled the straps with much vigor while attempting a standing position. I ended up falling sideways on the floor and nose to nose with my setter Pogue who surely thought this was some fun new game. We all know it is universal dog law that any time a human gets on the floor playing must follow, even if you are not planning on playing or in this instance trying to find the magical wisdom in the term "picking yourself up by your bootstraps". So I forgot about the boots and wrestled around with Pogue on the bedroom carpet until he collapsed with a loud puppy sigh. He then rolled on his back with paws dangling in the air and started to fall asleep while I rubbed his belly. His silly positioning made me laugh out loud and I realized something more profound than the boot strap experiment. Dogs have it right. Engage. Play. Be near somebody that loves you. Expose your vulnerability to the world. Be touched. Hope it's enough to soothe you to sleep fully content when all is said and done.

I'd like to say Pogue knew all this and understood he'd lead me where I needed to go upon sight of the boot straps. But honestly he just wanted to chew those boots. Real bad. Vintage leather with boot straps to drag the boot around with? Doggie deliciousness squared.
So this is me exposing my belly to you. (metaphorically speaking of course, because I haven't been to the gym in awhile, but that is another blog entry) My name is Shannon Barry. I am an artist. (it took me 40 years to realize that is a credible career title damn it!) I write, make dog collars, design tee shirts, play in my studio and sigh a lot. I am trying to be funny and happy and all the things hopeful creatures are whose blog you want to follow. Dogs are pretty much my whole life and yup, my life is whole. I'm also the Head Bitch around here. Listen up.
Smooches to the Pooches ~
          Shannon 

We Love a Rave!

From the Lucky Fiona Mail Bag...

Just thought I would send you some pictures of Klepto. She received the collar of the month as a Christmas gift from my friend, Denise. As you can see from the photos, Klepto really enjoys getting HER package each month. Thanks for sending such wonderful collars each month!

~ Angie and Klepto (aka the little blu-eyed dog)