This holiday season sees many new additions to our collection of smoking men from the Erzgebirge: the charming smokers by the workshop of Klaus Merten, and a number of cunning miniature smokers from Crottendorf.
The Merten smokers are the typical height of the Erzgebirge smoking man–approximately 8 inches–and feature a wide range of subjects: There are […]

The past week or two has brought us the fantastic large Noah’s Ark by Christian Werner. It is a design that has been years in the making, as Herr Werner worked and reworked the ark, and it is well worth the wait. Truly a masterpiece of Erzgebirge folk art!
The Werner workshop was not the only […]

We’ve received a number of new Easter decorations over the past week, as well as old favorites that had run low. I’m very partial to the straw-decorated set pictured here, knowing from my wife’s forays into egg-decorating how difficult this craft is to do. The individual eggs are equally stunning, ranging from simple designs to […]

We are happy to offer three new styles of fillable easter eggs, which are found on the Easter Decorations page. The new styles are the “Country Living” series, featuring nostalgic designs of the Easter Bunny and his family; the “Gold” series, with flowers or children, chicks and rabbits on a gold background; and silk paper […]

There is a brief article about the Reifendrehen style of woodcarving, with a mention and picture of our friend Christian Werner, in the December/January issue of German Life. Be sure to look it up!

A friend has just returned from visiting the Frauenkirche Dresden, which will celebrate its 800th anniversary in 2006. She brought us a brochure from the cathedral’s shop, which is featuring a wonderful new collection of figures by Siegfried Werner. Herr Werner was hard at work on these pieces when we visited him in July, and […]

Our Traditional Nutcrackers and Smoking Men category includes three new nutcrackers from the Fuechtner workshop: a natural colored King; a natural colored Forester; and a very handsome Station Master. We also are expecting more of the new Fuechtner Toyseller smoking man any day now.

We’ve posted six photographs from our recent trip to Seiffen in the Erzgebirge, which may be found here. They show the Füchtner workshop (two pictures) and Christian Werner’s workshop, and include some images of Reifendrehen in progress. (For more information about this style of woodcarving, visit the Folk Art information page.)

We should soon have pictures to post of our just-completed trip to Seiffen, Germany, where we met with several of our favorite craftsmen and got to see their newest designs firsthand. We will be getting several new pyramids (to add to those that arrived in April), and have an exciting project in the works that […]