Discover how Cat's Meow Village pieces are made

Cat's Meow Village Collectibles started as one woman's effort to make some "side" money with handicrafts, and ended being a national collector's trend. Faline  Fry Jones started making Cat's Meow Village pieces, (Let's call them CMV from now on), by herself using whatever resources and materials she had around home. They caught-on with people because they were "cute and folksy" and soon turned into a national collectors trend. People began displaying them in groups on their door or window ledges, and even creating "small town" layouts on table tops and mantles and collecting them as sets. It wasn't long before Ms. Jones was recruiting family and friends to help her produce her CMV pieces. This is the story of how they were made.

Cat's Meow Village pieces are wooden decorative pieces.

Cat's Meow Village pieces are decorative collectibles made of wood and shaped like buildings. There are also CMV accessories shaped like billboards, signs or whatever they are representing. They were designed to sit upright or on ledges, (many people put them on their door or window frame ledges), and are made of 3/4 inch think pieces of wood that range from 3 to 8 inches wide, and 4 to 8 inches tall

...and this is how they are made

The designs on each piece are screen printed and each has the piece information, series date, Casper the cat, and Falines dated signature on them for authentication. Initially they were created as individual creations, but they quickly became popular sellers and were issued in sets and series. This increased their collector's value because now people would buy them to complete their series or set collections.

So now you know that, ( if you didn't already) Let's move on to how they were made... in the early years, and later when sales volume demanded increased production.

The early steps:

1. create the design, and draw the outline on a piece of board
2. cut the board to match the design outline
3. sand the cut piece
4. paint the piece with a design color base coat
   
5. let it dry, and lightly sand to remove burrs and imperfections
6. paint a design detail, let dry, repeat step for each different design detail color
7. Inspect for flaws and stamp piece with Casper the Cat, piece info and, Faline's signature

Those are the basic steps, here's how she did it

Faline Jones made her first CMV pieces from some pine boards and left-over room paint from her house. The early pieces were all hand done, step by step. The story of that very first piece illustrates the early production process:

After she had the design on that first piece of wood, she had to find a way to get the wood cut into the shape of her design. Grandpa Mullet had built himself a small workshop in the loft of his hog barn, and he had a homemade power jig saw. Off she went.

When she had her first piece cut in the shape of her design, it was back home to her basement to begin the painting process. First, a base coat was applied, using a color that matched the base color of her design. (The first pieces of The Cat's Meow Village, (CMV), were actually painted with leftover paint from various painting jobs around the house.)

Each step was a time consuming process. First the base colors had to be applied and allowed to dry. (That drying process had to be done for each color used) Then each area of detail had to be hand painted and allowed to dry. Even doing each process on multiple pieces was still just as time consuming because of the need for the drying process. As mentioned earlier, the first 24 pieces took 2 weeks.

Trivia Tidbit: Those first 24 pieces did not have any authentication marks. No Casper, no piece identification, and no signature.

After that first order, the shop owners, (two were involved now) convinced her to design a series of buildings. It started as 14 different designs but boiled down to 12 basic building styles. They were named after their basic functions. Such as Apothecary, Toy Shop, Victorian House, etc

It was then that Faline developed the concept of stamping the name of each piece on the bottom, along with her signature and year.

Business was looking up, but now she really needed production help.

This is when her husband Terry first jumped in. He handled buying the wood, using a radial arm saw in their basement to cut the wood into blocks, and then taking the outlined blocks back to Grandpa Mullets to cut out the designs. Then it was back to Faline's basement for sanding, painting and stenciling.

ps. after those first 24 pieces took two weeks to make, her shop owner friend suggested she try stenciling the details to help speed up the details painting process.

let's break here... and continue below

CMV was doing well, but Faline needed some help. So when summer arrived Faline recruited her friend Dannette, (a school teacher) and another friend to help her with the painting and stenciling.

The orders started rolling in, Faline was pressed for production. She wasn't happy with the stencil results, and even with the extra help, she wasn't able to keep up. Her next step was to get Jeff Miller, the owner of a new woodworking shop called Archwood. too get him to cut the designs from the 'raw' blocks and take over the purchasing of the wood and doing the 'rough' cuts.This allowed Terry to help Faline in other areas, giving her a little more time for the designing aspect of her production.

It was about this time that Terry designed a spray rack so they could paint the base coat on multiple pieces at one time. This cut initial paint production down to about 15 minutes

The early days at CMV were all about family and friends. This wasn't some big company buying divisions and production facilities, it was Faline's energy and effort, relying on friends and family, to grow her business a step at a time.

Faline soon discovered that her pride in the details of each piece was not being well served with stenciling. Although it was faster, the stenciling process just didn't produce the degree of detail that Faline wanted.The next step was to go to screen printing the designs.

It was also about this time that Faline realized that CMV had overwhelmed their home and she had to find more space. Jeff, at Archwood wasn't using all the space in the building his wood working shop and he offered a part of the building to Faline.

It was a good match, she could get the extra space she needed, and get her final production efforts under the same roof as the design cutting process that Jeff was doing. So in 1983 Faline made the official company move to her new space on Nold Avenue.

Trivia Tidbit: It was at this time that Casper the Cat, the silhouette on each piece, became standardized as black. Until then, (after those first 24 pieces, remember?) it was a toss-up choice of whether Casper was White, Brown, or Black.

whew! writer's cramp, let's take a coffee break and finish below...

Business was booming, and even with the expanded space at Archwood, production needed to be sped up. In 1986 she revamped several of her production techniques. Pine -- the wood Jones hand-selected for her early pieces -- had been replaced by a furniture-quality pressed particle wood with a more consistent texture and appearance. And at some point, Jones' signature became part of the manufacturing process. The Cat's Meow was too big an operation for her to sign every piece by hand.

Trivia Tidbit: The piece info and Faline's signature were actually two separate rubber stamps, hand-stamped, just like she would use when she was a secretary

By then, a wooden house took maybe six or seven minutes to make -- compared with the 12 to 14 minutes Jones and her small crew of friends and relatives spent on each product in the early '80s. Instead of painting each keepsake by hand, workers were cutting and painting them in batches, using a screen-printing process in which inks are pulled over stencils to create sharp images.

Business continued to grow and Jones expanded. In 1989, she built a 24,000-square-foot building just outside Wooster, which today has 70 employees. This growth momentum continued through the mid-1990's, production lines were refined, and new employees added to keep up with the demand for these collectible pieces.

But momentum of the mid-'90s did not last, as fickle consumers lost interest in buying every single piece and moved on to other trends. Jones saw a shift in her shoppers. Instead of collectibles, they were looking for keepsakes of places they had visited and things they had seen. They wanted personal connections.

In response, the company launched two of its most popular lines: "My World" and "Fond Memories." The first turns shopper-submitted photos into representations of their homes or other buildings, reimagined in the two-dimensional, Cat's Meow-style. The second uses a heat-transfer process to re-create an actual photograph, often accompanied by text, on a block of wood.

And that... is the story of how Cat's Meow Village pieces were produced then, and are produced now.

You can see the story of how The Cat's Meow Village Collections started at this Hubpage:

If you have made it this far, thanks, and I hope you'll leave me a comment before you go.

Gregory W. aka Appletreedeals, started out as an occasional ebay seller, selling old stuff from around the house. From the very 1st sale of some old bulk Legos, I was hooked! I started scavenging the attic, and garage for old unneeded items, I started getting up at 5am on Saturday mornings to go to yard sales, and started scouring Goodwill and Salvation army stores. Pretty soon there was a new phrase heard around the house, "Dad! did you sell my..."

When I became an ebay Power Seller and registered Trading Assistant I knew it was time to step-it-up, and Appletreedeals was born. I did the 'whole legit business' thing with a business license, tax ID, and some local advertising. I started getting some consignment sales, (of course I continued to list my own items too) and then I contracted to liquidate the inventory of a local up-scale gift shop.

And that is how I first became involved with the Cat's Meow Village pieces. Most of the shop inventory items were in quantities of 6 or less, and almost all items sold well. But they had over CMV 300 pieces left after most of the shop had been liquidated so rather then string out months worth of listings, I made a bulk purchase from the owner, and began selling them myself.

As I researched these items, I discovered they were all retired pieces from collector's series. Also many of the pieces represented actual buildings, not just creations of Faline Jones. So, being the 'greedy' guy that I am, I didn't want to just give these away for pennies in bulk listings on ebay, I wanted to get top dollar for my pieces, and I thought providing piece history and provenance would add value and make my pieces more attractive to buyers and collectors.

And that is how The Cat's Meow Village Finder blog came to be. The more research I did, the more interesting these pieces, and their story, became. especially the pieces representative of real and historic buildings. Now, as collector's items in a decorative item niche, these pieces weren't 'flying off the shelves' fast. They were selling but it was a slow process, and that is when I began to look for net outlets to promote and link to my CMV eCommerce sites.

And... that's how I found Hubpages!