Gifts for Dog Lovers - Door Knockers for Staffy Dog Owners

Our Dog Door Knobs have been on our web site for a couple of months now and include eight breeds of dog and 4 cat breeds. The dog collection is being expanded to include a Yorkshire Terrier and a Pug.

Our marketing is mainly by word of mouth through our blog as the collection develops with new pieces being added.We will also be sharing news on Jackson our new Staffy dog and companion to Iris, our current Staffy who has been featured many times on our blog.

We have announced our new collection through press releases and through Pet Companion Magazine which is well known locally in Southern California and neighboring states, and which is an excellent read in print at news-stands and on line at www.petcompanionmag.com.

We are very pleased that our dog themed accessories are receiving a good response from dog owners and orders are starting to arrive. Our first order for door knockers was surprisingly for six Staffordshire bull terriers. While we concur with the customer that the Staffy head is quite exceptional and warrants an order for six it did raise the question “who needs six door knockers?” We have concluded that the customer must have some very worthy friends and that the season for gifts is only 5 months away.

We took a few pictures of the patinaed door knockers, and the pack makes an interesting artistic statement.

Happy July 4th

We are celebrating the 4th with a long weekend and hope you are able to do the same. Ours will be spent comforting our older dog Iris, who like many dogs finds the noise of fireworks nerve racking. This year she is a little more fortunate as one of the advantages to her mature years is her diminished hearing and with a lot of ambient grey noise from electrical appliances we hope she will not hear the booms from city’s fireworks. For all the dog owners out there we wish you and your dogs a safe stress-free holiday.

To see other dog and cat themed door knobs visit our dog and cat pages.

Boxer dog door knobs

Having officially launched our new collection of dog themed door hardware we wanted to share some of the background behind each dog breed.

We have four boxer dogs in our neighborhood with wonderful names, 2 are named Tank and Pistol, they are difficult to tell apart which given they are brothers is not too surprising. The other 2 are rescue boxers named Doctor and Dolly. Dr is a white boxer named after the well- known British show “Dr. Who” the other is named Dolly and as you probably guessed is a nod to Dolly Parton. My neighbor is a long- term fan of boxers and all his dogs have come from Boxer Rescue Los Angeles, a non-profit rescue center funded solely by private donations with a fully staffed kennel facility in the San Fernando Valley.

The creative end result of our neighborhood boxers  is a boxer head door knob set. The door knob exists as a functioning passageway set or can be used as a fixed door knob. The boxer head is also available as a simple door pull, or coat hook or as front door knocker. So far we have 8 breeds of dog but have 2 more on the design board which we hope to add by the end of this year or early part of next year.

All of the dog door knobs are made with the same eye for detail as our other lines of door hardware and made the same way using the lost wax method to create intricately detailed castings.

Different Door Knobs - One Door Set

We often get requests for mixed knob sets for our passageway door sets. If you are familiar with our site and catalogue you will know that the Netsuke collection allows you to mix and match our lizard, frog, rabbit, and bumble bee knobs. What is less obvious but just as creative an invention, is to mix the knobs from our Hedgerow and Willow collections. As all 3 collections have a nature theme, we feel the tree canopies of Hedgerow or the swirling leaf orb of Willow work well with the animals in Netsuke and their textural back-plates. The last image below shows how designer Bonnie J. McIntire paired the willow knob with the bark back-plate from the lizard collection.

A recent order by designer Hillary Zeiss went to the next level for both color and collection mix. The door set was created using a pea green frog on one side with a blue green (vert gris) lizard on the other. The door set also had a dead bolt lock activated by using our beetle turn piece and this was also patinaed blue green.

An eclectic group of cabinet pulls were included in the order with fiddlehead ferns finished blue green to match the lizard knob and with a dragonfly, frog and gecko finished in a simple but complimentary light antique oil-rubbed patina.

The blue and blue patinas were made with varying intensities and applications of acetic acid applied to the surface of the bronze heated to 180 to 100 degrees. We use various commercially available concentrates to expedite the oxidation of the surface molecules and halt the process by sealing with wax to prevent a further chemical reaction. The light antique patina on the cabinet pulls was achieved with a cold application of a commercially made selenic acid, once the desired depth of color was achieved the piece was wiped with a wet rag before being sealed.

The swirling leaves of the willow knob paired with the bark back-plate from the lizard collection.