Haberdashery
Definition: small articles for sewing such as buttons, needles, thread and zips [British English]

Haberdashery has been the "kennel" name I adopted for myself since beginning to actively participate in the petz community as a young adult; at that time I was working in a fabric shop and I really like the feeling the word evoked for my petz - lots and lots of odd little bits and bobs and nicknacks!

I no longer work there, but I still love to sew and will continue to use the name within the PC; it's such a unique word, distincly English, a bit old-fashioned, and I've always really loved it!

I'm still relying heavily on a WYSIWYG editor to help me along (hello MS Expression Web 4 you are my life saver) but also learning a bit of HTML and CSS as I go along and finding it not quite as scary as I always thought!

Like many of us, I'm nostalgic for the old web I used to browse as a kid/teen so my site will never get super-fancy or technical, but I think a lot of us in the PC have this same nostalgia and anyway, I like it just the way it is. It's pretty obvious - I'm using Comic Sans, after all!!! :>

Ancient History
As a teenager I created and uploaded a couple of Petz sites to the web, both created mostly using free copy-and-paste templates I downloaded and edited with Microsoft FrontPage (RIP).

My very first site was Northern Lights Wolf Kennels, hosted somewhere like Geocities or Angelfire. The layout was a narrow frame on the left for navigation, with the site pages displaying in the right frame. The background image was the northern lights (surprise!) and there was a little soundclip of a pack of wolves howling when you first opened the site :>
At the time I was obsessed with the Wolf file from APKC and had an extensive "pack" in my petz game.

My second site was named Featherwind, hosted on my own domain which was purchased for me as a gift from a cousin (What a cool present!) around 2005-2006. I distincly remember a mostly white layout with green as my text colour? This layout was a lot fancier involving multiple frames; navigation was at the bottom, the site pages were above and a frame on the right showing a graphic of a barn owl feather that I had scanned into my computer.

I offered my very first hexed litter of Great Danes on this site and received an application - I'm amazed anyone found it as I wasn't really active in the community! - but I was young with an over-inflated idea of how good my hexes actually were (newsflash; they were probably awful) so I never accepted that person's application and sent them the pet they applied for. Whoever you are, I'm so sorry that younger me was so stingy!!! :'<

Another layout was based around one of my all-time favourite video game characters (Vergil from the Devil May Cry series - still adore him! <3) and had a little clip of music from the game playing in the background. At this time I was totally obsessed with the Flynx file from Cheetah Kennelz, and Mojo Kennels/Moonoracle site and all of Mojo's files.