Anita’s Ocarinas
What the museum holds of anitasocarinas.com, Anita Feng’s site in Issaquah, Washington, and on what terms.
A note from the museum
This page records what the museum holds of a website that is no longer online, and what it may do with it. It is not by the maker, and nothing from the site is republished here.
The museum’s account of her work, with a chronology, is at Anita Feng.
Anita Feng made stoneware ocarinas in Issaquah, Washington, and sold them from anitasocarinas.com. She threw them by hand on a wheel rather than pressing them in moulds, which is an unusual way to make an ocarina and the thing she was proudest of: “the process of turning the ocarina body on a wheel brings a greater structural integrity, therefore provides a sweeter, more resonant sound… That’s why very few make ocarinas this way.”
What the site held
A small site for a one-woman studio. Her catalog listed two lines. Necklace ocarinas, four holes, soprano and sopranino, in unglazed red terracotta or glazed stoneware, supplied with a black cord and with a song sheet she had written herself “in such a way that there is no need to be able to read music in order to play them.” And traditional ocarinas, ten holes, which she described as playing “one and a half octaves with full chromatics” in soprano, alto and tenor — sopranos and tenors in B♭, C or D, altos in F or G, “most suitable for playing with other instruments.”
The catalog grew once, then shrank in public. In June 2004 a necklace ocarina was $30–35 and a traditional one $50–60 in three sizes. By February 2007 a bass had been added at $75 and the others had risen to $55–65. In June 2008 that list was still complete; by September 2008 the alto, the tenor and the bass were all marked Sold Out, leaving the soprano and the four-hole necklaces; by May 2009 the tenor was back and the other two were still gone.
She never updated the description page to match. In every version the museum holds, including the last, it still offers the traditional ocarina “in the soprano, alto and tenor sizes” and says nothing about a bass — the instrument existed only on the price list.
She did not describe her traditional ocarinas as Donati’s. That phrase comes from the Seattle Times, whose reporter wrote in 1999 that she “makes standard ocarinas in the Donati style.” Her own page says only that the instruments were “developed to the traditional western tuning in Italy during the late 1800’s”, and says of the fingering that it “is very similar to other standard wind instruments such as the flute or recorder” — which is not a description of the Italian system. The museum records what she wrote, not what was written about her.
Double ocarinas are the same case. Both 1999 newspapers say she made them. Her own catalog, in every capture the museum holds, does not list them. She may have stopped, or made them to order, or never sold them from the site; the documents do not say.
A book page carried several thousand words of excerpts from Ocarinas For a Song: An Ocarina Maker’s Guide to Craft, Life and the Unknown, with an invitation to readers to send their names for notice of publication. It also carried four sound recordings of the instruments themselves, which are the kind of thing that exists nowhere else once a host is gone.
How it ended. She had already retired from ocarina-making: between September 2007 and April 2008 the front page gained a notice selling off the remaining stock. Then the registration ran out. The site was still up on May 16, 2009; by June 12 2009 every address on the domain returned a notice from the registrar reading “The domain anitasocarinas.com has expired.” That page is the last thing in the museum’s copy, and it is worth being clear that it is not hers — it is what a hosting company serves when nobody renews. The domain was afterwards parked and offered for sale, carried an unrelated Japanese-language site from 2013, and has answered to nothing since 2016.
What the museum holds
218 files, 2.6 MB — and 94 further captures of those same pages, taken on other dates, 832.2 KB more. So this is a record of how the site changed, not a single day of it.
| 139 | pages |
| 19 | photographs and illustrations |
| 8 | sound recordings |
| 42 | small images that are page furniture rather than pictures — buttons, rules, spacers |
Saved from the Internet Archive in September 2026; its captures run from 2001 to 2021, across about 107 days.
What the museum holds back, and why
Nothing from the site is published. She is living and has not given permission.
The excerpts from her book are held and not shown. Ocarinas For a Song appears never to have been published, which makes them unpublished work by a living writer who has given no permission for them. The museum’s account of her names the book and quotes its jacket endorsement, which was advertising copy on a public page, and stops there.
Her home address, her telephone number and her email addresses are in the copy and stay in it. Every version of the order page carried all of them, as a one-woman mail-order business had to. They are not published, and they are not written into the museum’s research notes either — the same rule the museum applies to every living person here.
Her family is left out. Her author biography and a 1999 newspaper profile name her children, and give one of their ages. Those details are not recorded anywhere in the museum’s research and will not be published: they are family, they were published when the children were minors, and they have nothing to do with ocarinas. It is the same principle as the museum’s rule on addresses and dates of birth.
Rights, and what is published
Nothing. She is living, and the museum does not have her permission.
If this is your work, Anita, and you would like it published here, kept privately, or corrected, please write to theocarinamuseum@gmail.com.