just randomly...

Just thought I'd point out these posts in case someone else finds these interesting. They are about the work life of one person in London in the 1940s over on Mary Portas' (of Mary Queen of Shops fame) blog: http://tiny.cc/3lhiu

perfume

good morning....it's Monday again, hurrah. Ok, it's not too bad. It's sunny (sort of) and there's a lot to do this week. In the meantime, here's a photo of part of my perfume bottle collection. I really like small perfume bottles and over the years I've received rather a lot of bottles. Word got 'round that I like these teeny tiny over-designed bottles and my grandmother and her friends found out, which meant lots of donations to my collection! I think over the years I may have purchased a bottle or two, perhaps a total of five. All the others are empty bottle donations or gifts. So I have rather a lot...I think this photo shows about half of the collection. I like the way so much thought and effort has gone into the designs and how they look (in my opinion) so much better in miniature. I keep thinking that I ought to trim down the collection, perhaps only keep the small bottles (not vials) and get rid of all the duplicates. But thus far all I've managed to do is put the large bottles in a cardboard box for storage. I'll sort it out some day....in the meantime, I like looking at the mini bottles :-)

to continue a theme

And while I was on the subject of cats, my friend has a super cute cat too. He's called Maurice and right now he's a cat teenager so when I do see him, he tries to bite me. But when he was a kitten, he was still all sweetness and light. Here's a photo of little Maurice when he was but a young wee kitten (click on the photo to get a super close up of Maurice cuteness):

Pepe

I really, really like cats and when I was little, we had a cat at home. When we got Pepe, I was allowed to name him because I was very upset about our old cat (who was called Gnoes) passing away. So, having just seen the Romero brothers (classical Spanish guitar), I named our new kitten Pepe. Full name Pepe Romero. Ha!! I think it took about, oh, say approximately one nanosecond for Pepe to be converted to Peppy. He is peppy, and he's very cute. He's a very relaxed cat and he's still going strong. He's now 20 years old and still chilling out in Houston. He's about to move in with my sister in California. Anyway, basically this is just an excuse for me to post some photos of Pepe (aka Peppy). For your viewing pleasure:

nearly the weekend?! wot?!

Ack, this week is flying by! And I still have so much to do! Could it have anything to do with my dear husband having yesterday off? No, no, nevermind that I did no work whatsoever yesterday. Oh, wait, I did post an Etsy purchase package. But that's all I did. So now I am feeling a slight rising panic about when I am going to get everything done. But I have a plan of attack and I'm going to have a very productive weekend getting lots of things done, so next week will be all shiny and new and I'll be ready! Hopefully this weekend I'm going to be building the backdrop frame for the Craft in Focus show at the end of October. That's the only show that requires me to bring a backdrop, so it's a lot of extra work. It would be fabulous to get that done this weekend so it's ready to go and I won't have to worry about doing it too close to the show. So hopefully that'll happen. Plus I had the genius idea of sorting out the garden by ordering 200 flower bulbs. Yes, it was a special offer, a mere 5 quid for 200 bulbs!! But of course now I have to plant them all....and do the weeding first so there's even room to plant them. So, it's going to be a busy weekend.....with hopefully the reward next spring of a ton of lovely flowers....maybe something like this:

curry & a pint

Tonight we're going out for a friend's birthday to have a curry. A curry goes hand in hand with a beer. Or a pint. of something. Pint of lager, pint of ale maybe, pint of cider. I'm just making this up, but I reckon a curry and a pint goes together like a two pints and a packet of crisps. You don't have to, but it's nice.

monday and rulers and coriandr

Hello again! So it's Monday morning, everyone's favorite time of the week. I was happy to see that my earrings made it to the front page of Coriandr today, which is a nice start to the week. It's going to be a very busy week. I have loads to do, including the super exciting task of doing my taxes. At least I can just do them online. Hopefully it'll go smoothly and there will be no grumbling, shouting and shaking of fists. I also need to do some supply ordering, some making things, some polishing things, some thinking about commissions, and some ordering of stickers and business cards.
I was going to write some witty post about how my rulers are my three best friends. They are, during the day. I find it amusing how I have my rulers carefully laid out. Obviously there's the steel ruler at my bench. I can't imagine how I would get by without the steel ruler - for cutting paper, for marking lengths on silver sheet, for checking and rechecking if pieces are indeed square or rectangular as intended. Then by the computer I have my transparent ruler and my Snoopy ruler. Essential for measuring items to describe them on Etsy, Folksy, etc. This process, by the way, makes me dislike using inches - I find it pretty useless to describe things in terms of 19/32ths of an inch. I guess it's what you're used to. I think by now I could probably draw a ruler with the metric system freehand pretty accurately. Anyway, rulers are my friends. The end.

it's friday

It's nearly the weekend! I hope everyone has fun plans. Congrats to Dr H, who won the free earrings I was offering earlier this week. They'll be in the post soon :-)
I'm off to stock up on boxes! I need to buy a decent stock of boxes so I don't run out halfway through the craft fairs.
In other news, I have some new earrings which I will be putting up on Etsy soonish. I say soonish because it seems to me that Etsy is in super slow time, seems like this is mega holiday time! Well, I'm pretty sure it is. Plus next weekend is bank holiday weekend here in the UK, so it's down time. In any case, those earrings will be up on Etsy, Folksy, etc soonish.... !!
Have a lovely weekend...

ouch

Mweh...the pitfalls of bench work: yesterday I added three slices and one puncture to my fingers. snif. I even had to scrounge around for a bandaid for the second time in a week. It's because I'm filing the thin edge of a disc and that gets quite sharp when I'm doing the filing. Then I occasionally slip, and wham, another little slice in my poor fingers. poor me! ok, not really. Something randomly interesting is that in the US, the bits of sticky stuff you put on a cut are called bandaids. That's a brand name, like q-tip or hoover or kleenex. Here in the UK, they are called plasters. Which is fine, but I thought it was interesting, as the word in Dutch is pleister (not sure if that's spelled plijster, but i think it's pleister). Anyway, that makes me wonder if in the US more brand names are used as a generic term than in the UK. So, to test my theory:

UK
cotton bud
hoover
plaster
tissue
sellotape

USA
q-tip
vacuum
bandaid
kleenex
Scotch tape

Ok, I can't think of any other examples off hand, but with the exception of hoover, all the UK ones are not brand names. Anybody have any other examples?

here we go again

Here we go again, down the only road I've ever known....what song is that?? It's some 80s song. Is it Bon Jovi? Oh my good god, I checked google and it's Whitesnake. I had Whitesnake lyrics in my head. Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear, there is no hope for me.

ANYWAY....moving right along. It's the start of the week again and I have heaps and heaps to do. I need to finish some items for my sister and aunt, go to the post office to send off some earrings that sold on Folksy at the weekend, plan a newsletter, etc. Also the washing machine is peeping that it's finished, so I think today is just going to have to be a mega productive, running around day. So, deep breath and here I go again!

busy!

Well I just discovered that if you type in the blog post title and then hit enter by accident because you haven't had a cup of tea yet, then it publishes the post! Oops. Anyway, easy enough to fix.
Yesterday I had a super productive day because I really needed one. I had so many little bits and pieces to do, I had to get a lot of them done otherwise I would just be overwhelmed for the rest of the week! So I think I might even have photos of a finished display unit today!! Which would be fabulous.
I was also productive at the weekend. A friend of mine came to stay and she knows a thing or two about sewing. She also really likes shopping, so I went with her to London to look at shops. She found some great stuff, but I couldn't find a top that I liked at all. So she persuaded me to buy some cloth from the Berwick Street Cloth Shop (I hope that link works) and on Sunday we sat down at the sewing machine at home and made a top!! We didn't have a pattern or instructions, we just used my oversize batwing top and copied it. It was interesting to do and we did a pretty darn good job, given the circumstances. We made some mistakes, did some bits of sewing in the wrong order and so on, but overall not too shabby for a first attempt. Next time I will make the collar a bit different and make the batwings a lot smaller. On the original top, the batwings don't seem that big because the cloth is much lighter. The part that came out the best, in my opinion, was the band at the bottom, which is the same material but it's stretchy so acts a bit elastic. In any case, here is a photo:

phew

Ok, things are looking up! My new acrylic display case arrived today with no cracks and in perfect shape! So I would just like to say here, in case anyone ever googles this online shop to see if they are ok - The Shop Fitting Shop - excellent customer service. Very friendly and helpful and dealt with the problem immediately. So, thanks to them!!
Plus my boy totally sorted out the Firefox/virus problem and all my bookmarks are back and it's all in fine working order. Plus it's Friday! Hurrah!
So, now I just have to clean the house, make some earrings, make a ring and have some more tea :-) Hope you all have a lovely weekend.

ha...

This is one of my favourite ever jokes. I have it hanging next to the computer monitor because it makes me laugh so much.

yech

I have a nasty sore throat which I'm hoping will go away very quickly indeed. Yesterday I made some new earrings, some stock earrings, and started on another bracelet. Today there will be fun-filled trip to the dentist, hurrah. It should be fine, hopefully. That's pretty much all the news here. Not very exciting, so I'll make up for it with a couple of photos of cute bunnies. :-)

My friend took this photo in Cuba or Indonesia, I can't remember. I save it because someday I want to get it printed on canvas for her. I keep wanting to do that, but I don't want a tiny canvas, so I'm forever on the lookout for a place that would do a good job but not too expensive. If anyone has any tips...let me know :-)

hee hee hee

jewellery news.....I'm busy with the secret project and plan to launch it tomorrow! yay! If all goes well, there will be photos, there will be plans, they will major excitement (from me, anyway). I have a lot of ideas for new things as well, so the to-do list is as long as ever...

I'm loving the lovely weather we're having. Yesterday I went with my friend to Greys Court - that's a National Trust property close to Reading which has gorgeous gardens. This is a good time of year to see the gardens and there's also a tea room with an outdoor area. The house is closed for renovations, but it's a great place to go sit in the sunshine and enjoy the scenery. Also the woods were full of bluebells, so it just looked amazing.

ha ha - I just got this from my sister and I had to laugh out loud!

ring, bracelet, ring

Two down, one to go. That is, I finished and resized a ring for a friend and delivered it to her yesterday and happily it fit and she's happy with it! Then I finished a cuff bangle which I had sent off to get engraved and that was posted yesterday. Now there's the engagement ring to go - I need to order the gold for it today and then I can get moving on it. It's all heading the right direction!
It's another gorgeous day today - beautiful blue skies and sun! A bit surreal, frankly....

The TOP SECRET project in coming along nicely and I should have photos sooooon....tum-di-dum....oh yes, the excitement!

Erm, in other news I'm getting my hair done tomorrow! hurrah! colour! So I'll have some photos of that soon too.

birthday fun

A lovely day was had yesterday and actually the whole weekend was good! Yesterday was the boy's birthday and we all chilled down at the pub. We had a roast lunch - which was very filling indeed! I had nut roast and it even came with little mini Yorkshire puddings, which aren't usually given with the veggie option! Anyway...it was a lovely relaxed day! I also made a surprise birthday cake - a carrot cake with cream cheese icing (recipe randomly chosen from the internet!). It turned out really well and here's a photo of it:

Today we took down the Norden Farm exhibit, so that has come and gone. I'm sure it won't be too long before we do another exhibit and then I'll post it on here again :-)
I hope everyone had a lovely weekend and here's hoping that we get fabulous weather this coming weekend too!!

Monday feelings on a tuesday

So it's Tuesday but I'm feeling like it's Monday - wondering what order to do things in, what I'm supposed to be doing and thinking I'm probably forgetting something important! I have a box of items at the hallmarking office, so I should have those back at the beginning of next week. I have a small pile of half-finished items - this pile is, thankfully, getting a wee bit smaller and more manageable! Last Thursday I did loads and got various things done that had been laying around for ages. Also, we had the private view at Norden Farm which went very well. The show there is still on for another 2 weeks, so there's still a chance to see it!
I hope everyone had a lovely Easter. I put my knitted Easter bunnies and chicks on the table for Easter breakfast and it was very cheerful :-)
Tomorrow hopefully a more interesting post - with me more focused than I am today!

update: hm, two websites seem to have disappeared. One is a bead supplier I have used a lot - Jules Gems. They seem to have gone bust, the website is gone and I managed to find one comment somewhere that they aren't in business anymore. That's a shame because they had a good selection. And now I see that theindiego.com seems to have gone as well - but I can't find any comments about that, so not sure what the deal is there. If anyone knows....please leave a comment!

middle-of-the-week-iness

Well, I meant to take some photos of some fabulous knitted rabbits and chicks and egg warmers that I got from my grandmother. But I'm not sure where the camera is. Ok, I know where it is, but it's just too much for today. I'll get around to it. Then you can see the fabulous goodies that I'm going to use to decorate the table for easter breakfast. I don't think I've had easter breakfast for years...maybe not even since I lived with my parents. But this year it's going to happen, because I have stuffed knitted rabbits and chicks. Oh yes.
So yesterday I managed to get quite a bit done, including finally finishing 7 pendants I was working on for a big project which involves approaching a local business to see if they would like to sell my jewellery. I'm nearly ready to approach the store, just need to get my plan on paper so that they agree it's a genius idea. I'll post more about this once I've spoken to the store.... (ooo the suspense)
This weekend we're doing the end-of-tax-year stock take. That's going to involve making sure the stock sheet is accurate (I don't think it is, because sometimes I forget to take items off once I've sold them) and reviewing prices. I need to review prices because the silver and gold prices have changed, as they do, and increased loads again. Anyway, I like organising so I'm actually looking forward to this big stock take! And today I need to work on my commissions...so off I go...
ALSO - if anyone out there knows how to add a label cloud instead of just a list of labels on blogger, can you please tell me. It should be easy, but for some reason I can't figure it out.