Our Handcrafted Journey: Star Wars

Showing posts with label Star Wars. Show all posts

Saturday, November 16, 2013

Let the Frantic Holiday Season Begin

I can tell the holidays are nearing. The feel of emails from customers is changing. The majority of the time, people are so kind and free with their good words. I would say 99% of the time, but once in a while we have people who make it difficult. I guess that is the nature of working with the public.

We have been so blessed that we have had such wonderful customers, and we have a huge customer return rate - like 65% to 70% have returned to buy again, so that pleases us. Our feedback has always been fabulous like the following:

"SO AWESOME!! I know I will get tons of compliments on this bracelet....super fast shipping too"
"I love this bracelet so much. I love when people look at it, assuming it must be pictures of my family and then say, "Is that...the redrum kid?" And I say, "Yes, yes it is." And then suddenly it's like I have a secret side they know nothing about. Mwahahaha. Seriously, though. It's a fun bracelet I love to wear with otherwise standard outfits just to give them some punch. I get compliments on it a lot."
" Great Quality shipped very fast"
" THANK YOU for using so much imagination and creativity! This bracelet is much nicer than the photo shows. Jimmie Ellis"

However, as the holiday season approaches for some reason some people start to get prickly. We had one customer recently who we tried to do everything right for, but in the end, she was not happy. This is only the 2nd customer in FIVE years that has ever been grumpy and rude, and we just didn't know what to do to satisfy her. Bummer.

Yoda, Please give us the wisdom and calm to get through this season.

You can just sense the change in the emails. It's really rather interesting. If I can remain unemotional about it, I would realize that I haven't changed and our products haven't changed. It must therefore be the people who are coming to us, which traffic certainly increases during the holidays.

This is what the customer today reminded me of...just kidding, I'm sure she was just having an "off" day. - From The Shining

That's okay. I'm not going to let her ruin my evening. We are actually taking the evening off and watching the Snow Queen (kind of an early Christmas movie). Huge artichokes were on sale today, so we're going to have them with our barbeque chicken for dinner. We'll have popcorn during our movie. A nice evening.

Well, take care until next time. I'll breathe deep and be happy, as I hope you all are as well.

Yes, to this quote...What do you bring to the world? From Anne of Green Gables

Monday, October 21, 2013

Time Off

Well, I've done a bit better with my working all the time. I have actually kept up with the laundry and cleaned the kitchen all week...sweet! As I wrote last time, I have, indeed, not listed as many Scrabble bracelets this past week. It bothers me some, but I'm learning to live with it and trying to find that balance.

Additionally, we've been having supply issues, so I am being very careful about the bracelets I'm making. Fortunately, we have quite a few bracelets made, but we may need to find a new supplier for the seal we use for our Scrabble art. This is frustrating, time-consuming, and not happening at a good time of the year, but it did work out as far as my not making quite as few bracelets in order to form better habits...oops, excuse me..."routines" to follow.

Fortunately, I was able to make a few of new Scrabble bracelets that I've been wanting to make before our supplier issue occurred, so that was good. We try to offer a couple different style of bracelets with the same theme for people to choose from. Some may prefer a single glass bead, or silver instead of gold metals, etc.

For example:

The Monkees Scrabble Bracelet looks like this...

The Monkees Bracelet - Glass Ball

But the other Monkees Scrabble Bracelet looks like this...

The Monkees Bracelet - Gold Tone

One Star Wars...

Star Wars Bracelet

The other Star Wars...

Star Wars - The Force Bracelet

A gold tone German Shepherd...


German Shepherd Scrabble Bracelet

A silver tone and brown German Shepherd...

German Shepherd Scrabble Bracelet

A single glass Whippet...

Whippet Scrabble Bracelet - Single Glass

And the other Whippet choice...

Whippet Scrabble Bracelet

Well, we're glad we have choices to offer, and we hope we are able to offer more choices when we get our supply issue taken care of in the near future. For now, we've got a good inventory built up...thank goodness, but not enough to get us through the holidays, so I know the issue will be taken care of very soon!

Thursday, August 15, 2013

Moving a Home and a Handcrafted Life

It’s been a long time since I’ve written. Soooooooooo much has happened in the last four months! First, and foremost, we have moved. That means that we not only had to get our house ready to sell and move, but we also had to move our business, PAWS IN TIME, since it, too, is in the house. My, oh my, what a time.

We got a place that is about ½ the size of our old house, so we had to downsize considerably, which isn’t a bad thing, but frustrating when trying to make everything fit inside the new place. A real bonus of the new place is that we now have about an acre to plant a garden, have a few hens, let the dogs run (in a fenced area of course). After having lived in town on a very small lot for the past six years, we are so excited!! It’s also by the water, which is calming. When we go for our walk in the morning, we step out on our rural road and see the bay. Just beautiful.

However, the new place was in desperate need of renovation. We’ve lived in an RV for several months while fixing things – starting with the majors…plumbing, plumbing and more plumbing, roof replaced, putting sheet rock in, floorboards down, cleaning and painting. I never thought I would know so much about sheet rock - the different types, how many sheets can be fit into a Dodge Caravan (weight and measurement wise), how to use sheet rock mud and tape. Who knew there would be so much to know? But we’re finally in and even though there is still lots of work to be done, it’s nice to be in.

Here's a picture of what the house looked like when we first got it. Note the roof - truly a "green" roof with all the moss.

Next time, I'll include a picture of how it looks now.

Thankfully, there is a fairly good-sized sunny landing at the top of the stairs and that is now where PAWS IN TIME resides. It has a deck off of it with a fabulous old maple tree covering the whole area. We also use a downstairs back room for drilling tiles. I was terribly spoiled in our old place because I had room for everything. I loved looking at all my materials - even what I wasn't currently using. I could say to myself, “Someday I’d like to try making such and such out of that.” Unfortunately, a lot of those creativity inducing items that I’ve been collecting will need to stay tucked away. However, I will try to keep the boxes handy for those days when I want to do a little treasure hunting to try something different.

My work area is ready (cleaned, painted, carpet down) for all my stuff to be put out…Yeehaw! All the materials for our Scrabble Bracelets and Scrabble Pendants are out and organized. Due to our move, our inventory was down from over 400 items to under 200. Yikes! We’ve been busily making bracelets to rebuild our stock. The holiday season is looming. This was to be the year that we got ahead and had plenty of stock for the holidays. Hmm…guess not. But we are going to do our best to have enough stock to at least have an acceptable season.

We even took our personalized gift / custom bracelet listing off for a while to get caught up, but it's now back up and we've had several orders in the last few weeks where people use their own pictures on a Scrabble bracelet. I’ve been using the tiles as fast as my htp (husband type person) can drill them. Now, I really need to start on our vintage art dog frames…as soon as I can find the box the glue and seal are in.

Well, I better get going, but before I sign off, I thought I’d share a couple of our newer bracelets. I did have time to create a couple of new ones. Always love that!