Sarah Downton Beads and Jewellery

Thursday morning

Oh I can hardly type, my fingers are starting to seize up I’m getting colder by the hour. What’s occuring? The boiler has gone kaput and not firing, just in time for the cold snap, would you believe. It’s 16 deg C where I’m sitting, maybe not that cold, but when you’re not moving around it seems too chilly. I think I feel the cold, I remember when I was doing my Mechanical Engineering course that we used to go into the Metrology lab which was a completely sealed and air conditioned room kept at 18 deg C and I was always freezing in there. Well it’s colder here right now. The good news is they’re coming tomorrow morning to get it sorted so that will be good. Speaking of temperatures, it was 3 deg in my studio when I popped out a moment ago to fire up the kiln, I know it will warm up when I get in there and switch on the heater and the torch, I think in fact I’m looking forward to getting outside to warm up!

On another note I was so pleased with myself last night I could hardly get to sleep even though I was shattered as usual. Hmmm, how sad, and all over getting my show stuff and our huge cupboard organised. You know how it is, you start off small, then over the years get more equipment for your stall, first the fake shelf, then the lights, then other different sizes and makes of boxes to put jewellery stands and other bits in, and so it goes on over the years (9 of them) just evolving and turning into a total eclectic mishmash of an untidy bunch of boxes that have to be put in all sorts of different places in the cupboard and the car to fit, and that have to be pulled out of the cupboard every time Rick needs something of his. Well no more. Over the last couple of weeks I’ve been popping into our local Staples to choose different Really Useful Boxes and see which shape best suits my application and at last I have the problem solved. Last night I knuckled under and we pulled everything out and repacked it, and ta da, what a difference. My gear is now all in one (yes, only one) single very neat stack of boxes all on top of a 35 litre box, and yes, bar 2 boxes they’re all the same footprint. I’ve also worked out how I can replace my sneaky shelf prop tins (4 large Family Circle biscuit tins I had given that took up oodles of space in storage) with the much smaller Pencil boxes also made by Really Useful Products Ltd. these stack and give me 4 different height options whilst also containing my beads for sale, which I obviously have to pull out and put somewhere while I set up my stall, but I have that planned too.

You know whilst all this may sound boring, or exciting if you’re a tidy freek, you may say why didn’t I do this before? But life happens, things change slowly and you don’t necessarily realise things need changing in one go for the better. I only happenend to realise I needed a change a couple of weeks ago when for the umpteenth time poor Rick had to pull everything out and it made a huge mess all over the lounge floor yet again. So there we have it, next time you see us setting up at a bead fair we will have our new minimal sleeker stack of stuff. And hopefully I won’t let lots of other thing gradually change for the worst, we all know what happened about my hips. I shall be trying to keep a closer eye on life.