Happy Anniversary

...To us! We're off, my family and I, this morning to the coast to celebrate out 11th anniversary on the 11th. We spend all our wedding anniversaries in Monterey. It's been a tradition since before we were a family. The kids love the aquarium and we love the weather and, well just getting away somewhere we know is relaxing. We'll be gone for the weekend and will return to loan paperwork and tatting custom orders come Monday.

Here's just a picture from one of our trips many years ago. Enjoy.

Rainbow Bright

With yesterdays little rant, I didn't share my tatting adventures from Tuesday. I was twitter stalking while making a custom mask. One of my lovely twitter friends shared a picture of her new manicure. A bright and multicolored hand and I was inspired. I dug through my collection of patterns for just the right one and made a bracelet. The pattern was an adaption of a cross pattern by Dianna Stevens. It was one collected before I started designing my own pieces, but it is perfect for the three bright colors I wanted to use.

I got straight to work on the bracelet and took pictures with my laptop during the process. It went very quickly and was done just a couple of hours later. I'm sending it to her this week as a little present. I might make another up to sell later, though I'm pretty busy with the remaking sold pieces.
One more thing for the day, my SALE. This is the last day of my anniversary sale, since I'm leaving for Monterey tomorrow. This is definitely the last sale I'll do until perhaps the holidays, so take advantage of it. If something you want has been recently sold and isn't listed, just let me know & I'll list a custom piece for you. I want you to be able to take advantage of this rare discount. I'm not closing the store while I'm gone since it's just a weekend. I'll just be shipping any orders out on Monday or Tuesday instead. Thanks for all your purchases during the sale too. I really appreciate the business and thanks to my customers we'll have a nice, comfortable anniversary trip with the family.

Communicate

I'm not an easily ruffled personality. I tend to go with the flow whenever possible, why stress over things that you cannot change. It is best to accept the hand you're dealt and work with what you've got. There are of course exceptions to this course of action. I'm not a complete push over, I just prefer not to get worked up over the little things. That being said, I got all into it yesterday over, well, a little thing. Monday morning I made a sale that needed to be delivered by Thursday. It was in state, no problem...until Paypal flagged the payment. The site stated it would take 'up to 24 hrs' to review and release the funds. Ok, I have a day, it's still cool. right?

Twenty-five hours later, still no cleared payment. Now, I'm annoyed. Finding no resolution on the site, I made a fruitless phone call where the agent tells me the review takes '24-48 hours' to review. To which I respond,'Then why does it say up to 24 hours?" The fellow clearly ruffled says I can send a message on the site. Frustrated, I bark my goodbyes and hand up. I proceeded to write my message and right after I clicked send, I received the cleared payment message. Aaarrrggghhh.

I must point out that my problem was not with the time frame of the review, I get it, I do. They are covering their own bums and consequently mine. I appreciate the effort. My issue is with their ability to communicate. If the time frame is 24-48 hours, just say that for goodness sake. If you think that something might even remotely take longer than you say, you might just want to add, 'some reviews may take slightly longer'. See, that was easy. if you're going to miscommunicate with your customers, at least do it the other direction. You know, under promise and over deliver. That I can hang with, everyone wins when you say something will take up to a week and it only takes two day. I could be saying that because it's what I do, but I still think it's the better way to go here. Whew, glad that's all out of my system now.

Just Words

I seem to already be settling into a new daily routine. The new balancing act now contains the tasks of cleaning and packing things away. I'm trying for 'a little a day' approach. I figure this is the least likely to interrupt daily living, for anything that upset the kids schedule too much, destroys. We dropped off some updated paperwork at the loan office yesterday and out real estate agent tells us escrow will open any day now. So aside from moving into a different phase, we are still basically in the dark, waiting.

I've been very fortunate during my sale to sell a good many large pieces, masks, chokers and whatnot. This does put me in the position of having to decide whether to relist even more pieces as custom listings or simply wait until I have them remade. I hate listing because then I have to work on demand, normally not a big issue, but with current events can be a bit too stressful. Then again, I hate not having those signature pieces listed because they can't sell if they're not listed and I doubt many people troll the sold items looking for things to buy no matter how many times I make that suggestion. I will probably opt for a combination of the two, some listed, some waiting and hope that I choose the right ones to relist.

The end of my knitting project is in sight. I haven't gotten any in progress photos mostly because it's my bedtime project. Not much desire to get up and fetch a camera at that point in the day. When it is finished. I'll get some pictures for the blog. I have been horrible at adding images here lately. It must be awful boring to have all these stark works filling up the page, but I hate adding pictures for no good reason. Since I haven't made anything new, there's just not much besides family stuff on the camera. See, I just looked for something and couldn't find a thing. One of these days I'll do one of those wordless posts or something and you'll all be confused.

Undone

It has begun. The slow, steady dismantling of the house we've lived in for three years. The pictures and figurines are coming down and I'm filling in the holes in the wall. It's already feeling less and less like we live here. Of course I am still avoiding any 'real' packing. Our loan agent has finally contacted us for updated paperwork making everything just a bit more real, though we're still waiting for that 'pending' or 'sold' sign to appear in front of the house for further reality checking. That hasn't stopped us from the train of detail worries we're thinking about, everything from how to move the huge desks we put together here to where we're gonna put the kitty litter boxes. We have extreme busy brain and there shows no sign of it slowing.

The sale I spontaneously put together last week has been much more of a success than I could have imagined. Really, it is quite odd, until this point my sales have created no more than business as usual. I keep saying I wish I knew what the secret ingredient was in this one so I could clone it and share the wisdom, but I've really no idea. The discount isn't too large, I'm only pimping it out on the twitter, here and then there's the store announcement. I haven't left links anywhere, haven't tweeted about it non stop. So if you see that little spark of genius in it, please let me know. The sale will continue until Thursday, since we'll be off to our anniversary trip on Friday with the kids in tow.

Oh and just a heads up, as our impending move gets closer, I'm likely to close up shop for an undetermined length of time. Moving utilities is always a crap shoot and I'd hate to be without Internet and have sales or questions sitting unanswered and unexplained. I imagine that blog posting is likely to suffer as well, so please be patient with me. We still don't have a confirmed move date and the way people keep going on about the horrors of closing, I fear we won't know until it is upon us either. See how I can't stop thinking about this crap...aarrgghh.

I am still managing to get in some good tatting time. I've actually been mulling around a few new ideas recently which means I must be hankering for a bout of creation. Though I think that I will have to keep it simple for my own sanity. If I even get a moment to work on them. I'm also almost done with the scarf/wrap I'm knitting up and I'll show that off when it's complete. So check out the sale while you can, the details are in my last post and I'll see you tomorrow.