My first market stall was a roaring success

I survived the market! After working feverishly on my jewellery for most of the end of last week, Skry and I gathered our bags and headed down to St.George's Market at about half eight on Saturday morning. This is the earliest that we have been up and about for quite a while, so that was traumatic, but we got there in good time and were allocated a stall. Well, half a stall. I knew beforehand that I might be required to share, so it wasn't a huge shock, but we were also told that the person who was meant to go on the other side might not turn up. As it turned out, they didn't show and we could have taken the whole stall, but by the time that became clear I had already laid out my cover and arranged all the jewellery on it, so it was too much trouble to spread it out.

It took about half an hour to lay out everything and make it look nice, then all we had to do was wait for the punters to arrive - and arrive they did. I wouldn't say that we were thronged, although occasionally it felt like that, but we had a more or less constant flow of customers from 10am until 2.30pm when everyone started to pack up. I was hugely relieved to have customers who weren't just my friends making pity purchases! That was what I had been most worried about beforehand, but I needn't have worried at all because people seemed to really like what I was selling. I got lots of compliments, and many people asked if I was coming back the following week. By the end of the day, I had sold a ton of stuff (including three cotton tote bags that were brought almost as an afterthought but did well to fill up the empty half of the stall) and was about £240 richer!

Of course I haven't even come close to covering my costs; I buy too many pretty sparkly beads and things just because I want them, and I've probably spent twice as much as I've earned. But I'm lucky enough to not need to make any money from this at the moment, and I have the confidence now to believe that I could go to another market or craft fair and be able to make some sales.

I also have two pieces commissioned - a necklace to match a bracelet that I sold to one friend, and a necklace and bracelet to match a dress for another. I'll make those in the next couple of days, and also get more stock up onto my website. Now that the market is over, I need to get my online sales roaring in the same way :)

Earrings, earrings everywhere

I've started getting everything together for the market in St.George's on Saturday (10am onwards, people - be there!). I just spent the last hour fastening earrings onto business cards, writing the details on each one, and logging them in an Excel spreadsheet so I can keep track of what I've taken with me. There are nearly 70 pairs!

I haven't gone through the necklaces and bracelets yet, but I think I have only a fraction of that number with the two of them together. Luckily I got a delivery of some necklace sized memory wire and some new beads in the post this morning, so I'll be able to make up some more necklaces before Saturday morning. I don't want to look like I am focussed on just one thing.

I'm both nervous and excited about this market. I have never done anything like this before, and I'm looking forward to it, but I'm also worried that I won't sell anything. Well okay, I know I will probably sell some things because I have friends coming down, but I'd like to have strangers think that my stuff is worth buying too. I suppose I'll just have to wait and find out...

Modern art is rubbish?

I found this site earlier today and wanted to share it. Piles of rubbish formed into art. Fantastic.

Things are meant to be moving OUT!

This is all wrong. Everything is going the wrong way. We are meant to be clearing the house and getting it painted and decorated, but not a single box has actually left the premises yet, and Skry has just brought half a ton of stuff in. As I write, I am surrounded by bulging bin bags filled with goodness knows what. I can't complain, really - the whole rest of this house is full of my own things, and Skry's things have been languishing in his old house since we got married. But we are making the opposite of headway with the whole clearance thing...

We spent the weekend doing nothing, too, partly due to my brother visiting from Dublin but mostly due to laziness. I did make some more jewellery, and I made a start on some new purses and bags too, but that has had to be put on hold because my sewing machine is acting up and is currently in the repair shop. I don't know if I'll get it back in time to sew anything new for the market this Saturday. I'll just have to make a few extra bracelets or something instead!

I'll try and take a few photos today of what I've been working on, and stick them up here. Don't hold your breath though.

Cat-related guilt - a follow-up

The cat-related guilt adventure has reached its conclusion. In the post today we got a card addressed to "Jenny and partner" with a rather garbled address on it (incorrect street name and no postcode). I am half-expecting an evening invite to a wedding, so I assume it was that until I opened the envelope and there was a bouncy 3D giraffe design on the front. Not very weddingy!

Inside the card it read: "Thanks again Jenny for being so understanding - [Woman]" and "To Jenny, thank you so much for Freyja's photo. It is very special. From [Girl]" and there was a little drawing of a cat purring. It was all very sweet.

I'm still mystified as to why the address was garbled, since they live right in front of us and have the exact same address themselves apart from the house number, but nevertheless it was a very nice ending to the whole cat guilt saga.

The man from Pickford's

The man from Pickford's, Ron, came to the house yesterday to see what we want to move to New Zealand, and let us know what services they offer. He went through the whole house and we told him what we wanted to get transported over in the Autumn, and he also viewed a stack of boxes that I want to get put into storage now.

The first thing he said about the boxes that are already packed was, "Those boxes won't do at all - we need double walled cartons for international transport". I only bought "those boxes" a few days ago, from Belfast Self Storage, after talking to a Pickford's girl on the phone and asking was it okay for me to pack some things myself. I made it very clear that I would be packing them in order to have them stored for a while and then shipped to New Zealand, so I wasn't at all impressed to hear that I had wasted £35 and a load of time. Happily, Ron agreed that I had been misinformed, and said they can take the boxes as they are for temporary local storage, then they'll re-pack them for transit and I won't be charged for the cartons they're re-packed into. Phew.

He is to email me tomorrow with a quote for their services, but the things for temporary storage can go into a big crate that costs £12 per week. We don't have enough to fill that crate yet, so I have some more packing to do, but hopefully we'll have a much clearer house in another few days. Clearer, that is, until Skry gets all his stuff from his old house in Killowen Street - it has been languishing there since we got married because there wasn't any room for it here.

It'll be interesting to see what the quote is for the rest of the packing and transporting. I'm expecting something in the region of £3,500 - £4,000, but I should find out tomorrow. That sounds like a lot, but it's a whole lot cheaper than replacing everything we own!

I need a project plan

Sad as it seems, I have come to realise that I need a project plan. Yes, a proper one, with Gantt charts and everything, otherwise I won't get anything done this summer.

A day or two ago I took a quick look on the net for project planners that were easy to use (I have bad bad bad memories of Microsoft PWA from when I was gainfully employed) and more importantly free. For now I am using iTeamwork, which is fairly basic but does the job. No Gantt charts, but otherwise it keeps me on track! I can add projects with sub-tasks and it reminds me of what I'm supposed to be doing when I log in each morning. I'm the sort of person who needs to do lots of small things that can be ticked off as I go, rather than one mammoth task, so it really does help to break things down in a visual form like this.

Thanks to the beauty of the project plan, I've been more productive for the last two days than for the last two weeks. More packing boxes have been bought, more stuff has been packed, more stuff has been binned, I joined the gym and actually visited it, and I even made good headway learning Cyrillic. I can now pronounce and understand words like and . The first one might come in more useful if we get to Russia and I want to order some wine, but if I want to discuss any actresses while we're there I'll need the other one too!

A sense of community

With being off work during the day now, I'm really noticing how much of a sense of community there is in Sydenham. I did know this anyway, just from watching people greet each other on the bus, but it's much more apparent now that I see the "daytime" people going about their business.

The post office this morning was all bustle, but I was the only person in the queue who wasn't chatting to whoever was next to them. The women behind the counter seemed to know everybody, and the one who dealt with me was very friendly and chatty. Next I went to the bakery for a couple of sausage rolls, and watched the woman in front of me chat with the staff like they were old friends. After that I took a quick trip to the Mace across the road, and again everybody seemed to know each other. It felt like a real community, and I liked that feeling. I love being able to walk down the road and nod hello to familiar faces, or even talk to them. It doesn't matter that we don't really know each other - it's just the sense that everyone belongs here. It's not something I experienced at all while living in south Belfast, before I bought my house here - I suppose having such a transient student population kills any chance of that community feeling building up. I can see why residents of areas such as the Holy Lands are so upset at what has happened to what was once their community...

The joy of laptops

I just got my first laptop about three weeks ago. I never had any particular desire to own one before - I have my PC upstairs, and Skry and I can sit side by side on our computers and play games, surf the internet, work, whatever we happen to be doing. No big deal. But when I handed in my notice at work about six weeks ago, I realised that I had some holiday pay coming to me, and I decided to spend it on a laptop.

After a surprisingly short amount of humming and hawing, I went for an Acer Travelmate, and I'm happy with my choice (apart from it having Windows Vista pre-installed - memory hog or what?!). Large clear screen, built-in webcam, all the usual features that one might expect, and it's very slim and light too.

What surprises me is how much I am using this thing. I imagined that I was buying a replacement for my soon-to-be-turned-into-a-fileserver PC, and the laptop would spend most of its time hooked up to a docking station in the computer room. Not so! It has been a permanent fixture on the dining table since I brought it home. I can surf and watch the soaps at the same time, Skry uses it to display recipes when he's cooking, I can Skype friends and relatives in foreign lands without having to put down whatever I'm doing - it is just so handy. And of course I can cart it about if I want to as well. Tonight I watched a whole episode of Grey's Anatomy with the laptop perched on the toilet seat while I lay back in a bubble bath with a glass of wine. Nice....!

In other words, laptops are the way forward. Go get one. Now.

It gets worse

I just got a letter through the door - a heart-felt plea from the woman and little girl asking to please try and get Freyja back. There were drawings of her and heart shapes and their address and phone number.

Obviously I can't take the cat back now that she is settled and happy in her new home (and she is happy - I checked - she is chasing pigeons up trees and coming back in to be pampered when she's tired), so I called round to their house to tell them to give up hope. There was nobody home, but I left a little framed picture of Freyja for them to remember her by. Then I phoned the woman to tell her that the cat wasn't coming back. She started to cry! I feel so guilty, even though I couldn't have known that this would happen. She said that it was the first time that her daughter had experienced having a pet, and they both loved Freyja, and they couldn't even say goodbye because they didn't know she was going away.

I can't believe I made a complete stranger cry, and no doubt her daughter too. I feel awful.

Cat-related guilt

There was a knock on the door at lunchtime today. A woman and a little girl were standing there, and the first thing they asked was, "Do you have a cat called Freyja?". We said that we used to, but she was living somewhere else now, and their faces just fell. The little girl looked like she was about to burst into tears. It seems that the mystery of where Freyja went every day when we let her out has been solved - she was coming to them for her breakfast first thing in the morning, and just hanging out for the rest of the day being petted and eating their tomatoes.

We did explain that she had gone to another family who were really excited about getting her, but I feel terrible. The woman asked if there was any chance we could get the cat back so she could go and live with them instead. If we had known beforehand that she was going there, I could have just let them take her straight away, but it's a bit late now. I don't know how well that would have worked anyway, because it would have been very hard for us to stop letting Freyja into our own house when she scratched on the door, but we certainly could have at least considered it. Oh well, what's done is done and I am happy that she's in a good home now - it was just so hard to see that little girl's sad face.

I might call round to their house with a photograph or something, just so they can remember her. Maybe that would just make it worse, I don't know. Gaaah!

19 minutes a day? I don't think so

So it turns out that the 19 minutes a day is totally unachieveable, at least in this house. We let it get far too squalid over the last few weeks, and 19 minutes barely makes a dent. It took me 45 minutes in the bathroom alone! I think that plan is only for people who already have a sparkling clean house, and possibly a maid.

I did make a dent on the packing, though, albeit a small one. Yesterday I looked on the internet for self-storage places locally, and found Belfast Self Storage just a couple of miles up the motorway from here. I nipped round yesterday morning and got a selection of boxes and some packing tape. Since then I have filled five boxes with books, one with bed linen and blankets, and one with childhood memorabilia that I'd be really sorry to lose.

By that point it was becoming obvious that I had more boxes than would fit in my car to take back to the storage facility, but there may be a solution to that as well. Pickfords had seen that I submitted a request for storage information on their site, and phoned to get more details from me. We are most likely going to go with them for shipping to New Zealand, and it turns out that they can also collect boxes now and store them for us until we're ready to leave. A rep is coming over next week to look at how much we have in the house that will be coming with us, and go through our options. It would be so handy to have someone just come and take the stuff rather than having to hire a Man with a Van to ferry it about. I'll wait and see what their prices are like, but this is promising.

Keep your house sparkling, in 19 minutes a day

I have a problem. The plan for the month of July was to get the house cleared out, re-painted and re-carpeted, in order to put it on the market in August. So far, none of this has happened. It has actually descended into squalour over the last few weeks, as we have both become very lazy about keeping on top of the housework.

Maybe the internet can save me. I found a site that promises I can keep a sparkling house in a mere 19 minutes a day. Here's what I have to do:
kitchen - 4 1/2 minutes a day
bathroom - 2 minutes a day
bedroom - 6 1/2 minutes a day
living areas - 6 minutes a day

Personally I think the bedroom should be closer to 2 and the kitchen should be way more than 4 1/2, but I might give this plan a go anyway. At the very least the house will be a bit tidier!

It won't help with the general clutter around the place, though. For that I need some sturdy boxes and an off-site storage facility. And possibly a skip.

Freyja moves out

A sad day for me - I no longer own any cats. Freyja went to her new home today. Before Aggelos and his daughters came to pick her up, I gave her a special treat: a tomato. She loves tomatoes. Check out the video here.

Help My Baby Live site outed as a hoax

A few weeks ago I stumbled upon this site, Help My Baby Live. The idea is that a young cash-strapped couple are saying they'll abort their baby unless we, the public, give them enough money to bring it up properly. They are asking for $50,000 - as I write, the site lists $13,200 in donations and has 70 days left before time runs out.

Snopes has now listed it as a hoax. I don't know how they came to that decision, because there really isn't any proof either way, but it certainly smells like a hoax to me. Even if it is for real there is something terribly wrong with the whole setup. I hope that people will stop donating to them now (if they really have been), because even if it is for real and there really is some couple out there who are using their foetus as emotional blackmail, they should be ostracized on general principles, not helped out with money for nothing.

As an aside, I am watching Britain's Next Top Model, and one of the hopefuls has "Queen Bitch" tattooed on her leg. Why would anyone do that?!

Rain, sleeping in, and more jewellery

There was more rain last night - really heavy, tropical monsoon type rain at about 3am. We stood in the open doorway and looked out at it for a bit, and if I didn't know there were loads of slugs in the garden I would have gone out and danced in it. It was that sort of rain.

Once again I slept in until lunchtime, too. I am going to have to be careful about getting into that bad habit, because I'll end up wasting half of every day and I don't want to do that. It's fine this week because I am treating myself to a week's holiday, but I'll need to find a more productive routine for the rest of the summer.

I have been very productive with the jewellery, though - lots of new pieces made up in the last couple of days. I think I'm going to be fine for this market stall at the end of the month.

To market, to market, to buy a fat pig...

I am taking my jewellery to St.George's market in Belfast on the 28th of this month! A friend forwarded me an email about trans '07 saying that they were looking for "businesses and artists of all shapes and sizes to show off their skills and skills, as part of a very special Saturday Market". I shot off an email a couple of days ago to ask if jewellery fitted the bill, and apparently it does.

I don't have many details yet, but I know that the table will be 8 foot by 4 foot and I will need enough products to fill it. I have quite a lot already but I have never tried laying them all out together, and I haven't a clue how I should be presenting this stuff. I'm going to get down there this Friday morning and see what the other jewellers do. This is a fantastic opportunity for me, but I so obviously don't have a clue what I'm doing yet :)

So is this what skiving feels like?

It hasn't quite sunk in with me yet that I am now self-employed, mainly because I have no real business plan or goals. Must work on those! But for the moment it just feels like I'm on holiday. Yesterday I did make some more jewellery, using a stack of beads that arrived in the post, and today I renewed my car tax, but that's about it so far. It's a good thing that I have some savings to see me through the summer, because I'd be on the breadline in about a week if I had to fund myself this way.

The jewellery is loads of fun, though. It's amazing how excited I got when I found some amazonite beads which I'd forgotten I ordered. I had never seen amazonite before, and it turns out to be a lovely milky green colour which I think would look great with black and silver. I only got a sample size bag of those particular beads this time around, but I was still able to make a (what I think is) very pretty bracelet with them. (The darker green is a semi-precious stone called green aventurine, and the purple is amethyst).

It turns out that stacks of different beads in little plastic bags make me slobber with delight. I could play with this kind of stuff all day. I am so lucky that right now I have the chance to do that!