A More Balanced Outlook For Tuesday

Thanks for all of the positive comments on yesterday's post. I'll just have to tough it out, I signed up for the ride when I married DH and when I opened the shop more than 30 years ago. His time schedule doesn't match up with mine, but his reasons are legitimate and I'll just have to deal. I'll ride it out, and at least I can vent every now and again on my blog and over the phone with my SFADM, Aearwen (yes, I do know what the letters mean - LOL). 

I feel a bit more in balance today. I'm still trying to track
down an artifact that the computer decided to toss into
my Saturday sales record, but we're getting closer to
finding and reversing it. Old systems have glitches and
hiccups. *sigh*

I'm feeling a bit more in balance today. I've been cruising ahead on shop repairs - I have quite the backlog of items that I've accepted for repair, and most of them are super interesting and fun. Today I'm bringing one of my beading looms to work with me - there's a bracelet that came in that will require a beading loom to revamp for the customer. It originally was on stretchy string, but the stretch has disappeared and she wants it on standard string with a clasp. Can do. This one will be lots of fun. 

The piece I restrung wasn't as nice as this, and
didn't have the earrings. The pearls were flattened
like this, though, even though they were much more
irregular and more multi-colored and MUCH
smaller. It took forever to restring them. 

I restrung a strand of pearls last week. I do a lot of pearls, both with knots between each one and just strung straight together. I do what the customer wants to get the piece back to her looking great and ready to be worn again. This one strand of pearls was actually quite short - an 18" strand - and no knotting. It should have been a fast and easy restring - just move from the old string to the new. Of course, nothing is quite that easy in my life. The pearls were the DIRTIEST and cruddiest I've ever seen. I ended up working with a #75 drill bit in a larger holder, and had to hand-drill the gunk and dirt out of each pearl. Since they were wafer pearls, it was hundreds of them to make up the piece. One hour turned to three hours. I decided to charge her for two and educate her on cleaning pearls - needs to be very gently, but is absolutely necessary. 

Saturday had been very busy and we sold out of some colors that we thought would be fine until next year. We placed an emergency order with our distributor over the weekend and it's due to arrive on Friday. That would be great, because we'd be able to get the gaps filled back in before the upcoming Saturday. 

Our sales are worth saving up for since we have them so
rarely. We're usually pretty busy for the sales days, but
I need to get that email updated and scheduled. 

I also need to work on the email for our upcoming "After Christmas 4-Day Sale" announcement. I only do four store-wide sales a year - one for Thanksgiving and one for After-Christmas. My experienced customers know to save their holiday dollars and come in at those two times to stock up. However, if I don't get that email finished, it won't happen. 

Thanks go out to Poo and to Samtyr for the fabulous holiday cards. Thanks so much! They're going to be ranked across my fireplace mantle on Sunday - that's the first day I'll have a chance to catch up at home. I hope that everyone has a truly wonderful Tuesday. I'll be back tomorrow with a busy agenda - shopping for groceries, doing lots of laundry, and picking up a Honey-Baked Ham for the holidays. Yummy!