So what exactly have I been doing for all these months and months? Well, I'll tell you. Firstly, my dear, darling, stubborn as a mule grandmother had a partial hip replacement after falling out of her wheelchair while snoozing. It happened while my aunt was at work, and since Grandma was able to climb back into her chair, she decided to not tell my aunt when she returned home. In fact, she didn't tell anyone for almost 18 hours, when the pain finally became too much to bear. I love my grandmother to pieces, but she is so proud and so easily embarrassed that she makes it very hard to help her. It was terrible for my mother, which, at times, made it aggravating for me, 'cause- as everyone knows- poo rolls down hill.
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| No need for Simplicity Pattern #3677 quite yet |
(As an aside, I've decided not to get old. I don't mind being older, or, eventually, elderly. But if I even suspect that I'm starting to put out the slightest whiff of crone, I'm booking the next pixie-dust flight out to Never Never Land to be a wench on Captain Hook's ship. So there! Thbpt!)
But I digress.
Amidst the Grandma chaos, I also:
- knit a maple tree sweater and bird's nest fascinator for Miss Peach's Halloween costume
- celebrated Miss Peach's 13th birthday
- celebrated my Mr. Mister's birthday (I won't mention his age)
- celebrated my mother's birthday (or her age)
- sewed blind hems for over 2 dozen tux pants and jackets, sewed a dozen glittery tulle bustles, and made any number of other mendings and adjustments for a community theater production of White Christmas
- celebrated my brother's birthday (I won't mention his age, either. But I will tell you that we had a super fun wine tasting at his place)
- hosted Thanksgiving at our apartment
- worked backstage for the two-week run of White Christmas (sold out! Woo-hoo!!)
- spun 300 yards of hand painted 2-ply BFL, and 200 yards of hand painted 3-ply BFL for my church choir's holiday bazaar
- organized the bake sale portion of the bazaar, and made and decorated almost 20 dozen butter spritz cookies
- started a sweater for myself
- sang a Christmas cantata
- had my father spend almost a week with us when he lost power during a HUGE snowstorm
- sang the Christmas Eve service at church (they got their power back just in time)
- Christmas!!
- frogged my sweater and stuffed the yarn in a plastic bag to deal with later
- sang a recital in which I managed to hit myself in the head with the mic boom
- bought an exercise bike
- caught a nearly impossible to kick case of bronchitis
I think got everything in there. (Oh, except
for the liberal peppering of snow days that Miss Peach had, which she spent
wandering about the apartment whining about boredom.) I wish I had some
pictures to share of all my adventures, but I don't. My life is kinda
funny that way. I have tons of pictures of things that don't really matter,
and no pictures of things that do. I should probably get after that.
***************
You may remember that quite some time ago, I wrote
about putting some of my tatted jewelry into the Absolute Gallery. My
jewelry is no longer there. The short story is that it didn't sell.
The long story is a bit more complicated. Kathy, the owner of the
gallery, is a very nice, well-meaning woman, if she is a bit quirky. Her
mother, on the other hand, can be politely described as a harpy. When I
first walked into the Absolute Gallery last summer, I thought it was kinda
great that her mother was hanging out and helping in the shop. I liked
the whole involved family, local business, vibe. I
loved the aura of the space, the feeling that you would find something cool and unexpected around
every corner, and there hundreds of corners. What I didn't know going into this venture was how much
influence Kathy's mother was going to have on my business.
My Mr. Mister and I had gone to a midweek
after-hours meeting in late July with Kathy to select the items she was going
to display and to work out pricing. She told me that she was going to be
rearranging the shop and that my things would be out in the next few
days. We chatted for little bit afterward, and we left feeling pretty jazzed. When we visited the gallery two weeks later, though, the jewelry hadn't been put out on display yet. I
couldn't help but feel a little let down, and Kathy was thoroughly
embarrassed. She apologized profusely and I tried to be upbeat, making
allowances for festivals and gallery walks and other things that can eat up
time. However, when we visited after another two weeks, it still wasn't out. It
was during that visit that I actually met Kathy's mother. She recognized
me from behind the counter and called me over. She claimed that she was
glad I stopped in because after reviewing it for several weeks now, she just
didn't know what to do with my jewelry, and wanted my advice as to how to display
it. I didn't really understand her statement, because I knew she had
access to my phone number and my email, and had it been important to her, it
would have been very easy to contact me. I asked to see it, and it took
her several minutes to find where she had removed it from the storage box and
stashed it in the clutter behind the register. She also couldn't find the
inventory list for my items. My Mr. Mister and I explained that the
jewelry really didn't need any particular or fancy setting- there was no reason
why it couldn't just be laid out in the cases like all the other jewelry that
they carried. What I couldn't explain is how put out she seemed about the
whole issue, and how uneasy it made me feel. She thanked me and said that
she would figure something out. So Mr. Mister and I left the shop and
went home; me feeling let down, irritated and surprisingly insulted, and him
annoyed that Kathy's mother made me feel so bad about myself. Shortly
after I had settled down in front of the TV, Mr. Mister went back to the gallery.
Like I've said before, he's the one who has the knack for business in the
family. When he returned, I half expected him to have our entire
inventory with him. Instead, he told me that he spoke to Kathy herself
(mom was nowhere in sight by then). She was mortified by her
mother's behavior, and told Mr. Mister that she had asked her mom to put out
the display weeks ago. She again promised that it would be out by the
weekend, and Mr. Mister promised that if it wasn't he'd just pull it and place
it in a different shop. This time, it
really was out when we went to check a week later. One crocheted bead
rope bracelet was missing, and at first we thought it was lost, until Kathy
remembered that a woman had bought it as it was being put out. I was so
relieved that the mess was over that I purposely overlooked the fact that it
had been basically tossed into in the back two cases in the second room- along
with the polymer clay children's jewelry and sorority girl charms- in their
plastic storage zip-top bags and stapled to my business cards.
Months went by without hearing from Kathy.
Almost 6 months. Finally, about 3 weeks ago, I got a call from Kathy's mother. She sounded smiley and happy-
light years away from our last interaction- and told me that my jewelry was
lovely, but since they just didn't sell any of it, she needed me to come pick
it up and could it please be this afternoon? I told her that the very
earliest I could pick it up was the following week. And then I hung up on
her. It was not my most professional moment, granted, but at that moment
all I could think of was how smug she was that she finally got her way and it
pissed me off. Though I didn't have proof, I strongly suspected this
woman of deliberately delaying the display of my jewelry, and then of hiding it
in the very back of the shop where no one goes and in the most amateurish way possible.
I just couldn't figure out why. Kathy had seemed so nice, such a friendly woman
who loved to chat. Had she just agreed to have me in her shop out of
pity? Was her mother just acting out what Kathy didn't want to tell
me? I felt betrayed, somehow. I thought if she hadn't wanted it in
the first place, why she didn't just tell me no? I can handle outright
rejection. It's the sideways compliments that always throw me for a loop.
I made my Mr. Mister go to the gallery and
retrieve my tatting for me. He doesn't have a problem maneuvering through
these kinds of situations; I, on the other hand, tend to holler when I'm
mad. (Or I have an even more unprofessional reaction- I cry. It's
embarrassing and I hate it, but it still happens upon occasion.
Growl.) When he came home, he had a very interesting tale to tell.
Apparently, Kathy and her mother were on vacation together and her father was
left in charge of the shop. He had known that we would be coming, but he
had to call his wife to find out where my things were being kept.
Wouldn't you know that the very same items she kept losing for four weeks
straight when it was time to set up a display, were immediately located due to
her very precise memory when it came to getting rid of them. Mr. Mister
made an off hand remark that alluded to some of my suspicions, to which Kathy's
father replied, "Well, it wouldn't be the first time"(!).
Apparently, for whatever reason, Kathy's mother feels that she should get an
executive decision as to what goes into Kathy's shop and what
doesn't. When Kathy makes a decision without her mother, and her mother
disapproves, her mother has then been known to hide merchandise, lose papers...
anything she can think of to disrupt sales and rile her daughter.
So, needless to say, I'm glad to be done with
it. My relationship with the Absolute Gallery was simply not to be, and
whether I was kicked out or I finally got fed up and quit, it was going to end
eventually. Strange as it may seem to the casual observer, though, I
still really like Kathy and I wish no ill will on her, her shop, or even her
mother (that old pistol is not my crazy to manage. She's Kathy's, and
I wish her good luck on that front). None of this experience makes Kathy
a bad person- she's still nice, friendly, and lots of fun to chat with.
All it really means is that she has a chaotic personal life trying to manage an
elderly neurotic mother and her business relationships are suffering from the strain. I sincerely hope that it doesn't sink the entire business,
because that would truly be a loss for the Old Town community. I guess that's
one of the many lessons I've learned from this: I now really truly know
what it means to not take business personally. See, before I walked into
this, people told me this and I thought I understood. But I still kinda
believed that I needed to be friends with the people I do business with, and
that I needed to be super humble and grateful for whatever I could get.
So I never complained or did anything that I thought might offend Kathy, and
even made excuses for her (or as it turned out, her mother) as a way of
justifying her not holding up her end of our agreement, no matter how much it
inconvenienced me. (Re-creating pieces for orders, while the originals
were gathering dust in her shop, for example) It kept me from doing
things that other people would treat as no-brainers, such as making sure I was
paid within the allotted time frame for the one bracelet that did sell/got
lost/who the hell knows what happened to it. At this point, I don't
expect to see any payment, and that's okay with me. I'm calling it the
price for a lesson well learned.
Now, I'm back at it and happy to be so. All
of the handmade cards have staple holes in them, so they will be updated,
redone, and put away in new storage bags with their respective pieces.
I'm looking for new shops to display and sell my tatting, as well as checking
out the art fairs and music festivals for opportunities. The Etsy shop
and the blog are going to get an overhaul as well, I think, so be on the
lookout for exciting changes. And of course, I'm always creating new
things. For my new store, I've made a whole series of Go Green! and Go White! bracelets. Soon, they'll all have charms for football, basketball or Rose Bowl 2014.
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| current project: making rose charms from dyed bamboo coral for a bunch of these babies |
See you soon!
Love, Stephie
plans for the kitchen: marbled fudge cake
for Valentine's Day
plans for the (knitting) needles: socks,
beaded i cords
on the nightstand: nothing (!)
on the boob tube: whatever my Mr. Mister is
watching. I've given him reign over the Wand of Power and Control (for
now)
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