Shop Life

The shop was doing much better this year... but it has been a bit quiet the past week or so... but I'm still hopeful. I had to figure out how to pre-pay my taxes. The IRS makes it very easy! The MA state is a doozy to figure out. You'd think it would be easier to send them money! I had my first in person sale which was fun. Its pretty sweet to enable someone to find THE ring via social media. I honestly wasn't sure social media worked at all. There were some nosy folks nearby too who had to ask some questions. I should get some business cards made just in case.

Speaking of getting things made someone is trying out printing some rings at work... and while it is very expensive to do so I am interested in the possibility of only doing the custom designing part and hiring out to do the rest if the client was to pay that expense. I guess in that sense I could even sell a downloadable pattern since there are already vendors available to do the printing and casting. I am not sure if there are any services to do the casting and set stones however, so I might have to finish up that last step. It would just be prohibitively expensive to have it as a ready-made product... unless my shop was wildly more popular haha.

I've started the reboot of my mom's art website. I'm trying to get her to start a blog and to make a web gallery of her art... I'm not sure she wants to part with any of her paintings though. I'm not the best influence with my sporadic blogging! I do however wish to part with *most* of my finds :)

Summer was almost here last weekend... we got stuck in beach traffic on our way to our usual hiking spot. But its back to windy and a bit chilly with the sun sometimes peeking out. Its birthday/mother's day weekend or semi-annual clean up the house week so the shop is likely to be a bit neglected but I have tons of inventory to organize and post once the place doesn't look like a pig-sty :) I'm picking up some cheesecake from 7ate9 and Boston cream pie from the Omni... its a very good excuse to have a tiny slice of cheesecake.

So far we've already done two road trips this Spring. One weekend we went up to Lake Placid NY and just putz'd around, got caught in a lot of rain, pushed the car up a mountain and had some excellent chocolates (and brunches). On the way back we stopped by Lake George which looks like it will be super packed come Summer. It reminded me of Old Orchard Beach in Maine. We've already done a road trip up to Maine on a gorgeous Sunday and are looking forward to many more this summer. We visited Auburn and Mount Apatite. Saw several guys hard at work sifting through dirt looking for gems. I hope to go back and find something better than quartz and mica - of which there was a lot. We just need to know where to look!

<3 Amorette