2009 Open Studios show

Over Mother's Day weekend, I had my 2nd successful (and fun!) Open Studios jewelry show, hosted again by the BF's family at their home/backyard. The weather was gorgeous and perfect and so many old friends, family, and neighbors stopped by. There were also a lot of new faces, people in the area checking out the other Open Studios going on. SugarCube Jewelry was a hit! I surpassed my sales from last year, even tho I slashed my prices. And my "not in this economy" cheapie earring rack was really hot. I was all about clearing out inventory this year and making room for the new. Isabelle did really well too, selling more paintings this year than last. Safe to say we'll be doing this again!

The only thing that could have gone better this weekend was if I had not been sleep-deprived. It's my own fault of course. I had this great idea to give each piece of jewelry a code on the back of the price tag, then match up the code with the file name of the jewelry's photo. That way, when a piece was sold, I simply would have to write down the code and could reference exactly which piece it was later. Sounds pretty straight-forward, right? Well, I'm an admitted neat-freak and I do love order, but as much as I adore Martha Stewart, my digital photos are a complete mess. Nothing is organized or sorted in any logical way. So this great idea turned into an even bigger nightmare--if you can have a nightmare without sleep. The BF and I were up til 6AM tying price tags and tagging photo file names. (Now that is love, folks.) We had just enough time for a one and a half hour "power nap" before packing up and being down in the South Bay by 9AM. (The show went from 11AM to 5PM.) By the end of the day, I was running on 100% caffeine fumes, but still managed to visit a friend's newborn baby after dinner that night before hitting up a backyard BBQ birthday party. Got into bed by 2AM to do it all over again on Sunday. Who says I'm old? I did less in my 20s!



Above are photos of my "shop". I changed up some of my displays. The handy BF made more frames. (He got a new set of power tools out of this project!) And to cover the tables, I used some free fabric from work that I actually like in that Miss-Marple's-living-room sort of way.

Some close-up shots of my work: