Living the Dream..with a touch of nightmare ;-)

Oooo, I am excited!!! Our new shop (shop #2, not replacement shop!!) is painted, papered and carpeted. With only a little bit of messy stuff left to do, we started putting stands into position (important for getting the spatials sorted) and then I couldn't resist a bit of stocking up. Just a few button tubes, but it felt goood.

For a mere 42sqm, it's turning out to be a nice size, I think.

 Two very long lines of bunting in bright fabrics that unfortunately you can't hardly see in this photo. I make batches of 8 and 10 flag strings with close together, single layer pinked flags sewn to a pretty striped ribbon, and these will festoon the walls. But because these ones are seen from both sides, I laid the fabrics wrong sides together, pressed them which gives them a little more cling to one another, and cut through all layers with my trusty pinking rotary cutter. Then I worked with them that way. So, no bagging in, no vliesofix to bond them and they seem fine. A triumph of under engineering!

 Gutermann threads. Lots of them. I love the way the colours flow up and down the columns of a thread stand. Some of these threads will never sell, some will be replaced over and again.

 YARN!!!!!! Another happy thing. Here in NZ it is finally turning to autumn and it is nippy. People are drifting into our Marion St shop looking for yarn. All of our yarn must be made in NZ 'from sheep to shop," with no sneaking it off to China to have it spun and dyed as is so often the case. I'm working on getting in all of the ranges that qualify, the most expensive of which we are going to have to save up for. Possum, silk, merino...mmm...

 More gratuitous thread shots. Because I can! :)

 Some buttons. I've already doubled the count since I took this photo and it still looks meagre. But those little discs are the road to financial ruin, let me tell you! But they are as irresistible to this shop owner as they are to the customers, so I keep buying them in!

Ahem, and buttons are not the only thing I find irresistible! These fabrics just arrived, from Riley Blake's Geekly Chic range, they are such fun!

So, that account for where I've been most of the time recently, and it will go on for a bit longer too. Hopefully we can open on Friday - no eftpos because I forgot to sort it out sooner, but MrC has programmed the till and, well, we'll get there eventually! :)