My consignment shop owner friend Debbie gave me some customer feedback on one of my
necklace designs I had placed with her. She said there was a good measure of
interest in the African Turquoise Pendant necklace and several potential customers had tried
it on, you know to see how it looked and felt as they were deciding if to just
say yes and make the final purchase. I don’t know about you but that’s when I
get most excited, I love to hear talk about my jewelry designs that people like
them, are commenting on them and trying them on wanting to purchase. That kind
of talk fills me with hope and confidence it gets me believing that it’s only a
matter of time before my designs are “in demand”. It won’t happen overnight
that I’m sure of but as I keep working on my design skills and improving on
learned techniques, each new piece of jewelry SK designs will become better
more creative, more uniquely beautiful and lusted after by Simply Katie’s SK Wire Jewelry
followers.
With the good news also came some bad news and honestly I
don’t know that I would go so far as to classify it as “bad news” except that
these potentials customers ended up not
making the purchase. In business (and in life) everything has a positive and negative, the
negative here is that they did not purchase my necklace and the reason was –
and here’s the positive – because there was a design problem with the toggle,
it would not remain latched my handmade wire wrapped toggle bar slipped out of
the ring every time the customer turned her head. Remaining positive and being
an always deep in thought [overly] analytical woman I thought Okay, what
exactly is the cause of this issue and took the necklace with me to try and
solve the problem. Well it just so happens that one of my favorite bead and
wire supply shops and where I bought the toggle ring, Buttons Baubles & Beads is on the next
block so I walked over to see if my friend Bobbi Maw was in and could give me
some insight, you know a second set of design eyes and plus she’s got a Wired Imagination. Bobbi’s
given me many tips before and this again was a positively fruitful experience,
she showed me how to create tighter wraps so off to my studio I went hoping
that tightening the wraps on the toggle bar would be the ticket fix.
Tightening the wire wraps did help but it is not the root
cause of the slipping toggle problem even after another simple adjustment of
bending the toggle bar, the toggle ring still slips but remains caught on the
lower coil of the bar when I wear it. So I decided to set the necklace aside for
a while and it sat on display in my studio as I worked on other projects and
this morning out of the blue I had a design vision and rushed to my art journal that I bought
from my friend Alice on Etsy
to sketch it out. What a beautiful sight, the look of the toggle changed
completely I’m excited to get to work on it but first I’ll take a moment to
stop and thank God for blessing me with this wonderful artistic and visually
creative gift.
