The Slipping Toggle

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.