A Brief Introduction To The Beady Dragonfly

Thinking of going Self Employed? It's all in the planning!

If you are an active member of a networking group at some point somebody will ask the inevitable question; “I want to give up my full time job and run my own business but I don’t know where to start – does anybody have any advice?” I, along with many others, have always tried to help, giving what advice we can based on our own experiences. In an effort to help anyone considering  following me down the path of self employment this is how my journey started along with a few suggestions that I think are important.

I wasn’t one of those people who hated their job; it was hard work and stressful but also challenging and fulfilling at the same time and I’ve worked in a lot worse places. For me it was a nagging sense of missing out on something and for a long time I couldn’t pinpoint exactly what. In the early hours of a sleepless night after a truly dreadful day at work I made a decision; I was worth more than this, to be a cog that gets used up, worn out and spat into oblivion, just another statistic with a long list of ‘what if’s’ and so the seed was planted.

Now I’m a planner – whether it’s planting a flower bed, decorating a room or setting up a business the first thing I do is reach for a pen and paper.  I know this isn’t everybody’s way but seriously this is the one thing you really have to get used to doing, it will save a lot of effort, frustration and heartache in the long run.

The first thing I did was sit down and have a long talk with my husband, any decision I took would have a massive impact on him – essentially we were going from a two wage family to a single wage one. He might not be the world’s most romantic person but he’s very calm and level headed and he just told me to go away and get some ideas together and we’d take it from there and the rest is history as they say!

For me these points were essential, others may be in different circumstance and they may not apply but the aim of this blog is to help people get started with their own planning.

v  This is going to take time – there are an awful lot of things you have to put in place before you start out, these steps really are essential, trust me you will have so many new things hitting you when you first start out  you simply won’t have time to set up as you go along.

v  Look at your personal finances – get your bank statements for at least the last six months out and go through them, write down what you spend your money on, divide it into essential and non essential categories.  The essential list is your bottom line, non negotiable, somebody will have to pay those every month.  When I first looked at mine I wasn’t in a position where I could give up my job and my husband could cover my outgoings. So I stopped buying all those non essential bits and pieces every month and started getting rid of things on my essentials list.  Store cards, credit cards, magazine subscriptions, if I couldn’t pay them off completely I got the balances down to where we could afford the monthly payments.

v  You will need a dedicated place to work, time is money in this game, if you can’t have all of your equipment and supplies out or readily to hand or you will lose a lot of valuable time packing and unpacking every day. You will also need to make sure your family understand that this area is a ‘no go’ area: no dumping of toys, no hijacking the computer to surf YouTube and absolutely no ‘borrowing’ of anything (My husband is a devil for borrowing my tools and not putting them back).

v  Talking of family you will need to set some ground rules with them. I am not for one minute suggesting that you totally ignore your family during ‘working hours’ but they are used to having Mum/Dad available whenever they want them. This was one of the hardest things for me, making them understand that despite the fact that I was sat at a workbench upstairs it  didn’t mean they could wander in at any given time for a little chat or that I could come down and do ‘X’ ‘Y’ or ‘Z’ Now – Immediately!

v  Most people struggle to get meaningful sales for the first 3, 6, 12 months when they set up – it takes time to build up a brand and you will spend many a day thinking you are talking to yourself. So you need to plan (that word again) for this, make sure you have all the equipment and materials you need to stockpile products for sale when you set up – don’t get into that vicious circle where you need money to produce a product but you have no product to sell to produce money.

v  Branding is so, so important - it is your visual name and signature. It doesn’t need to be complicated (or expensive) it just needs to be something that makes people think of you when they see it. Go and visit all of the those lovely websites that you like – why do you like them?, What is it that makes you want to look at their products? This isn’t about what they are selling but about ‘HOW’ they are selling it, it’s a great free resource so make the most of it. Find something you like and use it to build your business.

I’m sure that there are many other things that you need to consider but I hope that this post gives you something to start with.

Experimenting With Copper Clay

Well today I thought might like to join me in a little experiment.

The beauty of the internet means that I have a constant source of inspiration available so there are always new ideas to try out; today I’m working on producing bead caps in metal clay and I’ll be sharing with you how it goes over the next two blogs.

I should probably mention at his point that I can’t draw, at all, for some reason I simply cannot convey what I see in my mind onto paper in any way that is recognisable or even useful so I just skip over that part, dive into the making process and make lots of notes.  So there will be no sketches or concepts for you to see at the start of a project, I will do my best to explain what I’m trying to achieve and hopefully imagination will supply the rest.

Because clay starts to dry the minute it encounters air I like to have everything laid out close to hand before I start and as you can see from the picture you really don’t need much in the way of tools. First of all let’s talk about the clay I’m going to use; Hadar’s Clay ™ Quick Fire Copper, this comes in a powdered form so I can just mix up what I need for that day, the rest will keep almost indefinitely in the plastic jar (the beauty of this product is there is virtually no waste, if you make a mistake just dry the clay out thoroughly, grind it back to powder and start again).

The trick with mixing up the clay is to add just enough water for it to start to bind but still feel reasonably dry to the touch – a bit like making pastry really – the clay will actually come together nicely when you roll it out.   You’ll notice that I use a plastic wallet for rolling out the clay, I originally started doing this because I have four cats and no matter how much you clean and hoover clay is a magnet for pet hairs! I roll the mixed clay a couple of times to make sure it’s thoroughly mixed and then roll it to the required depth (playing cards are great for this I have pairs of them taped together in 2, 3, 4, 5, and 6 deep).  For the first set of caps I have simply transferred the rolled clay onto a hard surface and used the cutter to give me the shape I want. If you want to make caps for beads then you may as well use beads as a drying form, in this case some rather nice large japer ones. I’ve used a knitting needle to lightly press channel in between each petal tip for a little interest, the shape can be finalised when they are dry.

For the second set I’m going to press a decorative plate into the surface of the clay, I’ve used quite a shallow pattern as the pieces are so small so it will be interesting to see the effect when it is fired. It can be quite a fiddly job lifting and piercing the caps then easing them into shape on the bead so I like to cove the clay with a damp piece of kitchen towel to stop it drying out while I work.

Next stop is tidying up the edges and sanding the surfaces, it’s a lot easier to shape and sand clay so do as much of the finishing as you can at this stage. Dried clay is brittle and will snap but with a little care you can do some really fine detail work on it, use water and clay slip to fill and smooth any cracks in the work.  The really important thing now is to ensure that the piece is completely dry; any moisture in the clay when firing will nearly always end in disaster causing cracks and breakages. Pop the pieces onto a clean piece of glass or mirror for a few minutes, if there is any misting on the glass there is still moisture in the pieces. I have a warming plate that I use because I need to dry a number of pieces as quickly as possible, that said, it is on the lowest setting with the pieces on a rack about eight inches above it. It’s the warm air circulating it not the direct heat that dries the piece safely.

Well that’s about it for the first part – next up Firing and Finishing.

Metal Clay – More Than Just Play-Doh

Strange title for a blog you might think, well yes, probably, but ‘Play Doh’ was a term that I heard applied to Metal Clay when I first encountered it a few years ago, mainly from purists in jewellery industry who saw it as nothing more than a passing fad – not worth taking the time to research. Well time has proven what a wonderful and versatile product it is and I, for one, am hooked!

What is Metal Clay?

Well in simple terms it is a combination of very fine particles of precious metals such as Silver, Gold and Platinum mixed with an organic binder (in this case the clay) and water.  From a UK prospective the first major developments in metal clay were undertaken by Mitsubishi (yes the car manufacturers’) in the early 1990’s.  Their product was to become known as PMC, and was for a while was the only avenue for this remarkable product in this country.

Metal clay was slow to make a major impact on the jewellery trade here in the UK with people not understanding its potential or finding it too fiddly and time consuming to be profitable. The price in the early days was prohibitive; demand for the product wasn’t high, with very few suppliers in the UK and little competition to bring prices down. With the American jewellery makers’ leading the way the product has become more popular and you can now work in:  Platinum, Gold, Silver, Copper, Bronze and Steel.

So how does it work?

This is not a lesson on how to use metal clay in fine detail, merely an introduction to what you can achieve with this most remarkable of mediums.

Firstly you need to remember that while the finished item is precious metal the main component during construction is clay, any restriction you have initially will be dictated by that medium first and foremost, so forget you are a metal smith and become a potter. 

You can buy the clay in lump form of various weights, in a syringe or as a very fine sheet and you can use one or all of these to make your piece.  Because clay is the dominant material you can manipulate it in a variety of ways. It can be rolled, moulded and stamped, you can add texture to all or parts of it and it can be built up in layers to produce interesting effects. The picture below shows a clasp that I made with one side fired and ready for polishing and the other side still in the ‘dry’ state waiting for final sanding and finishing before being assembled prior to firing.

The Platinum, Gold and Silver versions can be fired with a hand torch in what is a relatively quick process if you don’t have a kiln; however, until recently the copper and bronze versions required a very long 2 stage process involving activated charcoal.  They have now introduced quick fire versions in both mediums which has made them accessible to a wider range of crafts people.

Metal clays are never going to replace the traditional metalsmiths’ techniques and nor should they.  My hope is that they will become accepted as another way of stimulating people’s imagination into different areas and ultimately giving us one more avenue to be creative with.  Just to whet your appetite to the possibilities - this is what I produced from my first experiments with copper clay, finished and ready to be fired - they sold within a week!

A Technological Terror – a.k.a. Taking The First Steps Into The World Of E-Commerce

WEBSITES.....

.....  they’re everywhere these days!

Retail outlets have long been on the website bandwagon but they are no longer alone!

Celebrities have them; money spent on their own personal version of ‘Hello’ or ‘OK’ magazine!!!!  Network channels use them to promote your favourite channels and programmes in an effort to increase viewing figures; even sporting personalities now have a website presence!

Like it or not online retail is BIG business and the big players spend a lot of money getting noticed!

So here I am starting out in the in the big bad world of enterprise and trying to stake my claim as a business owner – the thought of setting up and running a website a tad frightening.

Funnily enough that’s probably a good thing.....

Okay first things first; I am not a website expert, never have been and probably never will be – all that technical stuff goes in one ear and out the other. Still I do like learning, have never been very good at being told I can’t do something and I like a challenge, so let’s talk websites.....

..... or not; well not yet anyway!

Before I could even start building a website I needed to decide how I wanted to brand my products, I figured the web page would lead the way for all the other areas of marketing. Simple enough; or so I thought, as I sat down with paper, pen and a large pot of coffee ready to do some serious research into this wonderful branding that I was going to devise. I made lists, lots and lots of lists – what I liked, what I didn't like, who my target audience was, who my competitors were – it just goes on. The lists were refined, reduced and starting to make sense, time for the simple process of registering a domain name. Simple – no, no, no you silly woman what are you thinking of? Well just sticking ‘www’ on the front and ‘.co.uk’ on the back of my business name actually, surely that’s all you need to do …. Isn't it!

So off I went to a domain name expert and typed my proposed business name in only to find that it was already take, as was my second and third ideas. After a fair bit of head scratching I finally came up with a variation that was available, my excitement knew no bounds FINALLY I was getting somewhere. A brief look at Facebook and Twitter confirmed that no one on there was using the name either so in a rush of emotion I registered my name then went to lie down in a darkened room.

After all that things can only get easier but I’ll leave that for another day!

Introducing A Self Made Somebody

The first thing we should establish is the word eccentric (or crazy if you prefer) is often applied to me, so if you are expecting sensible, serious or profound you’re probably following the wrong blog page.  I should also mention that I can talk – a lot – hind leg off a donkey and all that as they say; so you have been warned!

I’ve been with my OH for twenty years although we’ve only been married for a dozen or so. I live on the outskirts of Nottingham, close enough to the centre if I need to be but far enough away to be on the edge of the countryside which I escape to as often as possible. I have a wide range of interests, including a fondness for good food and red wine and a very eclectic taste in music. Any spare time I do have is usually spent doing running repairs to the house or trying to tame the wilderness in my back garden.

Initially my career was spent in administration for both private and public organisations, something I enjoyed doing but stopped being challenging after a while. Anyone who has worked in an office knows it’s not a good career choice if you get bored easily; it takes a real skill to get enthusiastic about photocopying the same page for twenty different people. I took a year out and went back to college to study horticulture for no other reason than I love gardening (and boy is there more to that than meets the eye) but ultimately that doesn’t pay the bills so it was back to work for me. Deciding I wanted something completely different I went to work for Tesco’s, working my way up from checkout operator, through customer services to merchandising and stock control. It was an incredible experience not just in terms of learning retail skill but life skills as well. I can guarantee with the mentioning of good old Tesco at least some people will think that it’s an easy job, I mean what’s hard about putting cans of beans on a shelf? Let me tell you at times it’s hell on wheels – imagine running a long distance race where you are working flat out to stay ahead to the competitor whose breathing down your neck and desperately wondering where the finishing line is – that is the reality of retail nothing stays the same for more than a few days!

I loved every minute of it.

Eventually though I decided what I really wanted to do was work for myself – so here we are running my small business from the spare bedroom and writing blogs to entertain the people who are kind enough to visit.
 

Some of these musings will be about the creative side of things; with the occasional jewellery book review thrown in as well, some will be about my home life. I hope you enjoy reading them – feel free to leave comments – good, bad or indifferent – I’m happy to see them all.

Oh and I better not forget to mention my four cats – the real rulers in our house!