Dental trauma........

I had a check-up at the dentist this afternoon.

Thankfully, everything toothwise was OK, and nothing needed doing, which was a relief, but my head and mouth are still jangling from the drilly/poky thing he used to scale and polish. Also he put the chair so far back that my head was lower than my feet so I went all swimmy.

For some obscure reason he had two dental nurses/assistants and they were chatting away to each other non-stop the whole time, not paying the slightest attention to what they were supposed to be doing. So the one who should have been watching what she was doing with the squirty water and suction tubes in my mouth was completely distracted and the tubes were everywhere except where they should be. At one point the squirty water tube was so far down my throat I thought I was going to drown, and the suction tube got stuck on my face.

Eventually, after I gagged on the squirty water tube, the dentist told her off, but not before I was at at point where I wanted to grab both tubes and ram them down HER throat.

Hastings town centre is wall-to-wall Christmas but there was precious little festive cheer to be had. In the shopping centre there is an animatronic Santa's Grotto already juddering away, and outside in the square what looks like two wooden sheds have been erected for no discernible purpose. Surely they can't intend to shatter childhood illusions by having TWO competing grottoes, complete with twin Santas!

It's been a horrid, grey, cold, wet, windy day, yet again and the house feels very dark.
Sod carbon footprints, I want every downstairs light on in an attempt to banish the gloom.

Moving swiftly on...........

Back to work with a vengeance today....orders to package, invoices to process, so no time as yet to get to grips with restocking the website.

However, to balance my deficiencies in that department, a vital element of one of my forthcoming projects has unexpectedly fallen into place, thanks to the wondrous Freecycle.

To explain..... our workroom is a reasonable size but our office/study is tiny and subsequently crammed chock-a-block full of all the office paraphernalia required to run a small business.

We already have a rather lovely solid wood pedestal desk and two matching filing cabinets, but they are really too big for the tiny space. PP has the use of the desk for the office computer, but for the past six years I have been forced to work at my laptop on a very small, flimsy folding tray table, only marginally bigger than the laptop, crammed uncomfortably into a small area in front of one of the filing cabinets. As a result I have nowhere to lay out books, papers, notebooks etc, so they usually end up in a teetering pile on the floor.

Quite why I have endured this situation for 6 years I cannot fathom, but as of now I have had enough and have petitioned for a complete re-organisation of the room so that I can have some proper desk space. To this end, we will be relocating the desk and filing cabinets elsewhere in the house and replacing them with one large desk which will fit all along one wall in the office and allow both of us space to work properly. We will also be doing away with a tall bookcase which is always overflowing with stuff, and replacing it with something sleek and streamlined, with drawers and cupboards, within which all the dispossessed 'stuff' can be hidden out of sight.

While we're at it, the scruffy old carpet will have to go and we might slap a few coats of paint on the walls to freshen them up a bit. I have a vision of a neat and tidy office, much more conducive to creative endeavour than the current unholy guddle.

So..... when PP saw that someone on Freecycle was giving away a large beech topped desk this morning, fortunately she spotted it and was able to respond within the 'golden 15 seconds' before the world and his brother saw it too.
Measurements were requested and supplied and miraculously, it appeared that it would fit perfectly into the space available. So we arranged to go and have a look.

10 minutes later we were unsuccessfully struggling to fit one large, unassembled desk into our tiny car. The legs and back panel fitted in fine, but the desktop wouldn't fit no matter which configuration we tried.

20 minutes later we had returned home to get the campervan in order to retrieve the desktop.

30 minutes later we had successfully unloaded the desktop, plus legs etc and it is now leaning up against the wall in the dining room, pending further developments.

Of course in order to establish the new desk in situ, the old one will have to be emptied, drawer by drawer, and all the extraneous stuff dispensed with. Ditto the four drawers of the filing cabinets, in which there are invoices, accounts and tax stuff going back decades, and which I can probably safely dispose of. Ditto the bookcase, the whole bottom shelf of which holds several hundred vinyl LPs which may themselves find their way onto Freecycle in due course.

However, I can sort through a drawer or shelf each day for the next week or so, by which time we may have reached some agreement about the relocation of the desk.

Another positive knock-on effect is that we are both going to get new office chairs. Plush and comfortable, ergonomically designed with proper back support and everything!

I am sooooo looking forward to having a lovely, sparkling, uncluttered office space. Best of all, in the process, I get to visit stationery/office stores (my secret guilty pleasure!) in search of new chairs and useful, coordinated, storage and stationery organisers.

Be still my beating heart...........I LOVE STATIONERY!

Sold out city...........

Phew.......

I've just finished going through all our stock boxes, made a list of what we still have, and spent a while going through the website systematically removing toys which we sold on Saturday.

As a result, the website now looks very bare, so tomorrow my primary task will be to upload as many of the remaining new toys which hadn't been listed on the website in advance of the last two fairs.

These will include several new exotic animal pullalong toys, a boy's magic set and a really fantastic boy's toy tool set, as well as some new handpainted puppets, wicker prams and a selection of boxed Jumeau style doll's dolls.

Also, over the past two weeks since the Charmandean Fair, only the bare minimum of housework has been done, as we have been heads down working hard towards KDF. I looked around this morning as if I had awoken from a dream and the house looks as though it's been ransacked. So some major clearing up and clearing out is also the order of the day. I can't believe how messy and unkempt everywhere looks..... especially the workroom and the office.

I'm hoping that rolling my sleeves up and getting stuck into some clearing and cleaning will be cathartic, as I can put my brain in neutral and give some serious thought to moving on to new things. I can then sit down in a (hopefully) tidy, sparkling clean room and sketch out a plan of campaign for my new projects, about which I'm really, REALLY excited.

Back in the land of the living......just

What a weekend!

I've had to have two long sleeps to recover from Saturday and although I still feel a tad fragile today, I'm fortunately much less zombiefied than yesterday.

Saturday was both wonderful and awful.

Wonderful in that we did amazingly, jaw-droppingly, eye-poppingly well. By mid afternoon we were staring at each other in disbelief and the customers just kept coming.... and coming.... and coming!

It was like travelling back in time to the heydays of miniatures fairs, perhaps 10 or 15 years ago, when the melee around each stand was 6-deep, and customers were literally throwing money across the top of other people's heads in order to bag a coveted miniature. If I hadn't known better I would have thought I had slipped back into the Twilight Zone.

Despite the weather, long queues built up outside Kensington Town Hall long before the fair opened at 10.30. As soon as the doors opened the Main Hall seemed to fill up very quickly, and within 15 minutes we were submerged under a deluge of collectors, intent on serious spending.
We didn't stop all day.........I didn't even have time for any of our delicious lunch as wave after wave of really enthusiastic buyers besieged our stand.

People were still flooding in up until lunchtime and the crowds were astonishing. From our vantage point up on the stage the whole of the Main Hall was a seething mass of people. Apart from a very quick dash before the show opened, to pick up some essential materials for my next project, I wasn't able to venture out from behind our stand all day.



The awful bit began at 5.30, after we'd packed down the stand, headed down into the car park, loaded up the car and set off home.
What had been a straightforward 2 hour journey in the morning, turned into a nightmare 4 hour marathon, in horrendous traffic (it took us 45 minutes to travel just the few miles from Kensington High Street to get back over the river) then driving wind and rain. Roads turned into rivers and at some points we were forced to drive through mini lakes of water which had pooled in dips in the road.

4 hours to travel 69 miles. Nightmare!

We arrived home at 9.30, absolutely exhausted and traumatised by the journey back. After wearily unloading the car we didn't even have enough energy to cook dinner and resorted to eating our lunch instead. It was all I could do to struggle upstairs and fall into bed.

Yesterday I could hardly move. I ached in places I didn't even know I had. The limit of my effort was to make a cosy nest on the sofa and snuggle down with Small Dog to watch films on TV.

Bliss..........

So, today will be a day for very gentle pottering. We haven't even touched the fair boxes yet, which are still in the hall where we left them on Saturday night. They're filled with mostly empty boxes so I have to sort through what remains and remove whole swathes of miniatures which have been sold, from the website.

The weather today is still horrendous.....driving wind and torrential rain so that is a perfect excuse (if one were needed!) to stay indoors and recuperate further.

In other news, I have the luxury of a whole 88 days till our next fair.

Woo, and indeed, hoo!

Stop press..............

Just back from shopping for our lunches tomorrow. Tesco was absolutely heaving, and to add to the throng there were various fund-raising efforts for Children in Need going on. I hate doing food shopping on Fridays but we like to push the boat out a bit on fair days, and treat ourselves to a special lunch-time menu so we had no choice.

Tomorrow we will have Chargrilled Chicken, Bacon and Pasta Salad; Layered Cheese Mixed Salad; Brie, Cranberry and Rocket sandwiches; Roast Beef Salad & Horseradish Sauce sandwiches. Put like that it does sound like a lot but we will be leaving home at 6am and won't get back till around 8-ish in the evening (if we're lucky!) so it's going to be a long day and we will need to keep our energy levels up.

In other news, I've been quite distracted over the past day or so, and although I was vaguely aware that PP was busy making something, I wasn't paying much attention to what it was. So it was a lovely surprise when she unveiled this earlier today....



That little wicker cart is just gorgeous! It's lined with pink leather and has plenty of room in the back for a selection of tiny toys. In the front there is a sweet little raised leather seat for the driver. My contribution was the lamb's silk roses hat in various shades of pink, to coordinate with the cart. I'm secretly hoping it doesn't sell tomorrow as I'd love to snaffle it for my toy shop. It would look fantastic in the window, with the cart full of toys.

So, early night tonight. Every alarm in the house set to go off at 5am *middle of the night*.
Small Dog will most likely stay in her bed until her sitter arrives, and will thereafter submit to being mollycoddled in our absence.

It's a dog's life..........

KDF information......

The friendly countdown timer on my desktop informs me that there is just 1 day left till KDF.

Normally at this point I'd be locked in my own private hell, racing against time to complete just one more miniature toy while simultaneously packing and trying to do a multitude of other essential fair-related tasks.

But not this time.

No by no nonny no.

I'm not sure whether that bodes well or not.

Either way it's a refreshing novelty. Yes there are still a few bits and pieces to do. I might print out a few more brochures. We have to go shopping for tomorrow's lunch and finalise our travel route.

But trust me, those are as nothing to the chaos which normally reigns at this point in the proceedings. D'you think that belatedly, after over 20 years of exhibiting at miniatures fairs, I might finally have cracked it?

This will be our final exhibition of 2009, and plans are already afoot for exciting new projects for next year. I'll share them with you in more detail next week, after the dust has settled.

However, as you probably know, after the end of this year we will no longer be selling our character porcelain doll kits. So we will be taking a selection of Clearance Sale kits with us tomorrow. This will be a final opportunity to see them 'in the flesh' and snap up a bargain in the process. We probably won't have space on our stand to display them all, so if you're interested, just ask to have a look in the box.

Today, I also have the unaccustomed luxury of time to compile my own shopping list, with new projects in mind. However, whether I will have time tomorrow to leave the stand in PP's capable hands and go walkabout is anyone's guess...

Hmm.........

You know what they say.

The devil makes work for idle hands.

I've been messing about with my blog settings for the past 20 minutes, and for one awful, stomach-churning moment, I thought I'd inadvertently deleted the whole thing!

Thankfully that is not the case. Unless I'm back in the Twilight Zone and this is all happening in my imagination, and there has never been a blog to delete in the first place......

Anyway, I've done a bit of tidying up. Put up a new header. Swept out some of the cobwebs etc.

I'm going to stop messing about now though, otherwise something irrevocable will happen and I'll never forgive myself.