Time for new skills?

Today, I went on one of the South Shore Beaders field trips. We visited a School for Jewelry and Metal Arts where a vendor of gemstones was showing their wares. I'm not sure what we thought we would find but soon discovered they were out of our league (I guess I should say MY league anyhow).

Realizing we would find nothing we could afford or more importantly, our current customers would purchase, we decided to find a local bead store we quickly found in an Internet search. While these prices seemed higher than we would like, too, at least they were less than $850 per strand. More like $25 or so. I did find a nice strand for $18 that I liked and will be working on a design soon.

On our trip home, we had our usual discussions of how to find people to buy our wares and other such related themes.

Tonight, while watching the national news, I saw several pieces on the recession. One was about graduating college students that were altering their job searches from what they would like, to what was available. They specifically mentioned the fact that many were looking into government jobs like law enforcement.

The other was about how the recession was affecting children. They showed an organization in Chicago that placed children of parents who were out of jobs, loosing their homes etc, with people who would care for them temporarily while the parents got back on their feet.

All in all, today gave me something to think about in my jewelry designing business. The gemstone salesmen seemed to be doing well. ;-) I guess it amounts to finding your niche and maybe then learning some more skills such such as those taught at the school we first went to. Looking over the offerings there is a lot to learn. I found Trisha Harding is one of the instructors. I featured Trisha in a previous post. One of her pieces is shown above. We met her at the Fuller Craft Museum.


B


www.bevsjewelry.com and www.bevsjewelry.1000makets.com