8.29.2006

Countdown- 4 days to go

We are quickly approaching the opening day and we still have a ton left to do. There are still several orders that haven't arrived and we are still building and painting shelves. Our goal is to have all of the shelves painted and in place by Thursday night so we can spend the entire day Friday stocking and cleaning. While the overall state of the store is still a mess, there are areas that are complete and we just look at those when we start to feel frustrated. Last night I finished the vegan knitting section with the exception of the yarns that will arrive later this week. None of these yarns contain synthetics and all of them are absolutely beautiful. We are also carrying needle cases and knitting bags made from recycled materials, a perfect match for the large selection of environmentally and socially responsible materials we carry.
We also met with Sarah Turner from Cricket Press and we will be selling a selection of the Cricket Press rings made by Julie Briggs. These rings are amazing and they come in little hadmade boxes. We only have five rings at this point, but we are hoping to add several more to our jewelry collection.

8.26.2006

A long post, long overdue

Things have been extremely busy around here and the longer I put off creating this post, the longer it gets so I am just going to go for it.

First, Juli, my secret pal sent me the most amazing box of goodies. She sent four skeins of beautiful sock yarn, a bunch of kitchen cotton for my current Mason Dixon Knitting obsession, some mercerized cotton, and a bunch of other fun stuff including a fabulous vintage cookbook. She also included some lace yarn which I am really excited about. I have been wanting to take on a hard-core lace project for quite some time and now I have no excuse not to. Since I started on the store I have had almost no knitting time and now I want to knit more than ever. One more week and we will be on track and I will have more free time to use all of the fabulous yarns in my package. Thank you Juli, I really love my gifts!!!
Inside my package was tons of yarn, two patterns, a scrubby, an awesome cookbook, some wonderful soap, and some little figurines.

Next comes the store. The store has made an incredible transformation since the last time I blogged. We are done with most of the painting, we still need to paint the dressing rooms and do some touch ups. Last week we started the floors which were by far the biggest and most painful job. The original floors in the front are hardwood. Unfortunately, someone thought it was a good idea to put vinyl tile down directly over the wood using and insane amount of glue. As if that wasn't bad enough, after that someone glued carpet to the tile. The carpet was about 15-20 years old so you can imagine the state it was in and all of the nasty dirt and dust that went everywhere as we pulled it up. While the carpet was gross, but pulling it up was nothing compared pulling up the tile.

This is what tile scraping looks like. Thanks to Sarah's parents, Philip's parents, Philip, and Erik we got it all up and we will never have to look at that stuff again!

There was so much glue in some places that it would take 30 minutes to pull up a single tile. Thankfully, we had a bunch of people who were willing to endure soar palms and bloody knuckles to help us stay on schedule. We finished ripping up all of the tile around 11pm Tuesday night, just in time to start the sanding on Wednesday morning as scheduled.
This is what the floors looked like right after we removed all of the tile. The grey and brown you see is glue and dirt.

Since the floor was covered in so much glue we had to use an industrial sander with very coarse sandpaper. The glue was so thick and sticky that it took 5-10 passes with the sander to get it all up. Once it was done we applied three coats of polyurithane.
This is what the floor looked like right after sanding. We were actually surprised that the wood was in such good condition.

Then we moved to the floors in the back of the store. The building was originally old apartments so in the place where the kitchen and bathroom was there is plywood flooring. The back half of the store was painted grey with splatters of other colors. We used wood filler to even up the floors and the we painted the grey to make them less noticeable.
The back floors right before we started painting.

After the floors were finished we had to spend a day painting the bottoms of the baseboards which we left unpainted because the sander would have scuffed up the paint.
On the right are our new cubby shelves and if you look around the paper you can see our beautiful floors.

Next, we started sorting and pricing the merchandise and creating displays. Monday my dad brought us two large cubby shelves that we painted and primed and then yesterday he brought us three more. We are hoping to finish painting those today and get more merchandise set out. We still have five more shelves to make, prime, and paint before Saturday, but I am fairly confident that we will finish.
This is Sarah trying on one of our beer cap belts that appears to be made for a child.

8.08.2006

Our first shipment

Another few nights of painting and we are moving right along. No pictures tonight since I forgot to put the memory card back in my camera so you will have to take my word on it.

We received our first packages in the mail today. Two of which were from Relan containing bags made from recycled billboard vinyl. We will be selling the following bags from them along with a few others from their collection.

relan 4relan 3relan 2

We were so excited about our new bags that we went ahead and created a small display near the front window so people passing by could get a sneak preview of our stuff. If you happen to be by the store make sure to peak in the front window. I will post pictures of the display along with our progress tomorrow.

8.06.2006

Better or worse?

Friday, Sarah and I started work on the store. The original plan was to start with the classroom so that we would have a finished space to use as an office and to store the merchandise until the shelves and the retail space is done. Unfortunately, the classroom was still full of boxes when we arrived in the morning so we decided to work on the retail space instead. We pulled hundreds of nails and screws out of the wall, removed over 50 old stickers from the windows, pulled down all of the broken slat wall and painted the front room of the space. My dad came over to help us and he ended up pulling up the carpet in the front room and cutting it into neat little 4ft rolls so we can put it out with the garbage, cutting pieces of slat wall to replace broken pieces, and patching all of the holes that we made by pulling things out of the wall. We got way more work done than we thought possible. Here are some pictures of what we have done so far.

The front room is pink with white windows and trim. We still have to get a new baseboard for the area where the window display was.
The front door is painted green with a temporary sign to let people know we are coming.
The front rooms needed a lot of patching.
We started painting the trim in the main area the same pink that we used in the front room. The walls will be painted the same green as the front door.

8.01.2006

The anticraft

The new issue of the anticraft is up. This issue's theme is danger and I have two dangerous patterns in there so check it out.