I should have known better and stayed with my original web host.  Setting up the new website has not gone well and I am still having problems with it.  The old adage, if it ain't broke don't fix it definitely applies here.  Apart from fighting with the website I have been decorating slates for the past few weeks.  The storms at the beginning of the year brought down a lot of slates from the newly restored St Bartholomew's Church in Gourock.  Well when I saw the broken slates left lying in the church garden I thought there must be something I can do with them.  So I took a few home and yes there is a lot you can do with them.  I decorated some with dried flowers, mounted 3D decoupage on some and I stamped and then painted the image with Twinkling H2Os and Cosmic Powders.  I am now trying to sell them in aid of the Roof Repair Fund at St Barts Church and the Restoration Fund for my own church St John's Church in Greenock.

For the rest of this week I am going to be preparing for a Car Boot Sale on Saturday.  I do not have any Father's Day cards, so I think I should do a few in case there is anyone looking for them.

I attended a fantastic workshop last night run by Business Gateway about Search Engine Optimisation so now my web site is under total reproduction with another web host.  Great idea, but remember all the trouble I had the last time, well it looks like it may be starting all over again.  I just hope I can remember all those lessons I had to learn the hard way have stuck in my brain.  I came home all enthusiastic and got started straight away, but by 1am my brain was fried so I went to bed and I will try again later today.

Some of my own jewellery

I thought I would show you some of the jewellery I have been making for myself recently.  I got fed up having nothing to wear when there was all that stuff in my boxes waiting to be sold, so I sat down and made a few things to go with my extensive wardrobe. The yellow set is honey quartz rice beads and chips with a carved honey jade rose pendant and is on 9ct gold plated on 925 sterling silver findings.  The turquoisy coloured set is glass beads on sterling silver findings.  This set drives my mother mad as she cannot cope with the asymetric necklace and odd earrings, but I like them as they are different and I am certainly never going to bump into someone wearing the same jewellery and I would be very surprised if I saw anything even similar.  The final set is wooden beads with large glass nuggets.  I have had the wooden beads for a while, they were part of a necklace I made a couple of years ago, but I never liked it as there were much larger wooden beads with it and I felt they were too big for me.

I spent the day at a Business Gateway training course yesterday, preparing my business plan and looking at basic marketing techniques.  they make it sound so simple, all I have to do is sell 90 units a month to make a liveable wage from the business.  ONLY 90 !!!! She then said you know that is only 3 a day.  In the past year I sold the total of 2 items from the website.  I did sell more through personal recommendation and the jewellery parties I did.  I have a friend who has more of my jewellery than I have and she is very good about  telling people that I made it when they admire her jewellery and then passing on my card so they can get in touch with me.  she really is a walking advert for my jewellery.

It seems that despite being full of good intentions I haven't got round to updating my blog for a couple of weeks.  So what have I been doing?  I have been making jewellery with Emeralds, Rubies and Sapphires as I bought 2 lovely sets of stones from the Jewellery Maker Channel.  I have also had my first Jewellery Making Party which was a great success, but unfortunately there were no further bookings from that.  Some of the ladies who came were a bit apprehensive about it as they had never made anything before, but by the time they went home with a necklace and a pair of earrings they had designed and made themselves they were feeling very proud of themselves.
 I have also attended another Craft Fair, this time it was in the Inverclyde Sports Centre in Largs, on the 17th of March.  when I booked the table I thought this would be good as it was the day before Mother's Day.  However when Hubby and I went to find the place a couple of days before hand I discovered it is quite far out of Largs and not exactly somewhere you were likely to be passing and drop in to see what was going on.  My fears proved to be right as on the day it was very quiet and for the first time I did not sell enough to cover the cost of the table never mind my other costs.  However I did make a few more contacts, found out about a Craft Fair and Fun Day in June and got my details added to the database of a gentleman who organises Farmer's Markets and other such events, so I may get some more business out of it.
On the fun side of things I had a friend's children over for the afternoon before Mother's Day so that they could make cards and presents for her.  One made a fluffy dog keyring for her from fluffy balls and the other a door hanger that said Shhhhh Mummy's Asleep on one side and OK Mummy's Awake on the other.  Being relatively young they are of the more is more opinion so when it came to making cards my peel offs were well used, but at the end of the day I had 2 very happy children who could not wait for Mother's Day so that they could give Mummy her cards and presents.

I haven't been doing much crafting lately as I have been trying to catch up with all the tasks that were not done during my frenzy getting stuff ready for the craft fair last week.  I went into my website today to see what has been happening there and there have been a few people popping in and looking, but no sales so far.  so hopefully there will be some soon.  I am going to have to get myself organised and put as much as possible into the site so that there is lots of choice for anyone who comes in for a look.

This card is one I have entered into the Craft Creations February competition.  The theme is vintage and I thought that this card when it was made up fitted the theme.  I don't often enter competitions mostly because like" the road to hell" I am full of good intentions which never come to anything.

Starting again

Well it has taken me a while to get the hang of things.  Top be honest I forgot all about the blog at the time, however I am more computer savvy now so I am getting to grips with things.  Angel A Designs is up and running and I intend to keep everyone up to date via my blog.

I attended the MyHomePageGreenock Craft Fair in Cruden Hall last night and unfortunately it was not the most successful of evenings.  however while we were standing around I got to know a couple of people and we discussed running a craft fair of our own.  The more I thought of this the better the idea seemed to me, so I am going to see if I can organise something like this in the Church Hall to raise funds for the restoration fund.  In the meantime I am slowly adding items to the website and updating things