Reconfiguring

Every year we do a purge in the club jewelry store. It has limited space, but we keep producing jewelry, more than we can sell. Our rules give us two years from submission date in the store to appeal to customers. After that, our jewelry comes home to us.

 It's a process. First, we go into the drawer that holds a card for each item in the store. When a sale happens, the card gets pulled out, matched with the tags on the jewelry, and goes to our treasurer so we can get paid our 80%. The other 20% is how our club makes money, going towards new equipment, repairs, and all the other expenses our club incurs.

Our expenses didn't go away when covid closed our club doors completely for most of a year, and kept people out of our jewelry store for much longer, both officially and unofficially. Our club treasury dropped nearly $7 grand during that time. We're fighting our way back, but it's slow.  In a move to be more fair to our members, we adjusted the two year limit to "two years of time when the store was open." In effect, it gave everybody an extra 18 months. But now it has caught up with us, and I sent out the notice last week that by the end of February, everything with a date of 2018 needed to be pulled by the owners.

We start with a rule that there have to be two people in the store during the process. The second one is to be sure nothing goes into pockets, or is incorrectly matched to cards. Each of us, one member at a time, pulls out cards with the old dates and starts hunting. Then each card with its item on top gets spread out on the counter top, hopefully all matching up perfectly. Our second person initials each card that is properly paired.

The first time you do this, you find out in a hurry that you can't really remember that far back. If your only description is "necklace, copper," you'll never find it because you made 10 that year and many since. It's time to hunt. You find out that some of your designs are distinctive, some others similar to what 3 other people made, and every tag needs to be checked. It's much easier when you had a distinctive style for a while, the dates fall in your time frame, and you can just go pull them and match up to the cards later.

While making that mental note to put down better descriptions on future submissions, you also discover that there are cards left over that do not match anything you can locate in the store. Not even after two days of searching. Occasionally one of those cards says "duplicate". What this really mostly means is the original card was misfiled, the item sold, but a new card needed to be made up so you could get paid. Meanwhile the original was found and sent to the treasurer but nobody pulled out the duplicate card. Is it getting complicated yet? Having a card but missing the item may also mean that the person making the sale had no clue what they were doing beyond pulling off the tags - or at least you hope so - and never got them matched to a card. So the store got paid. You didn't. Another somebody came along, looked at the tags, wondered why they were there, but left them sit on the counter. And on and on, until somebody else decided that having been there for two weeks now, they must be trash and tossed them out. Any of these possibilities results in your having a card which doesn't match a piece of jewelry. 

But you struggle on, looking for all the jewelry you can find that needs to come home with you. Many are simply embarrassing. You were a beginner, or at least less skilled than you are now. Or they were overpriced, since we all set our own prices on our wares and you were also embarrassingly a beginner at pricing. Or the design was just totally out there and you were the only person on the planet who actually liked it, for however brief a time. There are some, however, that were well executed but just not exactly how people wanted them.

For example, what doesn't look good in a necklace might look much better in a bracelet. Or a bracelet/necklace/earring looks better in a different length. Or with a better stone. Or a slightly different technique. Or a better color of stone or beads. Or what was done in copper would have sold in sterling. All these things can be reconfigured (significantly!) and resubmitted for another two years' crack in the store.

So after two days searching stuff out in the store, I looked it over to see what could be reconfigured. In a mixed metals phase, I connected brown metallic beads into a silver colored chain. The concept was popular then and popular now, but not so much the brown beads. It has been cut apart, new links with beads on them made, and those put back in the chain. But this time they are a lovely blue-green crystal. Another chain now has small square blue kyanite beads, about the color of lightly faded denim but shiny, and the links are more frequent, extending the length of the chain. I had two necklaces with agates in links, just in front with empty links going to the back, which didn't sell. I reconnected the agates by using double jump rings to hold them together rather than hooking them straight to each other, all into a single chain. A similar necklace using tiger eye rectangles had just enough of those to be converted into a bracelet, now with the beads all around. Tiger eye is starting to sell in the store again.

One total disaster was a highly-beaded wire phase I was into back when. Of about 30 items, I think 2 sold. Looking back at them, I decided they were totally tacky. A polite friend says "funky" as a compliment, but that didn't make them sell any faster. While they weren't completely past their sell-by date, I went around and pulled every last one of them. Then I spent a day sorting by colors, cutting them all apart, saving the seed beads for somebody else's ideas, possibly workshop teaching where quality in first efforts doesn't matter, and packaged them up in those tiny plastic ziploc bags more commonly seen on TV for drug buys.

 I did wonder when I stocked up on those bags whether that put me under some agency's microscope for being a suspect dealer. Just let them try to get high on those things! More likely choke! Or maybe they'd get swallowed, turn into some exotic coprolite a future archeologist pulls out of a dump site and wonders about for the rest of his/her life!

Anyway, each item was a color combo blend, and those got sorted out into purple, blue/green, red/white/blue, gold/orange/amber. red/pink. I'm keeping the purples. The rest are getting donated to the club. All the wire was cheap silver colored, and 983 bits went out in the trash. (Approximately.) I'm pretty sure several bits landed on the floor, just like the beads my feet keep finding. (Wanna see and old lady dance?)

Then there's a copper cuff. I cut the piece, rounded the corners, ground them smooth, ran it though the roller mill against a form that made patterned impressions in the copper. Once that was done, I used the torch to "paint" the copper, as it changes into many different colors depending on how much heat hits any particular spot. If I didn't like the colors, in it went to the "pickle pot" to come back to pink fresh copper, and again with the torch. I believe that took four tries before I got the right combination of orange, red and blue patches to satisfy me. The trick then was to immediately spray it with a clear spray so it wouldn't oxidize any further and just become brown. Those colors are still there. A real beauty!

Unfortunately, before I started that lengthy project back when, I chose a very flimsy sheet of copper that couldn't hold its shape to stay on a wrist properly. That gauge of copper sheeting was much more suited to being in earrings, where weight is everything! 

AHAH! 

So guess what I'm going to be working on this week? We have stamps for cutting forms out of metal sheets in several shapes, each with several sizes. We also have a tool with a part you twist to drill a small hole into metal so it can be strung from a wire, preferably a jump ring fastened to an ear wire in this case. As a bracelet it didn't sell for $7  in the store. As earrings, each of the several pairs I'm  planning, barring disasters, should each sell for about double that. I just need to find the time among all the month-end, month-start duties I'll have as well.