Making Progress & Experiencing Growing Pains

Every planner I've owned for the last decade shows April as a blooming month - overflowing with activities. This year is no exception. Our Signs of Spring Craft Show is on April 10th. Last summer I asked a college art student to create these signs for me as a summer job. When it wasn't accomplished by fall, I "assumed" that it wasn't going to happen. My son, Ryan, has quite the saying about "assuming" in which I won't repeat. In the meantime I asked my daughter, Sydney, to design and paint these signs. She's shown here putting on the finishing touches. Last week I received a phone call from that college student. Unbeknownst to me, she was home on spring break painting away. Now I have ample signage. Sadie, my oldest, reminded me that my communication skills haven't been up to par lately. People can't read my mind? Darn it anyway!

Experiencing growing pains with my kids, I know that they can be very painful. Beads in a Box is experiencing growing pains of the good kind. It's a sure sign of springtime as Mid is spring cleaning. We are giving promotions, moving offices and rearranging everything. You guessed it; the Beads in a Box office is expanding to double the size. Besides being our storeroom, asking Janice to make it her office to boot was walking a fine line of pure craziness. Good thing she can work in tight spaces. She only had room to make it to her chair and turn her chair around. Karen came up with some awesome office designing ideas and pictured here are our heroes, Ryan and Lonnie constructing our pegboard in the new office. We now will have double the hanging space. My favorite part of spring cleaning is the organizing. It doesn't get any better for me when things are organized, fresh and clean. We had a bead brigade transporting our pegs of necklaces to the new office. Since Karen is extremely tall (compared to the rest of us), her help dismantling the top pegs was essential. Misti got the fun job of reinstalling all the loaded pegs and organizing them. Look how much fun she's having. Do you like organizing things? What are your tips for creating less chaos in your work space? I'd love to hear from you. I'm a container person and have trouble throwing cute containers away. I love finding creative new ways to use them for storage. Do you have any containers that you just can't part with? Tell me about them and ways you have found to re-use them.

Before we fill our new room up with all our display items, we are having our first wholesale show for local businesses on Wednesday, March 31. We have some great new spring designs and will be giving a glimpse of the Untapped Potential line. I've been creating UP line designs to have Misti reproduce and Janice has been taking pictures of them. Janice is also working on our new logo and the third new website to be called http://www.theuntappedpotential.com/. I'm excited to see it born.

Time to hit the bricks as the next week is going to be pretty hectic!

Tootles for now, Kyla

New Inventory

One of the awesome things I do is select our Something For Everyone (www.sfejewelry.com). We have several vendors that we work with to find something that speaks to our customers. Last week, Kyla and I reviewed several orders and finally clicked purchase. This week the boxes began arriving. While this is exciting to open, see, and touch our new inventory; it brings a lot of work as we check in, tag, price, and store our new items. Our new helper, Misty, was busy this week working on the new inventory. She prefers to check in inventory when someone else helps too.

Over the last couple of years we have had many requests for purses; the interest was purses with crosses and western motifs. Well, we took that major step and now have a variety of awesome purses in our inventory. The purses will be available at the Spring Craft Show, April 10th, at the Buffalo County Fairgrounds. We also have them at the Cattleman's Ball, June 5th.

We planned an event that will showcase SFE, Beads in a Box, and Untapped Potential (UP Line) jewelry. We invited local businesses that sell jewelry to come and view the three lines of jewelry and hopefully become a vendor for us.

We continue to expand our selling and marketing horizons. Our vision is to have a business that supports mothers that work several jobs and by paying a living wage they will be able to work one job and be home with their children in the evenings. Our Untapped Potential Line (UP Line) will allow women to create in the evenings after their children are in bed. Kyla is creating jewelry for the UP Line that she will teach Misty to make. When we have orders for the UP Line; they will work with other women to create the jewelry to fill our orders. It is an exciting time for us and we hope that you will check out our websites. Remember to visit www.beadsinabox.,com and www.sfejewelry.com when you need a special gift. Have a creative weekend, Karen

More on Polymer Clay Creations

This weekend I decided to create another Mokume Gane cane. I decided to start with purple, sea green, turquoise, pearl, and silver. Knowing that I wanted to blend the colors with pearl so my mokume gane slices would shimmer. I began running the polymer clay through the pasta machine. Thank goodness I have a motor for it as it takes many times through the pasta machine to blend and align the mica particles. Finally I was ready to stack the colors and add silver leaf. I impressed several items into the clay to shift the colors and create interesting patterns.

This photo shows the patterns created using adding machine tape holder, chair coaster, and phillips head screwdriver. I will be able to make several items using this cane.

Using a full block of clay I am able to impress different items to change the patterns. These photos show my other cane and the pendant,beads, and pin made using it.


I will share photos when I create jewelry with the pendant and beads. The square is a pin and will have matching earrings.






Have a create day, until later, Karen

Taste of Home Cooking Expo

What an awesome day! Beads in a Box set up at the Taste of Home Cooking Expo in Kearney out at the Buffalo County Fairgrounds. It was the first show for our new employee to attend. Meet Misti Moreau. She’s pictured her in the middle helping Mary Kampfe at the show. Janice is on the left. Misti’s been on board a week or so now and we are excited to have her on the BIAB team. She’s going to assist us in creating the new wholesale line I’ve been alluding to earlier called Untapped Potential. Ladies were attracted to springtime colors and it was exciting to see them out and about after a tough winter. To top it off, our booth was next to SunMart so we enjoyed tasting BBQ beef, chicken salad and strawberry shortcake. The only thing better was having Mary Aupperle join the selling team at 5:30. Mary is our number one BIAB cheerleader! She’s believed in our mission from day one and gets choked up every time we take a stroll down memory lane. Can you believe we’ve been in business for 5 ½ years? It always surprises me to find out that people live in our hometown and haven’t heard of us. We are Kearney’s best kept secret but we are moving on up!



Tootles for now, Kyla

LET’S TALK SOCIAL NETWORKING

A year ago it was just a term to me written on notes from my GROW Nebraska meeting. It was top on the TO DO LIST of things we needed to get done. But how? Karen and I didn’t have any more time to spare but knew it was an avenue that we needed to go down. This last fall we were blessed to hire Janice Cash. A Doctor of Veterinary Medicine by day and an avid beader by night. Janice owns her own side businesses called Of This Earth Jewelry and Kelpie Graphics & Design. Karen and I have traveled and shopped with Janice in Tucson, AZ, at the world’s largest bead and gem show. We love her style and her creative abilities. We were blessed when she agreed to become a part of our team. Lucky for us, she’s also talented on the computer. We are learning this term “SOCIAL NETWORKING” together. Janice has me blogging now. I never even knew what the term meant until I watched the movie, Julie and Julia.

Now I’m blogging about the jewelry business! Janice has us going crazy on Facebook, My Space and our websites look wonderful. The pictures of these ladies shopping around our tables at shows is my mental picture of social networking on the web. It’s quite a buzz!

Tootles for now, Kyla

The gift that keeps on giving

Sorry it's been a while since I've blogged. It's a crazy madhouse as usual. I delivered some special jewelry to a customer today and had a nice visit with her. She shared a special story with me not realizing that I was a part of it until she finished. Just before Christmas, a BIAB customer, Janie, asked me to create something for her daughter, Sophie, using some jewelry that originally belonged to Grandmother Sophie. (Follow me here :-> ) Janie has a lot of siblings, like 8 or so - she contacted them all requesting a special memory they had of their Grandmother Sophie. Janie compiled all these little memories after taking a walk down memory lane herself, and included them with the jewelry that I had created for her. This now became Janie's daughter, Sophie's, Christmas present which is a memorial to Grandmother Sophie. What makes this incredibly special is that Sophie was named after Grandmother Sophie but who she never had the opportunity to meet. But now with this special jewelry and time capsule of memories from her aunts and uncles, Sophie will always have a piece of Grandmother Sophie.

This is an incredibly special way to preserve special jewelry handed down from generation to generation.

Do you have some special jewelry at home taking up residency in your jewelry box, maybe gathering dust? Why not ask the Beads in a Box designers to create several pieces from the original to share with daughters, grandaughters, etc.? We'd be happy to do it.

Seize the moment! What a special momento to share with the women in your family. This is a great idea when there are multiple females in a family.

Tootles for now, Kyla