Reflecting on the last 7 months…

The front of Created Gallery.

It’s been 7 months since we opened at 420 Chatsworth Road & we are finally going to get a bit of a break. We’ll be closed from Thursday 25th – Tuesday 30th August while we join the happy throng down in Cheltenham at Greenbelt festival (http://www.greenbelt.org.uk/festival/2011/lineup). We go every year & meet up with friends, share toilets with tens of thousands of random strangers & have a wonderful time. Last year I bumped into Jeremy Hardy outside one of the food stalls. I resisted the desire to ask him to sing (I’m sorry I have a clue fans will know why) & chatted about frozen prawns. Well it made my day.

But I digress before I even get started. 7 months at 420! It’s been hard work & we’ve all been overwhelmed by how people have reacted to the new shop. It’s been lovely to see old customers returning again & again but the new customers have been delightful to meet. People really appreciate that we stock UK handmade products, made by skilled people & not in the thousands but in the tens.

Jewellery has been very popular with all our makers doing well. Clare Gage is naturally a top seller because of her local & family connections but we’ve had collectors of her work coming in from all over the country. We’ve extended our range of glass as well as wood since February & recently brought in Bentley’s Fine Foods preserves & chutneys made on the Derbyshire/Staffordshire border.

Stitching the solar system – a series of hand stitched textile pictures.

Earthrise by Anne Menary

We are delighted to announce that Anne Menary: teacher, textile artist and dear friend of Created Gallery will be having an exhibition here this autumn. Many of you will be familiar with Anne’s work: her fabric postcards and the previous exhibition at Created, Postcards from a Time Traveller. Her new work is called ‘Stitching the Solar System’ and is a series of nine textile pictures based on each planet in our solar system.

Anne says “A solitary spaceman visits each planet in turn and gathers further evidence…surely there is chocolate on the red planet?”

Surely there is chocolate on the red planet?

As is Anne usual technique, all the pieces have been hand stitched on cotton
or silk using an eclectic mix of fabrics such as pin striped wools and old
fashioned crimplene as well as silk painted fabrics, felts, cottons and
assorted trimmings. Colours, planets and spaceships have been depicted
surprisingly accurately with a variety of traditional and contemporary
embroidery techniques.

Excitingly, Anne has agreed to give a talk on her Cosmic Theme work at the new centre for St Thomas’s Church. The title of the talk is ‘The Fabric of the Universe’. Numbers will be limited & tickets are on sale from 6th August at Created Gallery. The date for the talk is Monday 26th September and it starts at 7pm.

From the beginning of August Anne will be counting down to the Created exhibition, starting with the planet Mercury, on her facebook page which can be found on Anne’s website www.annemenary.com.

If it was that easy, everyone would be doing it.

Before I start, I feel I must issue a warning: this could get hard to read for some of you. In the last six years I have met many new makers & had the chance to work with them. To listen to their ideas, see their products & where appropriate, sell them to customers. I’ve also heard lots of people say that they make things & would love to give up their boring jobs to make craft to sell. Usually I try to gently suggest that its quite a big, hard job to make a living through craft. You need to be determined, focused and expect to spend only about 30% of your time making.

The first hurdle is not ‘what shall I make’ but ‘is there a market for it, at the price I can make it’. To know this you must do costings: material costs & your time. The statement ‘it cost hardly anything – I had the material in already & it was really quick to make’ is not the correct answer to ‘have you costed it out?’ Do you know how much it would be to replace the material you have used? Exactly how many minutes did it take you? And at minimum wage, that would be how much?

This gives you a basic price & you might like to make a (small) amount of profit…

Now to the cost of selling. You’ve worked out your basic price but that’s not what the customer pays because there is a cost of selling. The most expensive way to sell is through a shop because they have to pay 20% of the retail price straight to the VAT man in tax. Then they have to pay for the following:

• Wages for the staff who will listen to customers, select appropriate items from the stock to suit that particular customer’s needs & help them to come to a decision. Good sales staff will mean a customer returns again & again.
• Advertising. This involves writing copy, taking photographs, producing flyers, networking, donating to charities, taking stands at events just as a few examples. It is expensive.
• Ongoing costs of the building such as rent, rates, energy costs, insurance, cleaning, display equipment.
• Packaging. Done well this is a form of advertising & a service for the customer.
• Visiting trade shows/makers/making orders.
• Keeping accounts & managing the dreaded CASHFLOW.

A slightly cheaper method of selling would be for you sell your work directly to the public. I can feel the shuddering from here. So some obvious points:

• You are the salesperson. You must acquire the skills of a professional & this means some kind of training.
• You need a really good stand, well made & one that shouts – this is world of my product. It should be easy for you to use & for your customers to use.
• Visit any show first before you take a stand at it. Ask yourself: can I see my perfect customers here? (Your perfect customer always buys your product.)If not, don’t have a stand there. Good shows cost big bucks.
• Never take a stand because its cheap or close to home. These are bad reasons & you’ll waste your time 9 times out of 10.
• You will need packaging, insurance, accomodation & means of transport, to name but a few extras.

All these items go under the cost of selling face to face. I’ve not gone into websites but they should be viewed as an additional method never your main method. They are time consuming to set up and need constant attention to driving your customers to it. My experience is that people want to see your work in the real world and may buy additional pieces through your website.

So now you have a price to produce your product & a price of selling it. Add the two together & who would buy that item at this price? The answer is usually not you or your friends but your future customers. They probably don’t live where you live or shop where you shop & hopefully they have a larger disposable income than you (especially if you are a new maker/ recent graduate). Do your research: look for similar work to yours: how much is it selling at & where. Please don’t limit your research to Folksy & Estsy: they are really not the mainstream where sales are concerned. And mainstream is where most of your sales will be.

So, I warned you it would be tough love time. And really, truthfully, if it was easy then everyone would be doing it.

Super Obvious Secrets That I Wish They’d Teach In Art School at Marvelous Mustache Factory

Super Obvious Secrets That I Wish They’d Teach In Art School at Marvelous Mustache Factory.

Very wise words here and well worth a read.

Hayley Powell – Forever Forged

I know that I’ve been a bit quiet of late but I’m a busy girl and I didn’t have a special thing to blog about. Until now. I’ve just come across the work of artist blacksmith, Hayley Powell. Please visit her site www.foreverforged.co.uk to discover all about her.

I do love a bit of blacksmithing around the place and I’m sure that Hayley’s work is going to find a place in many people’s homes. She grew up in Derbyshire, so a local lass and is based in Burton on Trent at the Claymills Pumping Engines Trust. I’m the daughter of an engineer and he’d have loved the idea of offering a Home for the Rescued and Rusty. Hayley asks you to offer a home to a piece of great British Engineering: I have no idea what the current piece is but my dad would have. So Hayley, if you are reading this: my father, Frank O’Brien, started work at Fowler’s in Leeds who made traction engines and ending his working life running an apprentice school to train engineers of the future. He’d have agreed with you ‘they don’t make things like they used to’!

So in memory of Frank O’Brien and his many, many student engineers: here’s to the future of blacksmithing and let’s always stay ‘Forever Forged’. (Sorry Bob Dylan)

Sue Bulmer – our latest artist.

We’ve just welcomed the work of illustrator Sue Bulmer into Created Gallery. Sue popped into see me last year and it was truely a flying visit as she got lost on the way. She had come in her dinner hour so we had a brief meeting where I said how much I liked her work. I was able to give here a few pointers as far as business support was concerned and off she went.

Sue came back to me this week and I’m delighted that she’s made good use of all the help & support she found. I think that she’s found a focus and is all ready to let the world see more of her art.

We have a selection of Sue’s original ink illustrations, limited edition prints and cards in the gallery. I hope that I’ve wetted your appetite and you’ll be in to take a look at Sue Bulmer’s work. www.suebulmer.co.uk

World Book Night again.

If you would like to read my interview for the Derbyshire Times here is the link http://www.derbyshiretimes.co.uk/news/local/give_a_love_of_books_1_3142584. Naturally for a regional newspaper, it tells you my age, how many children I have, which part of Chesterfield I live in and one of my former occupations. And there is a cheesey photo.

Settling in and beginning to feel at home.

The front of Created Gallery.

As you know, we moved to 420 Chatsworth Road on the 1st January 2011 and opened our doors for business on the 1st February. It’s been quite hectic since then what with Valentine’s Day and then the hoo har about World Book Night. So it’s taken until now for me to catch my breath and consider how I feel about the move.

I miss my old pals at 479 and try to pop over whenever I can. Tonight I’ll be rushing over to Mesamis for the Champagne Knitters Group which is a highlight of my week. What happens? Not a lot but what does happen is magic. Chatting, chocolates, coffee, knitting, stitching, rag rugging, crochet and perhaps a little wine….

I get to see Libby during the Peacock pub quiz on Monday nights. This week we formed a minor team inside our large group team and called ourselves the ‘Bossy Madams’ which I think suited us. We didn’t win and I was forced to cheat on a question. Perhaps it should have been the Liars…

Kay was always busy when I was at 479 and now I manage to see her by booking appointments for treatments. As the whole of the Derbyshire Times readership now know (thanks DT), I am mother of four, former teacher Deirdre Gage (49) so my skin is in need of Kay’s help. It must be working as the BBC said I had wonderful skin on camera.

Ian Morris, my old chum & fellow absurdist, has finally had his own way and is taking on the upstairs gallery space. I’m excited about going for a rummage amongst his wonderful collection of antiques but I know that he’ll be a tough one to catch in the shop. He does enjoy the sourcing of new stock but you do need to be there to sell it, Ian. I’ll try to get a photo of the legend himself when he settles into the upper room.

Finally, there is ‘our Clare’. She has stayed with 479 where her studio is perfectly appointed for her. She does take longer to pop in for a cuppa and a chat but I can see her coming over the crossing to 420. It gives me time to put the kettle on before she arrives here.

So all in all, it’s going well at my new home. Yes there are a lot of boxes and yes my studio is too small to run classes and yes the Gallery Upstairs at 420 isn’t up and running yet. However, things are moving forward. You good people are finding us and lots of new customers are discovering Created so that’s great for us and our makers.

If you’ve not got in yet, don’t be shy. There’s parking at the back and plenty to do in this part of Chatsworth Road – why don’t you make a day off it?

See you soon.

New in for February 2011

What can we see through the small window?

We’ve had a few deliveries this week and a change of window displays after Valentine Day, so I thought that you’d like to see whats what. You’ll have noticed that I am posting happily today and that’s because I have a phoneline at Created, at last. Phone, broadband, card machine= happy bunny.

Elaine called in from Hearts and Homespun with soaps, bathbombs and giftsets. I think that these make a lovely present to a mum, sister or best friend.

As does this…

And this.

Laura Kent has refreshed her work at Created after a very successful Christmas selling here. I loved her work and had my eye on a few pieces. Too slow – they went to customers around Valentines Day.

But this red lampwork bracelet is still here and very lovely, I think.

At last we have got our wooden range from Big Black House in Ripponden, Yorkshire. It was worth the wait and I’m delighted with the wooden boxes, in particular.

These are pretty cute as well.

Finally, I’d like to show you Robyn Jane’s new bags – the quality of the material is very high. We love the animal motifs drawn in Robyn Jane’s distictive style. Two ladies are just oggling one through the side window – I wonder which one it is?

World Book Night

I’m tremendously excited that I’ve been chosen as a giver for world book night 2011. I shall be giving out free copies of Alan Bennett’s ‘A Life Like Other People’s’ to the good folk of Chesterfield on March 5th.  To be selected as a giver, you had to write a short piece on why you’d chosen a particular title from the list and where you would give out books. Here is what I wrote.

I was born & bred in Leeds. This book reminds me of my aunts & great aunts: how they viewed life and ‘the shame’ you could so easily bring onto your family by being a bit different. The feeling of invisible walls of potential shame kept you in line & the strange amputations of your character, performed to conform.

The feeling of escape into the Yorkshire countryside still moves me after 20 years in Derbyshire. I want to go home, not to Leeds but to the Dales. Where I won’t fit in either.

Finally, everyone should read about Bennett’s parents’ wedding: talk about no fuss!

I’m planning to visit Real Ale Corner to hand out copies to the regulars in to buy bottles of local ales. The pop into the Peacock to hand out some to regulars there. Finally I’ll nip down to the municipal theatre in Chesterfield, the Pomegranate, to collar the crowds as they leave after the local dancing school’s show. In other words, to folk who’ll recognise the book’s about their people & maybe read some other books by Bennett.

I’m still planning to visit these places to hand out books. I’ll probably start at Created and drop some off with the diners at Mesamis first. I hope that Tim at the Peacock will let me badger the regulars before I head off to Real Ale Corner. My fingers are crossed that the Pommie will be happy for me to collar the crowd after the curtain falls on ‘Run for Your Wife’ – it’s not a dancing school show that week. And all this with a camera crew for the Culture Show following me around – YIKES!

Find out more about World Book Night  at http://www.worldbooknight.org/