Teal

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One of my favorite colors is teal and variations of it.

Maybe it's because I don't like wearing lighter blues or greens, but I love any tone of teal or turquoise. 

Personal preference, I guess, but here's a sampling of teals in the shop right now.

Printed Beauties -- Shop Update

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I recently accepted some pieces from a friend on consignment.  She's a costume designer and has loads and loads and loads of vintage stored away, though she's partial to most of it.  It's a process, but she's slowly letting go, starting with this vintage beauties.  She has a great eye and everything is in great condition, so I can't wait to see what else she sends my way in the future!

The Renovations

When I moved into the space that is now, "The Shop," it was an apartment on the top floor of a building build in the late 1800s.  Living and working in Downtown Savannah, I didn't think of this as much of a big deal because it's what you expect when you're downtown in our historic area.

However, I didn't realize how much work would end up going into the space.

The walls were a horrible color, so that needed to go.  A lavender in the front room, a dark blue in the center room, and country-kitchen yellow in the hallway.  I wanted everything to be bright and airy in the rooms, so I kept with light colors.  A vintage aqua color for the main rooms and grey for my office and the hallways.  Bright white for all the trim (which ended up being the biggest bane of my existence, taking about four gallons of paint just to repaint all the trim, doors, and windows).

The closets had shelves built into them.  All I could think of was that line in Pride and Prejudice (the Colin Firth version), where Mr Collins shows Lizzy the closet with shelves and she says, "Shelves in the closet, happy thought, indeed."  What a mess!  Ripping out the shelves then ripped out half the walls (the walls are all composed of horsehair plaster without the proper studs buildings are built with today).  Lots of spackle later, the holes were covered.

The floors were covered in paint.  The beautiful, dark hardwood floors were covered in specks and globs of paint from whoever had painted them before.  At first, I was just going to leave them, but when you've put hours and hours and hours of work into everything else, what's a couple more days of work to get them cleaned again?  When I need a knee replacement later in life, I will look back at this moment of cleaning the floors with a steel-wool sponge and floor cleaner while on my hands and knees for the better part of a week to get them looking lovely.

Then came the lights.  And bless my poor group of guy friends who volunteered to give up their Thursday in the middle of JULY in Savannah to instal the light fixtures.  Should I mention we didn't have ceiling lights at this point?  Poor Garry crawled into the attic, which was probably about 115 degrees, to splice lines and connect things and do a lot of stuff I will never be able to understand, in order to give me chandeliers.  Then, he had to go back in about three different times in order to connect the lights to a circuit since half the wires in the attic were either dead or not useable.  It's great being my friend, isn't it?  And all it cost me was some Zunzi's, beer, and a lot of grief for the rest of my life over it.

That was just the main obstacles that had to be overcome.  Little things happened, like half the wall being pulled out from a hanging rack I installed (the old stud broke and snapped through the wall...), the paint peeling off the closet wall because someone before had painted over wallpaper and not primed it, and so on and so on.

All I can say is, I'm glad I'm a carpenter's daughter and that my dad had two girls instead of two boys because I would have been lost and very broke without the Bob Villa knowledge I obtained as a kid.
Overall, however, I am very happy and pleased with the result.  I love my shop.  I love coming to work each day.  And though it's a work in progress, as it always will be, I'm happy to call it all mine.

Being in Business

I decided to restart the blog as a documentation of me starting up my physical store.  Well, almost a year later, and this is the second post I've written.  C'est le vie?

In hindsight, it probably would have been great to have that documentation, and it would have been pretty hilarious, too.  If anyone is familiar with renovating a building built in the late 1800s, you'd feel my pain and know my frustration.

So here I am, a 4-month business owner.  It's been pretty interesting, to say the least.  Very stressful, as well.  Anyone who gives up their day job to become completely self-supporting knows how much of a risk it is.  I kept putting off putting my leave in until finally, my boss, a very good friend of mine who helped so much with getting the shop together, just told me he was going to stop scheduling me.  Which was the push I needed.

August 14th, 2012, was the day Ollie Otson officially opened.  I was incredibly nervous, but excited, and many of my friends came, visited, and shopped.  As the days went on, more people, people I didn't know, started trickling, through, and I realized how self-fulfilling this was going to be.

It's one thing to sell a dress on Etsy to a person and mail it out, but it's a completely different situation when you're there to see them pick it out, try it on, and get incredibly excited over it.  I've had people come in to buy items for dates, for birthday presents, and just to feel better about themselves, and the experience becomes so much more personal.  When you buy the garment, clean it, steam it, tag it, hang it, then sell it, and are there to see the whole process and the happiness of the customer, it makes you happy.  It's a certain high that's hard to explain.

I've decided to keep myself more dedicated to this blog writing.  I want to, if anything, document the journey for myself and, hopefully, inspire those who'd like to take those steps into opening a shop of their own.