Coffee is brewing--I hear the final gurgles now, Ernie and Jasmine are playing in the sun on the front porch... Well, Jasmine is playing with the beach ball (she pushes it around with her nose) and Ernie is regally ignoring her and eyeballing the squirrels in the front yard with feigned disinterest. My glass day begins now.
Tomorrow one of my customers is pitching a custom glass and steel piece to one of their customers as a welcoming gift for a huge celebration they are having next year. It might seem like there's a lot of time until next year, but we are hoping they tell us really soon if we're chosen as they will need 800 of these pieces created and custom-wrapped.
A few years ago the thought of doing even 100 identical pieces for an order would have given me anxiety attacks for days. Now I'm amazed to realize that I look forward to doing 800 with placid equanimity (I think Bill is much more stressed about having enough time to do the metal than I am about having time for the glass--of course he's also typically much busier at the end of the year than I am). We have a couple of current orders in the pipeline for 40 of these and 60 of those, and they are not registering on my radar one whit differently than the orders I have in the queue for one and two pieces. Wow.
Last night the two couples we had in the hotshop for Date Night were fascinated with the entire studio (one of the couples had done a bit of kilnforming glass previously). While I took them on the tour, we got to talking about how long the studio's been open for teaching, selling supplies, date night., etc., and when I said the end of October last year, I think we were all surprised. They were very impressed at our set-up and had a hard time believing that we managed to get so much done is such a short time.
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An hour has passed since I wrote on this post. An hour that that was spent talking on the phone with Bill about the details of the 800-piece proposal we are sending in tomorrow. Hubris was indeed my Nemesis on this one. Sure I can do the work, and I also committed to packaging and shipping the work in custom packaging (the custom packaging would be purchased and shipped to me by the customer). And I have no problem doing the packaging and shipping, but Bill brought me a bit back to reality when he started doing the actual math on the space required to store 800 14X14X4 boxes, and how many of them would feasibly fit on a pallet for shipping... and by extension how many pallets would be required to be held for shipping and loaded onto a truck from the studio. Yes, it's still all doable, but I am MUCH less smug than I was when I started this post! Time to slink off and have some coffee.
4 comments:
Stack them on the bed!
Oh I don't THINK so! Dave has been gone for a week and a half with a week to go before he gets back. I have other uses for that afore-mentioned piece of furniture, and will have for a long time to come.
There's always the couch...
Or the backyard!
LOL ernie might object to having his couch taken over by glass and metal objects that are NOT soft and cushy to lay on! ;P
glad SOMEONE gets reality into your plans on ocassion ;)
of course you could always CLEAN OUT the 2nd shed - yes i do mean THROW THINGS OUT - and that would give you room to store some of these things!
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