New Year, New Space (!!!!!)

That escalated quickly... I signed a lease for a new shop!!!! Just a few doors down from the existing shop but with a few more square feet to go around...
The existing shop is 250 square feet... yup, a sweet little shop. If I had a quarter for every time people came in and told me my shop is small, I would never have a parking ticket again. And if I had a quarter for every time I would respond 'small but mighty', I could get a gum ball from the machine at the grocery store for the rest of my life... It's a great space to see if this is something you are into and I am actually really proud of how I managed to use every inch of the place, while keeping it looking cute. But it's no secret that I would get frustrated with the lack of room... I really want to continue to step up my online game but I just had so little room to photograph, measure and ship. And so I would do all that from home, if the light was ok. But there gets to be a point when you want to have a little division between work life and home life. And having room to organize back stock at the store instead of storing all my stock in the attic and spare room (and everywhere really)? Opening the new space will be a happy day...
Honestly, I've been looking for a new place for a while. And while it seems like there are possibilities on the street, nothing was just right. It was like Cinderella and that glass slipper, except I was the mean step sister and nothing fit. A few weeks ago I pretty much decided to just make the best of it where I was and I shut the shop for a week to strip everything back, clean it, re-stock, re-paint my floors and just make little tweaks so the space could work as well as possible. Ugh, those floors... honestly painting your floors with a pattern is not so hard with a little patience and time but when you have a full shop and have to move everything to paint the shop 1/3 at a time and wait for drying time between base coat, stencilled design and top coat... it takes a while. It takes even longer when you first paint one design and then change your mind... oops.

But they turned out cute! Not a bad solution to covering some gross old gray tiles eh?
And then, of course midway through, I got the phone call that a new shop was available...

I'm so excited and pretty nervous because it's definitely a much bigger responsibility but I just think I can do so much more in the new space. You have to leap a little if you want to move forward. Quote that;)
So, in addition to having family crashing at our house, a wedding and going away (yay!), it looks like we're also putting together a new shop space. Yup, January did just go from really busy to really, really busy...