Brexit, dollars, lampwork beads and me

The United Kingdom has voted to leave the European Union. I am very surprised, it never seriously occurred to me that this would be the actual outcome so I didn't really think through what my shop's currency being in dollars would mean to my beadmaking income. I wanted to stay IN.

I found myself awake in the early hours and so got up at 3.30am to see how things were going on the referendum. With the result looking cut and dried and the pound falling alarmingly against the dollar, I shut my Etsy shop temporarily until I could figure out how it would affect me.

Now I'm up (and far more awake), I realise that this makes no difference to my customers in the United States, they can continue to buy at the same prices (to them) as my shop's currency is set to dollars. A little over half of my customers are the US and so I can hope to continue to enjoy their patronage and one upside is that the exchange rate means I will get more sterling from those transactions.

The downside is that the rest of my customers are in the UK, with a small percentage in other countries in the EU. To them, my prices have increased significantly (10% at the time of typing). I imagine this will mean some of those customers may choose not to buy from me. I have considered lowering my prices or changing the currency of my shop but I haven't increased bead prices in three years, if I decrease them and things settle down again, well, I'm just not willing to make beads for a lower price. I'm not exactly getting rich out of self-employment! I hope that the two sets of customers will balance themselves out and I can continue making lampwork beads for all of my lovely customers.

With apologies to those it adversely affects, I've decided I will be rolling my sleeves up and just getting on with things as they are. It's out of my control, it's pointless to get all stressed about it. I will continue to monitor and make decisions accordingly. Watch this space for news.

Lovely start

What a lovely start to the day! :-) I checked my e-mails and there was a thank you message along with some beautiful photographs from a bride for whom I made matching his and hers hammer finish sterling silver rings in the summer. I'll be adding the message to my testimonials page next time I update the website.

Congratulations Jancy and Simon and thanks for the photographs of the wedding - looks like you had a brilliant day! You'll forgive me for not publishing them all here but I couldn't resist showing off your rings. What a picturesque place for your honeymoon.

Have a long a happy life together. :-)

I just know I'm going to be in a happy, smiley mood now for the rest of the day despite the awful weather and dreadful forecast for tomorrow. Because I missed last week, it feels like ages since I've seen my customers and I've got lots of new things to show off!

Silver jewellery

This is a bit of a flying visit, I've put the new silver designs up on Jewellery section of the Sooz Jewels website. Two pendants and one pair of earrings; they're in hammered silver again, I love hammering silver (especially when I'm cross cos it gets it all out of your system!) I have a couple more things to add to the website but one of them was sold yesterday in the gorgeous sunshine we had in Cambridge all day before it even got added to the website!

The reason I'm in a bit of a hurry is that I have an appointment with mowing the lawn for the first time this year, it takes about three hours and as it's forecast to rain tomorrow, I need to get it done! My miniature daffodils are out, so they'll be keeping me company now the snowdrops are all over.