A Month Passed By Quickly

Its been about a month since my last post.  I have so many ideas of things to write about, but so little time!  Really, I do have a good excuse.  We bought a new house and we moved in two weekends ago.  There are still boxes in almost every room, but its slowly coming together.  This house is a fixer-upper, like the last one.  Except it is a lot bigger.  There will be plenty of room for my girls to grow up here, and maybe, possibly their future baby brother ;)

We are definitely going to do "before" photos this time.  We have some from our first house, but they are incidental, not intentional. 

Also, in late August I got a new shipment of beads and findings in.  I've been counting, restringing, making tassels, labeling, photographing, retouching photographs and organizing my growing inventory.  It was a lot of work, but I'm pretty much finished. 

There are definitely some photographs I'd like to retake.  I have had an extremely difficult time taking good pictures of the strands of Rose Quartz beads I bought.  When I use a white background and then color correct the lighting to make the background solid white, the edges of the beads seem to disappear into the white.  So I tried to use a black background.  I still have to color correct that to remove the lent and tiny but visible particles from the black background of the light tent.  But, I can't seem to get the settings right on my camera to start with when using the black background, so when I do the color correction the pink no longer looks pink; instead more coral.  I guess it will be a matter of trial and error until I get it figured out.  It's a shame, the Rose Quartz is lovely.  I can't wait to list it, but I have to figure out the photography first.  I don't want to misrepresent the product.

Finally, during all this chaos, I found a new job!  I've been a bit bummed out about my job at the bank since I came back from maternity leave last year.  My job started to feel monotonous and working in the financial industry has been and still is highly stressful since the economic downturn.  I may be a bit jaded, but I really think the the press has been unduly brutal towards the big banks.  I really liked working there and it seems kind of weird to leave after six years of tenure.  But, I am really excited about my new opportunity.  One big change will be that I've been working from home for the last two years and now I'll be back in an office.  I really liked the freedom of working from home, but I am kind of looking forward to being back in an office.  It gets lonely by myself sometimes. 

So, here is a photo of all the work I did.  It may not look like much to some people, but all this organization took a lot of time.  This picture includes one of my favorite purchases of all time; my label maker.  Every bag of beads is labeled with an identificaiton code as well as length of the strand and quantity of beads.  I love making labels!

This is just the counter of the cabinets behind the desk in the office area of my new house.  I will post pictures of both the desk and the storage once it's neater looking.  One thing I love about the office is that its really more of a large nook that is part of the girls' play room.  So, hopefully I can do some work while they are playing with their toys.  We'll see how that goes :)