Not My Favorite Thing To Do.....

Yesterday at Witches, my friend Sue had a bunch of kits that she wanted to get rid of for very reasonable prices. I bought two.

The first was a set of five shelves from England. They were very simple and straightforward. Paint the castings for the sides black for wrought iron and just varnish the shelves themselves. They are made of very nice walnut. Well cut and not much sanding. Those only took a matter of minutes to do.

The second was a candle stand and two candy dishes. It's not like I haven't done anything like this before, but I should have done it my way instead of theirs. It was a matter of stacking the beads and findings in a certain order on the center post. OK. Easy.

Then came the tricky part....Usually when I put dangles on chandeliers and such, I start with long head pins and then after getting them on, I snip the excess ends off with side cutters. Very easy.

This time, I opted to do it like the directions that were enclosed with the materials....GRRRRR....

To say the least, their method was frustrating. The enclosed short headpins that were already clipped to size. The directions said to put a hook in the end....Which I always do with the longer ones....Then it said to hook them into the finding on the candle stick and squeeze the ends together.....I repeat....GRRRRR.....

I am going to be finding assembled bead and headpin hooks in the rug for weeks. I think that i ended up with a few flying about 20 feet across the room and others shot straight up and came down in my hair....I couldn't figure out why there were about three times as many beads and headpins in the package as would be needed....Now I know.


I was also not impressed with the candles that they provided. There was a long piece of stiff coated wire, that had to be cut and then scraped at the end to make the wire look like a candle. They have to be kidding! I have never seen a candle wick that is almost as wide as the candle. I will be replacing these as soon as I am finished here.

All in all, the pieces look nice, but I am going to re do the whole thing. Some of the dangle thingies still aren't all the way closed and if you touch or jiggle it just right, the will fall off.

If I use my longer headpins, I can rectify the whole situation in about 15 minutes. And they won't fall off when I am done....OK....Enough ranting for one day.

At least Tessie likes them. Now she wants crystal knobs on the zebra chest to match. Don't tell her, but I told Zar that he could have the shelves of the Clockwork Cottage. Each shelf is successively smaller. I think that they will work better in his house. Tessie isn't showing much interest in the shelves anyway. She is more interested in the sparkly stuff.

I am off to find knobs for the chest.

See you tomorrow.