Fire and Ice

Every week, on a Thursday, I get home and have a surprise waiting for me. It is a box of lovely organic veggies and it gets delivered while I’m at work. So I get home and it’s almost as if someone gave me a lovely gift. I take my box inside and almost can’t wait to see what we got this week: lately it’s been yummy courgettes, sweet carrots, fantastic pumpkins and the best sweetcorn I’ve ever had. Sometimes I even get a vegetable I can’t identify and I have to use the included leaflets to learn what it is, how I store it and what to do with it. It is all terribly exciting. The organic veggie box schem e is one of my weekly thrills, not the least because of the element of surprise. I have little choice of what goes in the box, other than basic decisions (what size? All veggies? Some veggies, some fruit? etc) the whole experience is one where I have very little control. And I wouldn’t want to change that. I have noticed that there seems to be a rise in the amoun...

I did something this week that I hadn’t done in a very, very long time – I logged on to a scrapbooking website and bought something! Not only have I not purchased anything from a scrapbook shop (online) in a good long time, I hadn’t even gone on to any sites just to browse. I just didn’t feel the need to! What prompted this purchase was also real need – I am going to a scrapbooking retreat this weekend and I was nearly out of adhesive so I had to order some online. Sure, while I was there I had a little look at the shop but ended up buying some more, practical, things like post extenders (which I also need) and a cardstock pack for a specific project I’ll be working on. It’s been about two years since I decided to stop buying scrapbooking stuff ‘just because it’s there’ and focused more on using what I have. It was a little hard at first (although I have always struggled to spend hundreds in stash at one time ) but now it’s become second nature, so much that I don’t ev...

It is sad but true – quite a few of the more established UK scrapping shops have closed their doors recently. Some of these closures came as a shock to me, others not quite so but it has generated a lot of discussion on some UK boards. Some fear the demise of the craft, others think that it’s the wholesalers that are the evil ones, others blame “mainstream” stores for getting into the craft and lowering prices, etc. I think it’s about time I presented my theory: and as it’s my blog I can do whatever I want! As a marketeer, I think that what is going on is a combination of things. The first one and easiest to explain is the “boom and bust” theory. Mainly, an industry faces incredible growth but at some tipping point this growth becomes unsustainable and there are casualties. It’s a bit like what’s happened with the Internet bubble when it burst: lots of ambitious plans were abandoned but the industry as a whole is clearly still around. The bubble bursting just slowed down growth to more...