The times they are a'changin'.
On the 4th October my little shop closed for the last time. It was a huge surprise and we had to adjust to the reality of it with almost no notice, it was a business decision made by the company and we had a couple of trading days before we were packing up. It has truly been a great three years working there with Becky and I am sad that it is over. However I made my peace with the decision pretty quickly and now it's on to a new chapter!
Being as how I am terrible at starting anything myself, and as I have had vague thoughts of leaving for quite a while this has come at a great time really. Redundancy in this context is the best way it could have ended as now I have at least a couple of months to have a think.
Here is the final window that I made there.
Though I didn't know it at the time that this would be my final window, it does seem fitting somehow that not only is it the little pig (of which I am most fond)'s first appearance on the glass, but also she seems to be waving goodbye. It was a short stretch anyway to modify it for the closing message:
It has come to a point now where I feel able to take this kind of thing around and see if anyone else wants window displays (if that person is you, hit me up!). I have noticed that a lot of businesses use painted displays and often not very high quality ones, so I am confident there is a niche for more elaborate, illustrative work on glass. Time will tell, I'm trying to think of as many small revenue streams as I can in this time of change so even if it's just a supplement to other things it would be better than nothing.
The Chin Up festival I attended in the summer (see previous post) was truly one of the best festivals I have ever been to and it was a pleasure and a privilege to be involved in running it. One of my tasks I forgot to mention last time was to update the site map I had made for an earlier one. I am quite pleased with the result, though an interesting point is that I made this, and its predecessor, having never visited the site in real life! This has obviously now changed and I think the next map will be even better (and with much more accurate scale).
On the theme of things forgotten, now I have more time for sorting through my work I realise there are a few things from the past year that I haven't shown off enough. These are a selection of illustrations I did in the shop, you may recognise them from Instagram though these are better pictures.
These themes will return and evolve further I feel sure, they are the closest to my intended direction as I can determine from now.
Finally, more regular blogging is one of my new goals, and though I hope some people read this it is mostly to improve my general writing that I do this. Next up: gardening things!