Just one of those days

project sneak peak #2

Yesterday was one of the longest days I've spent at work in forever.  There is just so much left to still do to get ready for the Fall, and we have giant boxes of new yarn arriving almost every day.  Normally that would be exciting, but our shop has limited shelf space do it's like we have to rip it all apart and figure out how it all fits together...every few months.  And keep in mind that we're open 7 days a week so there's no good time to do this, which often results in Naomi staying in the shop until midnight, sometimes with one of us staying to 9 or 10 to try and help her out. 

Yesterday I walked in to an in-progress inventory of Comfort Worsted, which I had to complete.  Then I had flurries of customers come in with lots of questions so that took a lot of time away from my other project...totally restocking and reorganizing the Ultra Alpaca (by a new color system that Naomi wants me to start using...that I can't figure out and doesn't make sense to me at all).  When the shop closed at 6pm, and I had to go teach class, I had every bag of Ultra Alpaca we have in the shop tossed on the floor with several skeins on the floor to go with it.  After class, I had to go back and try to finish it up because I just couldn't leave it like that for Naomi to find in the morning.  It wouldn't have taken nearly as long if it wasn't for the fact that Naomi want's the colors arranged 'tonally'.  When I looked at her example in the 220 wool, I didn't see any sort of discernible pattern and had to call her to figure out what the heck she did there.  It looks so random (and unpleasant to the eye, in my personal opinion)!  So this task killed me, and it sucked my will to live, and I cussed it and complained bitterly about it, and worked on it until 9:30pm when I finally threw in the towel and called Naomi to let her know what I'd actually gotten done.  I have no idea if it looks like she wants it to, but I know I tried my best and felt like I was floating in the breeze the entire time. 

So what did I learn from this process?  That I don't understand color value very well.  That I prefer a shelf that flows naturally from one color to another in a basic ROYGBIV order.  (As a child I would dump out my brand new box of crayons and sort them in order before using them.)  That my mind perceives things a certain way and it's not usually the way that other people view things.  That if I don't enjoy a task, it's really really hard to finish it and to do a good job.  That if I apply what I've learned here to my budding design career, I should resign myself to simply designing what I want and what I like (even if there's not much money in it) because trying to do things that aren't my 'thing' simply because its profitable is going to make me miserable and I'll end up hating the thing at the end of the day...sort of like that wall of Ultra Alpaca.  That being said, I think I need to have a conversation with a few people about some project ideas that we kicked around, that I'm not very interested in doing, and getting them off my plate so I can focus on things I love.