A Day in the Life of Lady Wurlitzer
A special Monday morning treat. Today we follow Carrie Madennan, aka Lady Wurlitzer, through a typical day in her life. Over to Carrie.
Getting Up
Once my eyes have opened and regained focus, I spend five or ten minutes just lying in bed, thinking through my plan for the day. Without this little quiet, private period, I find it quite difficult to get motivated and enjoy a productive day. Sometimes Smokey Cat comes to say hello while I’m filling the slots in my mental diary. There have been mornings where I’ve asked her advice on which order to do things in! She doesn’t seem to mind as long as she has food in her bowl.
Lady Wurlitzer isn’t my full time job. Or at least, it’s not supposed to be. I am studying for my PhD in the non-indie world. I am free to structure my days and my working week as I see fit though which is helpful when trying to create more hours in the day to make soap! Research is my full time occupation, but every free minute is spent developing Lady Wurlitzer’s repertoire or planning my Fuzzy Felt Folk craft parties.
Let’s presume the particular day in question for the purposes of this article is a day where I don’t have to worry about PhD work and I can devote my entire day to soap! So. I’m awake, I am dressed, I am fed and I am watered (my husband has gone to work and Smokey Cat is asleep on the couch). The first thing I do before anything else is check what’s been going on online. I check my mail, I log into my Myspace accounts and I check what the activity in the shop’s been like. It normally takes me a while to sift through correspondence and what not. I really love it though when I receive positive feedback from customers or from people who have been browsing in the e-boutique. I love it even more when there’s an email notification from Paypal to tell me I have a sale! :o)
I spend quite a lot of time keeping my shop up to date. I like to change around the text every so often just to keep things fresh for friends and loyal customers who visit regularly! I add in offers or special products quite often too and I sometimes add extra fragrances of a particular bar to keep things interesting. I’m not exactly the greatest photographer, but I do enjoy putting the pics together for my products and I do feel awfully satisfied when I’ve loaded all my images onto my site. The Lady Wurlitzer Blog is important to me too. I like to keep everyone up to date on the happenings in LW land and recently there’s been a huge amount of news to report! Normally I deal with my updating and blogging during the first part of my day. I type away while listening to my alt -country/vintage country favourites and I enjoy having a little mug or two of pomegranate + blueberry juice too! :o)
My main aim at the moment is to spread the word about the opening of www.ladywurlitzer.com. In the afternoons you can find me sorting through a pile of my favourite crafty magazines searching for opportunities to have my items featured or talented crafties and designers who might like to swap links with me. I have recently discovered the joy that is ’the creative online forum’ and so I make sure I keep in touch with other likeminds around the country who can help spread the soapy word! I might spend a day writing an article, I might spend the day emailing magazines, I might spend the day taking suitable photos to include in publications.
Lady Wurlitzers who Lunch
Lunch is a bit of non-event for me. If I’m at home, chances are I won’t really eat at all (maybe nibble some berries if I have any). If I’m at the office and feeling flush I will often indulge in a ridiculously expensive sarnie from Pret (and maybe a smoothie and piece of lemon cake and some parsnip crisps?!?!?) but if I’m poor (which is more often the case), I have a fat laden flapjack to see me through til tea time.
Assuming that I have already ordered my ingredients and presuming that they have all arrived when they are supposed to (this does NOT always happen and this is probably my only pet hate re. Lady Wurlitzer work), I will spend a few hours preparing for up coming markets, organising orders from www.ladywurlitzer.com and making items for friends who request top up products. I enjoy making soap much more than I enjoy making anything else - it is cleaner! I just love cutting up soap base - it’s a great sensation (I can be a bit of a weirdo when it comes to textures). The fragrances I use are all absolutely delicious and so my whole house smells great after a batch making spree. As far as making lip butter goes, I adore the end product, I love knitting the pouches and packaging up the tins and pots, but I do not enjoy cleaning the dishes I use to mix the buttery ingredients! More often than not now I use disposable containers in order that I can just put them straight in the recycling bin when I’ve finished! I leave my products to set and dry for a day or so before packaging and labelling commences. I used to package every single bar of soap, every lip butter and every perfume oil in knitted or fabric pouches but this became so laborious and time consuming that I now mingle my items between little clear bags with ribbon trimmings and knitted pouches and fabric sleeves. Much more economical AND I get to recycle all my left over yarns and fabric remnants! Hoorah!
Winding Down
I wind down really by flopping on the couch in front of the tv! My husband has nicknamed me ’The Sleep Monster’ as I am unbearable if I don’t get enough sleep and every chance I get, I nab a nap! Before I put my jammies on, I like to get in a bath (funnily enough, bathing and pampering myself are a couple of my very favourite things - along with sleeping!), chuck in a lavender velvet bath ball and get excited about snuggling under the duvet and having a real good snooze! Works every time. However, if I am preparing for a market, you can bet your boots that there’s very little winding down going on in my house and that I’ll be up wrapping soap, knitting lip butter pouches and labelling bath balls into the early hours! It is ALWAYS worth it in the end though. I’ve not been disappointed by my market days even once and so I never grudge putting the time into Lady Wurlitzer. It is MY endeavour and it is up to me to decide the direction it takes. I find that really, really exciting and given the time and half the chance, I know I could expand the business, expand the product range and expand my customer base. I get butterflies in my tummy thinking about that day! :o) It will come . . . .
A big thank you to Carrie for putting this together for us. You can find Carrie at www.ladywurlitzer.com. And if you would like to find out more about Fuzzy Felt Folk, go to www.myspace.com/fuzzyfeltfolkparty.
