This morning we had to leave at daybreak to make a trip down to Essex for an early business appointment. I say ‘we’ – the appointment was my husband’s – I was just tagging along to keep him company on what was likely to be a lengthy and tedious round trip.

We had to leave at 04:00am to make it in time and the sky was just starting to lighten and the birds were winding themselves into a full musical greeting of the dawn. It’s a glorious sound and one that never troubles me – it’s something to be enjoyed and rejoiced.

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As the light levels grew, it was evident that it was going to be a gorgeous morning. The sky was almost completely clear and the air cool. I really do love early mornings, they always feel like the best bit of the day on days like this. It was incredibly tedious to have to set the alarm that early, but well worth it when you get to enjoy the day coming to life in that way, even from a car on the motorway.

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There was a heavy mist from each body of water we passed, spilling over the fields as it dissipated and the light went from blue to golden within an hour and I snatched a few photos from the car window on my compact camera.

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I hadn’t thought much of having to rise that early, but it really did prove worth it, it was a delightful start to a day.

Last night I saw the most amazing and amusing thing in the garden. I planted a few chrysanthemums last weekend, a lovely deep red colour and noticed a few days ago that one plant had been reduced to a green stump by my garden snails – totally beyond help.

My lovely deep red chrysanthemums before the snails found them.
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Yesterday, another plant looked to be heading towards the same fate. I’d bought some extra copper wire to put round my pots, as they’re not supposed to tolerate walking over it.

I’d seen the likely culprit hiding behind a nearby pot earlier and had touched his foot with the copper and he really hadn’t liked it, so I was hoping it might be a kinder way to protect my plants.

So I made a ring round the half eaten plant’s pot and another around the plant itself and went out at dusk last night to see if it had done any good.

Not only was the blasted snail actually balancing on the copper ring to get a good position to munch away my plant, but the bugger was giving his mate a piggy back for a good chomping position too.

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I’ve never seen team work like this before. I’m glad I got something to show you as it was going dark and the shutter speed is so slow that they’re not as sharp as they could be. Cheeky blighters!

Click the photo for a larger view. You can actually see the cheeky beggar balancing on the copper wire at the bottom.

Some days you head off out somewhere with no particular expectations, just out for a nice day, hopefully in decent weather and getting some fresh air.

And it’s usually one of those days when you see something unusual and unexpected. I’m not talking earth-shatteringly interesting or world-changing, just something that makes you smile, because it’s out of context, amusing or unusual.

Sunday of the Bank Holiday weekend was one such day. We had to run some errands in Warrington, so decided to head a little further on to the Delamere Forest – we’ve not been before, wanted some fresh air and it was a lovely, perfect, early summer day.

We don’t know the area and weren’t sure of the best car park to use for the walking etc., so basically parked at the first one we came to. There were a lot of people, as you’d expect for a nice Sunday, but the car park was generously sized and there was plenty of space. The one thing I hadn’t expected was the amount of horses and horse boxes. It’s obviously a place where horse owners bring their animals to exercise and trek along the extensive bridleways. There was a hive of horsey activity, horses being saddled, rubbed down, fed and watered. Big horses, little horses, brown horses and white horses. Horses with business men aboard, horses with toddlers, being walked slowly.

But in the middle of this was a horse style box – but it hadn’t transported horses – it had contained 3 llamas. Mr Boo couldn’t resist going over to see if he could pet them en route to pay for the parking. He found out all sorts of information about llamas – for example, these were being trained for trekking with parties of people – and got to pet one too – he was advised not to pet the adults as they tend to shove and jostle you – and they’re bigger than you think – but he got to tickle the youngster (far right) and stroke his furry lips. He didn’t shut up all day about it. Because he got to pet a llama and I didn’t. I did however pet one of the two three legged dogs we saw.

So I set off for some fresh air on Sunday, but really hadn’t expected to see llamas, on leads, being taken for a walk.

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I’d been slowed down by my cameras being locked in the car boot (new car, had to actually figure out how to unlock the boot first) and just managed to snag this shot as they headed into the trees and deep shadow – I’d taken it at an angle to try and get them all in, as I was fully zoomed, tight in between the rumps of two approaching horses.

When I first started selling my jewellery on-line, I went through a slow and agonising process trying to decide on how best to present items for sale – I started with buying a domain name in some hosting with the full intention of starting my own shop – initially using PayPal buttons to create a pseudo cart. I had sold greetings cards for a long time using this process and it had worked well, but the jewellery didn’t quite work as well – I needed more than one photo per item and much more space for measurements, descriptions etc.

I did a lot of work putting pages together and trying layouts and organisation and it became clear very early on that this was going to be a very tedious process. I seriously needed to hone the workflow into something actually manageable. It takes a lot of work to photograph jewellery pieces, measure them, write a description and price them – often this part takes longer than it does to make the item. To then have to write code to put them on a web page and keep the site organised, took it beyond practicability – on top of a day job and time spent making too – which is the fun bit and consequently likely to suffer.

I’d bookmarked and been looking at the US based hand made venue site Etsy for some time, but hadn’t realised that as a UK crafter I could also have a shop there, so putting some items on there gave me the chance to embed my Etsy mini shop (as seen here in brief form on the right) onto a basic portfolio page on my site and bought me some thinking time.

I’d visited and greatly admired an Australian jewellery store on-line. Their jewellery was elegant and expensive and their site gave just the right impression and worked really well – just what I had in my fantasy mind for my own – a page for each item, with multiple photos and nice easy navigation. I looked at the little credits at the bottom of the page and it said it was a Cubecart site.

Further investigation revealed that at the time there were three main cart systems of that style available largely free to use in the right web hosting packages – CubeCart, Zen Cart and OS Commerce. So I spent a great deal of time trying to find a host with them to try and I did try all three. CubeCart was head and shoulders above the others for me. At the time, it was the only one that allowed multiple photos per item and its methodology suited my requirements and skills by far the best.

I found that I could tweak the appearance myself by editing the standard graphics and editing the style sheets and thereby creating my own skin, based on one of the standard ones – this was a task within my capabilities. It also became evident that carts of this nature are highly customisable – there are a massive array of commercial skins and ‘mods’ to get them working how you want. It also became evident that the original Australian site that set me on this path was very heavily modded and I wasn’t going to get something quite so elegant within my skill-set and budget.

I fully intended to buy a commercial skin once I’d satisfied myself that this particular cart was the right one for me – I needed to be sure I was making the right decision before I invested even more work. I chose a skin, but spent some time modding my own from one of the three that come with the cart as standard. I wanted to add some items to see how it worked in practice. I put together a finished enough looking site and asked a few friends and family to test it for me, showing them the final design I was aiming for. Every single one of them preferred the working site appearance to the skin I had picked out, so I just stuck with what I had and spent the time polishing that up some more instead.

So that was about 15 months ago now. I’ve gradually modded the site to get it functioning more how I want it and I still have a lot more ideas to put into practice as the budget will allow. I find the site easy to work with – it might not be as good for other products or other methodology, but I have been thrilled with how it works for me. I suspect if I were significantly busier and had more staff, it might not be the best, but for me and my workflow, it has been absolutely ideal.

I now maintain both my own shop and a sister one on Etsy as separate entities – I’ve finally honed a workflow to allow me to use a lot of the same process for both shops and feel comfortable at last with how I’m working – I don’t think I can strip it to much greater efficiency and maintain the same high standards – that simply takes effort.

Yesterday I added the 250th item in my own shop, the copper and amethyst necklace shown above. There aren’t 250 items actually for sale, so it’s a tad misleading, some items are upgrades and buying options and 48 unique pieces have been left on the site but moved to a sold section, but it felt a significant milestone to see 250 ‘products’ in the shop. When I was tearing my hair out trying to figure out how best to offer my pieces for sale, this milestone was the stuff of pure fantasy. I’m glad I stuck with it, the results now are what I hoped for, but I wish the journey hadn’t been quite so agonising!

• Etsy shop – boojewels
• My own shop – Boo’s Jewellery