Creel Part 2 (July 24 to 28)

July 24
Some Notes – Being Saturday I had actually predicted an unproductive day and the day sort of started that way but by the end of the day I think I made up for an unproductive morning.

At lunch Luis brought me to his friend who was a dentist that works out of Chihuahua but comes to her Creel office on the weekends. I ended up needing a cleaning, 2 small filling repairs and a mouth guard. She was able to do everything except the mouth guard as that has to be made special for me. But we were at least able to make the mouth guard mold made. I will pick the finished guard up in Chihuahua when I get there by bike in the first week of August. Everything cost $3,700 pesos or about $230 CAN which I figure worked out to be about an $800 savings. ($500 pesos for the cleaning, $700 x 2 for the fillings and $1,800 for the mouth guard).

A visit to the dentist

Later in the afternoon I worked on actually making my rings. It’s way harder than it looks but I was able to make 7 of them. I made the rings out of plated silver for practice purposes. (That means the rings will be cut up to get back the stones). I then switched to making pendants and ended up making 28 pendants until almost 2am. The pendants are also made with plated silver but except for the necklace part they are ready for sale. The pendants went fairly smooth and fast.

Pendants

So, over all a decent day.

July 25
Some Notes – A little bit of an unproductive day. It was my host Ana’s Birthday today so Luis was largely preoccupied with that. We all enjoyed steak dinner this evening. I wired (but not completed) 104 more stones for pendants over the afternoon and evening. I was not able to complete the pendants as I need more small stones that are added near the necklace loop.

I also shared my US Summary blog post to 21 Facebook bike groups first thing this morning.

Ana’s birthday

July 26
Some Notes – A mostly uneventful day. Today I learned about making a leather necklace for my pendants. It was only a very short lesson. Most of the day was spent making 27 finished rings with pure silver. The process is challenging for me but they say practice makes you perfect.

This afternoon I also received my first haircut that I had to pay for since 1997 but it only costed $3 USD. [Since 1997 I have been shaving my own head with my own clippers. Along the bike ride I have had hosts that were either hairdressers or had a pair of clippers for me to use.]

Haircut day

July 27
Some Notes – I started this morning by writing my Mexico Creel blog post Part 1 and most of Part 2 as I am virtually out of stones to work with. Unfortunately, the wifi at the house has only gotten slower since the day I arrived here so I will likely have to wait until Chihuahuas until I get to post blog posts.

Today we built my jewelry selling table but we completely forgot about the lighting setup for when it gets dark. Because I couldn’t light up my table (this evening) I decided to stay back at the house and make more jewelry while Luis set up his table downtown. This afternoon I was also able to get more stones from Luis and was able to make 25 more rings this evening.

My “magic rings”

July 28
Some Notes – The main events of today was to get the supplies needed to build an overhead light for my selling table.

This evening I joined Luis and Ana and set up my table downtown to sell my finished jewelry. I sold my first ring in about 10 minutes and only sold a pendant later on in the evening. So, on first evening I did $200 pesos in sales or $10 USD or my meal expenses for a day. After getting back to the house I tinkered around and used up the remainder of my stones on new rings and pendants.

My booth

From a business investment perspective, the course cost me $500 USD and about $475 in tools and start up inventory. I still have a few tools I need and I have used up all my stone inventory into finished jewelry. The good news is that my sellable inventory value is about $945 USD. Give or take that’s only about $30 USD difference.