When dinosaurs ruled the earth

So it has been a busy month for me since I last wrote a blog post, I have spent many hours trying to get my head round the concept of search engine optimization. For almost a week I spent three hours a night adding listings in classified ads and free directories and kept my eyes peeled on my google analytics the whole time. It got to the point where I was becoming slightly obsessed with how much I could increase my hits by and would wait until 1 minute past midnight to see the result. After the first day I went up to 12 hits, well that was 4 times more than my previous average, then 25 wow!, and then 40 hits in a day!, needless to say I was chuffed, then howver for the next 3 days a big fat 0. Strange I never had that little before, then it occured to me the server must be down, but I came crashing back down to reality when I recieved emails from the classified sites I had been listing on saying they had removed my listing as it was a business listing and not a private ad'..damn! I have now turned to an expert for his advice on getting a better page ranking, so I look forward to seeing some results.

Anyway enough of that, its almost as boring writing about it as it is doing it, so without further ado I shall update you on my latest design. The brief was simple they wanted a dinosaur table like the one in our ebay shop but in a colour and style to match a competitors dinosaur bed, all be it a mass produced item. The item was to be grey and black with a hint of red in it, with lots of heavy cartoon style shading. The build was easy as I had already made one before and had templates, although this one need scaling up a bit as it was for an older child. I also used the opportunity to fix some design flaws, the most important being to make a new jig for the slot and tab parts of the table. Overall the build went very well and when put together it looked stunning. The client was very pleased and left some awesome feedback on our ebay shop, which was great. After recieving the quality item he has now ordered 2 dinosaur bedside tables a custom made bookshelf and a dinosaur chair to compliment his dinosaur table.

The chore of search engine optimization

So its been a couple of months now since our website went live and we seem to have found our natural page ranking all be it no where near as high as I would like, and now it is time to start thinking about optimizing our site. we are currently only getting about 5 hits a day to the site which whilst that has started to bring in sales they are fewer than i would like, i feel like I have been a little slack with my ebay store too recently, many of my items had timed out and I hadnt relisted them due to not getting any sales yet, but all that has changed now with my first ebay sale, so last night I set about listing many new items which is a very slow and boring job especially with my stoneage internet speed.
I then proceeded to update my listings on the free online classified sites that get my items found at the top of googles first page under certain search terms. After this I did a bit of research into search engine optimization and have put into place a plan of action that I hope will drastically increase our website hits.
Orders just in are now a butterfly themed toy box, a dinosaur shaped play table and a full dinosaur bedroom set, so watch this space!

Happy little chappy

Well here is my next little custom order, the brief was a storage unit to house 6 plastic storage boxes with a racing theme in royal blue with checkered flags on it. My original thought was to have cars on the design but the customer didnt want that so I drew up a fairly simple design, at the time I didnt think it looked all that special but after posting it to the customer she phoned back saying her little boy absolutely loved it. Apparently he had been taking the design everywhere with him and showing all his friends "look what I'm getting! no one else in the world has got one of these" bless him that gave me a little fuzzy feeling knowing that my piece was going to be so well recieved, i cant ever remember getting excited about a bit of furniture when I was a lad.

Anyway to add a little bit of something special for this design I wanted a super glossy finish, kind of like the shine on a flashy racing car, so I opted for a high gloss water based glaze to go over the top of the acrylic gloss. I also wanted something different to the usual rounded edges on this especially knowing it would be very hard to get the gloss finish i wanted on the end grain of the mdf, so i put a slight bevel on the edges with a block plane. the detail on the sides is the checkered flags which is routed in to give it a bit of depth as well as making it easier to paint neatly. The plinth is also checkered but this time it was done by masking off alternate squares and painting over a whit background. The finishing touch is then a race track in the top which was done by cutting out a figure of 8 shape and then recessing a 9mm rectangle painted grey into the back of the table top. The result is a race track he can play on the top with without the cars falling off all the time. The edges were a bit of a knightmare as even though i had thoroughly undercoated and sanded them before sealing them with mdf sealer the gloss blue still sucked straight into the end grain and didnt give the finish i wanted, so I masked of the top and under side of the shelves aswell as the sides of the side panels and painted the end grain with an oil based black matt which covers very well as well as drying veryquickly. When the tape was removed the end result is better than I could have hoped for, and combined with the super high sheen on the glaze looks great. The design is also put together using wooden dowels and plastic block type brackets so it can easily be flat packed and moved before being reassembled.

Unfortunately I had a weekend break away booked and due to the drying times taking a little longer than expected little Josh had to wait a couple of days longer but when I got back and delivered it on the sunday morning I was greeted by a great big smiley face watching patiently out of the bedroom window, and when i installed it in his bedroom he was quick to load it up with his boxes full of toy cars and start setting them out on the race track.

Spring is in the air!

A

Well its early May and spring is definitely here, the garden is green and the birds are singing, even that unfamiliar character that is the sun has been making an occasional appearance. Yes it's the time of year that gets everyone excited about the garden and being outdoors and especially kids. So that explains my next request from a local nursery, some outdoor flower shaped mirrors and a pair of outdoor blackboards.

Other than the instruction for them to be pastel colours and a certain size so that the could fit on the two gates and under a window it was pretty much left up to me. Oh yes the blackboards were to be in a duck theme and a floral theme.

The mirrors first, I chose to use two different flower shapes fairly simple cut out of far eastern exterior ply, jigsaw cut to shape and with a bit of routed detail between the petals and a rounded edge. I cut a nice dinner plate sized hole in the centre for the mirror and rebated the back a slightly larger circle for the mirror to sit in. They were then given two coats of under coat and painted in exterior gloss which has a really nice sheen to it. The mirror itself I decided would be best to make out of mirror finished stainless steel which I hoped to cut with a jigsaw in circular shapes. After purchasing a £10 pack of top quality blades and burning them all out in second I realized the steel was much too thick so back to the drawing board. I thought this time I would try a diamond blade in an angle grinder and cut the mirrors in an octagonal shape. Ten minutes later the grinder had failed to even make a mark. So back to the engineer shop and they cut the piece of stainless into four squares for me with their guillotine, only cost me £5 too, why didnt I think of that in the first place? After siliconing the mirrors in place and fitting a keyhole shaped bracket onto the back so the mirrors wouldn't be able to fall off the wall they were complete.

The black boards next, I painted two large rectangular pieces of exterior ply with blackboard paint, I gave them two coats and sanded it between each to get a nice flat finish. I then drew some cute little duckling characters and a mardy mother duck, cut these shapes out so they could be stuck onto the board and painted these in exterior gloss, I also routed some reeds into the board itself and painted the same. The chalk tray was then made from 3 x 2 pse with two drainage channels routed into it to allow the water to run out and to hold the chalks in place, this was slightly angled so any rain water could drain away and then painted blue. The other one was the same principle but with flowers the same as the mirrors on it and a nice pretty butterfly. These were screwed from the back onto the two nursery gates. All the kids were fascinated when I went to fit them especially my daughter who also goes to the nursery, although as she had already seen them in the workshop she thought they were hers and didnt seem to keen to share.

Hi there

So this it, the world of the blogger. You may be able to tell but I’m not exactly taking to this like a duck to water. More of an ostrich to water I’d say. Anyway I’ll try anything once, so hear goes.

My name is Simon Powell and I’m 32 and live in a small nondescript town set in the english countryside. I am a budding children’s furniture and interior designer. I hope that I can use this blog to show case my talents and make a name for myself in this niche market.

My business is called dreamcraft and we design and build the most inspirational kids bedrooms around. This all came about when i made my 6 year old son a huge dinosaur shaped bed. After having received comments from everyone that saw it about how I should try and sell similar beds and how amazing it was I thought, you no what I will. That was 2 years ago and I have now made and sold loads of different items of kids furniture you can see some of it at www.kidsfunkyfurniture.co.uk