A guided tour

Good morning! Thank you for joining me on this lovely day, as we take a field trip to Polka Dot Creations. My name is Lisa, and I’ll be your tour guide as we explore the tiny corner of my basement vast warehouse that contains all of the instructional materials sold in the book section of our store. We’ve roped-off the gifts area, as well as the craft supplies area(s) and the shelves of shipping supplies, and will be focusing solely on the printed and video media for the purposes of today’s tour.

Flash photography is permitted, but food and drink are not. If you would kindly deposit food items in the trash receptacle located conveniently to your left, we will be on our way. Thank you. Are we ready?

Great. Please watch your step as you descend into the basement, as the path is narrow and not particularly well-lit.

First up is our spinner rack, which we use to hold hardcover titles, Dover Clip Art, and brand new books which we have in too much abundance to store on the regular shelves. With space at such a premium, we have recently decided to no longer carry clip art. Look for it to appear soon in the clearance aisle.

Just beyond the spinner you will find a shelving unit to your right, which we use to house Ornament Magazine back-issues as well as Design Originals project books. Some of the older Ornament back-issues are an interesting glimpse into the history of polymer clay, as they contain some of the early success stories like Kathleen Dustin and Cynthia Toops.

Moving along, just below the previous set of shelves, and slightly to the left is where we keep most of the rest of our magazine back-issues. You’ll notice the most recent issue of PolymerCAFE sits on top within easy grasp.

Continue straight ahead, and to your left you will see the Stampington & Company area. These magazines, aside from one small cube for the now defunct Expression Magazine, are all published by Stampington. Art Doll Quarterly, Belle Armoire, and many special publications live here.

Right behind the Stampington shelves is our area for miscellaneous project books, containing mostly titles by publishers who are not particularly prolific with polymer clay instructional materials. Included in this area are some old, hard-to-find miniatures books from Dee’s Delights.

Moving straight ahead, and looking slightly to the left, we find our Hot off the Press shelf. HOTP is not focusing on polymer clay these days, and only has two or three active titles that they publish. The rest of these are from the “golden era” of polymer clay project books – the mid-to-late nineties – and are long out of print.

Looking straight ahead now, we come to our PolymerCAFE back-issue area. Not visible here are the many boxes with additional copies of these issues. We lack the room to keep them all out, so they’re stacked away until we need them.

Below the magazines is our book shelf. Nearly all of our regular-sized books are stored here. Before you leave today, you might want to pick up a copy of Polymer Clay Mosaics by Sue Heaser. It’s a nice book, with some lovely projects, but for some reason I’ve been sitting on this big stack of them for years. Since you’re still here, taking the tour, I’d love to give you a special deal on it.

Alright, if you would please turn right and walk a few steps ahead? Great. To your left is our rack of Mastering the New Clays VHS tapes. These are well-done workshops mostly featuring Victoria Hughes aka Tory Hughes, and mostly taped in the mid-to-late nineties. There have been advances in video technology since then, but the content of these workshops makes up for any deficiencies in that area. Also on these shelves are miscellaneous videos & DVDs that just fit better here than anywhere else. For now. We’re always re-arranging this section.

Straight ahead of you is the area that contains DVDs from the companies who only do DVDs – Page Sage, Angie Scarr and Creative Catalyst Productions, to name a few.

If you turn to you right, you will come to the last stop on our tour. This area is in flux, as we phase out VHS tapes and head towards DVD-only. It is requiring constant re-arranging as the inventory changes. You may recognize titles here from Mindstorm Productions, Abba Dabba Video, Polymer Clay Express, and Wee Folk Creations.

And so ends our tour. We hope you enjoyed a peek behind the scenes and that you didn’t find the aisles too cramped for comfort. As you can see, we are pretty much filled to capacity. It’s time to re-evaluate some of our magazine subscriptions, as well as some of the books we carry, and see if we can’t discontinue some items, or decrease the number of copies we receive. When we’ve had time to do a proper inventory count, we’ll be putting a number of items on clearance, and having a sale on some of our overstocks. Stay tuned for that.

Please watch your step as you exit the basement. We thank you for visiting our warehouse and hope you will enjoy this coupon for 10% off in the store: 101080108. Thanks, and come again!