Some of the more eagle-eyed among you may have noticed that there hasn’t been any activity on here (or on our Facebook or Instagram accounts) for the last year or so, and that the Shop page of this site has also been offline.
Why is that, I hear you ask? Has Tawbis Studios ceased trading?
Well, I thought it was probably about time to address this head-on and explain what’s been happening, and what is going to happen in the future.
Firstly, no Tawbis Studios has not ceased trading! If you’re in the Aberdeen area, you can still find some of our jewellery (including some new pieces) in the shop at Rosie’s Framers & Crafts on Holburn Street (just opposite the end of Union Grove).
As for why there has been no activity on this page or on social media, that’s a slightly more complicated situation!
Firstly there was the relocation! We had posted on social media in September 2022 that we were just preparing to move house and in theory that should have been a relatively simple matter, moving us out of a house in Aberdeen and into a house in northern Aberdeenshire. All we were waiting on was written confirmation (following verbal confirmation) from our existing mortgage company that we could port the mortgage to the new house.
Yeah, it’s never quite that simple, is it?
At the last minute the mortgage market in the UK collapsed (those of you in the UK will remember that, I’m sure – it brought about the downfall of our shortest serving Prime Minister!!). That effectively held up our mortgage offer (for a lot longer than we thought!) and we ended up being effectively homeless for two months. Thankfully, due to extremely generous colleagues, family and friends, we were never actually out on the streets but all of our belongings had to go into storage and we had to travel the country with our two beautiful cats in order to get to places where we could stay with them (thanks Louise, and Mum and Dad!!).
Finally (thank God!) on 1 December 2022 we did move into our new house near Fraserburgh (new to us, that is – it dates to about 1900). We absolutely love it, although it does need some work doing to it. It is going to be perfect for us once it’s all fixed up though!
After all of that stress, I decided to put everything with the business on hold for a few months. Nobody really buys jewellery just after Christmas anyway, I wanted to give the online shop a refresh, and I wanted to find some new venues for workshops in northern Aberdeenshire. Once all of that was done, we would be back at craft fairs, running workshops and music classes, introducing new designs and having a play with some fantastic new equipment bought at Christmas 2022.
Throughout March, April and May we secured exciting new venues for workshops and classes and were just in the process of agreeing dates, ready to launch the new events.
Then the unexpected happened. In June I had a serious medical emergency which took us all completely by surprise. I am on the road to recovery now but it’s going to take some time to be back to full strength. That means no craft fairs for at least a little while, probably for the rest of this calendar year.
But that doesn’t mean that we don’t have exciting developments on the horizon!
I have done a couple of practice workshops with friends to check safety and also energy levels and that has all gone really well. I am currently teaching Mr Tawbis Studios some silversmithing, and in particular how to run the workshops, partly so that he can help me run them in order to make them a little easier to run, but also as a backup in case we have a date booked in that I end up not being able to make. Once he’s confident with that, we will be arranging dates and publicising them, as well as some new workshops. If you come to one of them, you’ll be taught by both of us rather than just me, you lucky pups!!
The music classes are a bit trickier as I don’t have anyone as backup, and I don’t yet know whether I’ll be able to play and teach to the same standard, so they will require a little more thought, but I will make an announcement as soon as possible on those.
I’m now back to working on the online shop. There’s a bit of work to do which is taking longer than it previously would have, including new product photography and a new layout, but I will get that live again at some point this year, and in the meantime if you’re after some jewellery just drop me an email (anne@tawbis.com) with a note of your requirements and I can let you know what I already have in stock.
Given the length of time that the business has been in limbo, if you’re reading this thank you for sticking with us! We’d also appreciate it hugely if you could help us out by sharing event listings etc once they go live!
Thank you all
Anne
