String fever
I mentioned not so long ago that I'm going to be doing a netting class on Holy Saturday. Let me talk a bit about how that's currently going.
My original idea was to have up to nine people, preferably not too many of them children, and I'd get them started making string bags. (Don't get me wrong. I like children. It's just that netting requires a certain amount of concentration, and I don't really want to have to be keeping an eye on small boingy people at the same time as trying to ensure everyone can do a netting knot. Fortunately the ones who are likely to want to try netting are also, almost certainly, going to be the ones who can manage to sit still and concentrate for more than five minutes.) The plan was to collect e-mail addresses so that I could send them all a copy of Mr Holdgate's excellent book, both as a reminder and as a way to enable them to learn the techniques I won't have time to teach them; and also to give them all a follow-up card with my own e-mail address on it, so that they could come to me with any questions or problems later if they wanted, and possibly some of them might even be interested in taking it further and learning to do filet.
So the first thing I did was to enquire about the netting needles, only to be told that Gina (the only person in the country who, as far as I know, stocks them) would not be ordering any more in from Italy, due to the expense, the high minimum order, and the fact that they didn't sell well. She had only six that were large enough for beginners. And I was just thinking, right, then it'll have to be a class of six in that case, when she got back to me with some very welcome news. It just so happened that she'd suddenly discovered that one of her regular suppliers in this country also stocked them, but in sets of three - 21 cm, 19 cm, and 17 cm. I'd already decided that 17 cm was the smallest size we could get away with, so I said, brilliant - put me down for three packs and I'll talk to my pastor. At this point, both Gina and I were expecting that the needles would work out at about the same price, in other words about £5 a throw.
Let's leave that there for a moment. Meanwhile, I went and ordered some cards with a bit of explanatory text and my e-mail address on them. The minimum number I could order was 25, and I thought, well, really, I don't need more than nine; perhaps I might end up doing another class later, though. So I ordered 25, and they arrived about a week later.
There were 60 of them. I counted. O... K.
We then had a meeting (on Zoom, thankfully, as it can be a bit awkward for me to get out in the evening) about the craft session. I had a little bit of a panic originally because everything else seemed to be mostly aimed at children, and I was fairly emphatic that, while I didn't mind taking some children, what I mostly wanted was adults; but it turned out that that was fine. We were going for a broad appeal in any case. That all went very well, and then the pastor told us that we each had a budget of £50, and if we needed to go over that we'd need to talk to him and get approval.
"I'm going to go a bit over," I said. "The netting needles will come to about £45. I can provide mesh sticks because I've got a stack of them, but we will need some string."
"OK," he replied. "No problem."
Well, you know roughly how much string costs, and you can probably guess that somewhere between £5 and £10 worth of the stuff won't make nine string bags; so I thought I'd just get as much of it as I could and then tell everyone where I bought it, so that they could get more to finish their bags.
A few days later, Gina got back to me. The netting needles had just arrived and she had, indeed, put me down for three packs as requested, and now she'd sent me a Stripe link so I could pay for them without having to bother going through the website. I stared at it.
She wasn't charging me £45, or indeed anything close. She was charging me round about £13, and that was with P&P.
I paid for the needles on the spot, and sent her a very enthusiastic e-mail to thank her. It turned out she'd been astonished by the price, too; but then, these needles weren't coming from Italy. (They were exactly the same brand; there were just a lot fewer overheads. I expect they cost about 10p each to make in India.)
That suggested to me that it might just be possible to get everyone enough string for a bag after all; and, to cut a long story short, it was. Yesterday I picked up a dozen 60-metre balls of string - which should be more than enough - from eBay for the princely sum of £18.68. That's one ball per person, one for me to use for demonstration purposes, and a couple of spares in case someone tells me that was so much fun they'd like to teach one of their offspring who's into that kind of thing. (And if they don't, not a problem. It'll just end up as more string bags for the food bank.)
I did have to check with our church administrator about the data protection aspect of collecting e-mail addresses; however, it just so happens she's married to our informal head of tech, who's in charge of the church website, and he had a good idea. He suggested that rather than doing that and getting into a potential minefield for the sake of a few e-mail addresses, we could put the e-book up somewhere and give them a QR code to download it (and if they don't have the capacity to deal with a QR code, which I myself don't, then they can always e-mail me to ask for it). Giving out the cards is fine; if someone decides to e-mail me, they've implicitly consented to getting a reply, so there is no data protection problem there. All I have to do is not give out a card to anyone who appears to be under 18, apparently, and we're golden.
I really cannot quite believe how beautifully this whole thing has come together... but I suspect that, in fact, I probably should!
