World Map

The shop next door to me, Village Home (see their blog link down in my Favorites), has a map of the world where they put a pin for each customer who comes in from out of town. It's a cool idea, and one that I blatantly stole recently!

Not too long ago, I was getting some packages ready to mail out and one of the packages was going to Israel. In all the 26 years I've been making jewelry, I never sent a package to Israel before. That's when it occurred to me that people coming into my store might think it was interesting to see all the places in the world where my jewelry lives. I bought a really big map, mounted it on styrofoam, and put it up on the wall behind my ring case. I only had records going back about a year, but that's still a lot of pins--took me about 4 hours to put them all into the map. And I didn't put a pin in for every single package I mailed out--there are only so many pins you can stuff into a tiny space indicating a big city like New York or Washington DC! In fact, the whole US Eastern seaboard is pretty full! It's hard to see the pins in a picture incorporating the whole map, but there are pins in every state in the United States except Wyoming, plus several in Canada, Australia, and the UK. In addition to Israel, some of the more "interesting" places are: Sweden, Norway, Japan, Portugal, Spain, Iceland, and Malta! Yes, Malta--is that cool or what?!

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