A friend from Norway sent us a present.  I keep in touch with a lot of friends from Europe when I lived there and new ones I've made visiting, and new ones I've gotten to know through our mutual love of violet wands.

mmmm...the nicest things come in black boxes!!!!!

We love presents!!! What is it??

Its a hand-tooled copper rose- and its a violet wand electrode!

So beautiful, what workmanship!  The copper is heavy, very solid.

Art and beauty, function and fun and oooo so excited!

Of course we had to try it out.  This rose has some very sharp thorns.  It burns.  There's a solid delivery, no buffer, and its painful.  We'll keep to use for extra special people.  But its not going to be hidden away in its lovely hand made box!

It will stay on display in our office, along with our own special electrodes we've blown.

I  just wanted to say thank you again, Henrik.  We are floored by the generosity and skill of your gift.  You've taken great care and pride, and its obvious you've put your all and your own being into this rose.  We are honored. We are very lucky to have such friends.

To readers: if you MUST have one of these copper rose electrodes for your own, I can put you in touch with Henrik.  These are hand made and take time.  But they are a work of art, and worth it.

Back in 1997 when we started, our violet wand sales website was hard coded html.  Its old, its horrible, its messy, and it gets so much traffic at the end of a month that it goes over its bandwidth limit and shuts down for a few days.  I know its ugly too.  But its worked well for 16 years and even though outdated, because its simple html it doesn't break. So it works just fine but 'wow' its way overdue for some tweaking until it can get a complete overhaul that it deserves and should have had years ago.

Ill do the tweaking because I know what I've done to it.

But we did get photogs for some new pictures.  Here they are at left working on getting glow from electrodes to turn out just right without frying their equipment.

Either I try to supervise people or I try to mother them.  It was easy to mother these guys, and they were a blast to have around for a day.  I thought we should all stop and do a kick line in front of the webcam but they weren't too keen on the idea.

I am grateful for their talents- and they got to go shopping in the shop afterward.

This is part of the shop that the webcam doesn't cover, kind of a front 'lobby' area.  I get a LOT of feedback on that 'wand cam'.  Mostly people wonder why they can't see more of the other areas.  And that's just because the cam is affixed to the ceiling and I'd fall on my ass moving it around and probably break a hip.  It catches most of the work floor and lets everybody see what's going on in fulfillment, and I can post other pics like this at left when we do something interesting or unusual.

Here's the shop mushroom himself, the love of my life and wand genius, re-arranging the storage room.  Not so unusual, but it gives you a different view. I hope you like seeing those old kits.

Peering into the shipping room.  I do NOT go in there.

This is what I'm working on this week on our 3rd 'production' day; Agni floggers.  Here the tails are being sized and trimmed.  We do production three days a week, and one of the production days is for special items like this.

And THESE humongous things are taking up wayyyy too much room.  Even with the storage room re-arranged, Im tripping over them and I'm not happy.  So blow them out!  These are Viking/Toshiba ATA cases which we use to build large custom violet wand kits into.  (after fully detailing and painting them.)  You want?  You can do your own clean up and painting.  We had 11 and the nicest/largest have been sold.  New they are $400-500.

Take em!  $100 per and Ill throw in foam, plenty of pick and pluck.  STEEL construction, most have rolling wheels, extension handles, some have keys and all have super industrial strength.  More information on these cases and more pictures.  Take a look at those locks!

Get one now, because once we do it and custom paint it, we wouldn't be able to make it $100.

The Christmas season was  mad rush as always, but every Violetwanda package shipped out in time for Christmas delivery.  As always, the shopping season depleted a lot of our inventory and we spent some time restocking.

When you make everything rather than buy it wholesale, its sometime a challenge to keep everything made so you don't run out before Christmas.  But we're committed to making everything ourselves and as much as we can, we source parts that are made in the US.  So we use US parts to make everything we make. and its all made in the US.

Nice full stock bins!  That makes me a very happy lady.

So January was busy too; restocking during inventory.  I used to do inventory myself, but there was no way I could do it for the past few years.  We have far too much and I have too many other things to do, so we hire a kink-friendly inventory-er for tax prep.

It took him a day to count and do one section.  After the first day he came up to me and said 'Do you realize you have 90 different parts on this one shelf alone?"  yeah, I do.  And the stock shelves were "the easy part".  After the stock shelves he did the work rooms, the storage room and the break room.  He saved the work bench for last.   There were THOUSANDS of small parts in the work bench drawers.  BUT, we made it!  Inventory was finally over after a week and a half.

The interesting thing about inventory is that you find all these odd things you have accumulated over the years, especially when its done right and he did it right.  So he uncovered one-off electrodes, weird proto-types, bits and pieces and parts we'd forgotten about.  And so many, many parts for antique violet rays and so many violet rays.  They were always our first love.  When we have time we want to do them again because there is nothing like bringing some discarded antique back to SAFE and beautiful condition, and in actually better working order than when it was first made 100 years ago because we have better parts we can use in these modern times.