Brettuns Village
Trunks & Leather
Old Trunks, New Leather.
All from Maine.
May 17, 2011
It seems like just a few
days ago that this one was running around in diapers and drooling on the
furniture. It seems like just hours ago that that other one was licking
things out of the carpet and then depositing them back there a few minutes
later. They grow up fast. The first is our eldest daughter,
recently home for the summer from her freshman year of college. The
second is That Pup (Indie), who has tripled her body weight in just over
nine weeks. Slow down, I keep telling the world. It’s all going
by too quickly. Indie’s growing into those huge paws, and Becca is
an amazing young woman.Somehow while all this change
was going on I was here, nose to the grindstone, tape gun in one hand,
computer mouse in the other, and That Dog (Jenny) got a little more gray
and moved a little more slowly, so there it was ‘ finally, something moving
at the right pace. Good old J-Dog, with her aching joints (thanks
to Lyme disease) and her semi-wagging tail, serving as a forecast of what’s
ahead for us as we check off another year. The Jenny, always ready
for a photo-op, always ready to work to move this business forward, as
long as we let her take a nap first. That’s the right pace.They say summer is upon us,
but I’m still wearing long underwear everyday to work, and I don’t feel
any sense of pride announcing that little fact to the world, or at least
to the world of all 14 of you Brettuns Village newsletter subscribers out
there. Its still cold in the mornings, and chilly in the evenings,
and rather cool in the middle of the day, so I’m still sporting those great
LL Bean lightweight things that Becca had pointed at when she was about
4 and asked, ‘Hey Daddy, are you going to wear your silk panties today?’
and I had to stop whatever I was doing and explain to a four-year-old how
important it was that she never, ever say things like that in front of
any of my fishing or duck hunting buddies. She understands it now,
but things were shaky there for a while. At any rate, it’s been a
miserable Spring, or call it late Winter, hereabouts, with the exception
of one or two days of sunshine and warmer weather, which of course meant
black fly bites on the wrists and neckline. In Maine our true summer
starts right around 4th of July weekend, and it tends to last about 8 weeks,
at least in our part of the state. We’re ready for it.Here at BVL worldwide HQ
we’ve been getting a kick out of the sales charts. Things are moving
in the right direction ‘ the chart looks a lot like the profile of the
southern slope of Mt Katahdin up in Baxter State Park (northern end of
the Appalachian Trail, in case you haven’t made the trip yet). Up,
up, and away. We keep expanding the product lines, and we’ve expanded
our storage space. Bought a new pallet jack even (still no forklift)(long
story – read our newsletter archives to get a taste of that fine whine),
and we keep shoe-horning in more stuff to our existing shipping warehouse.
Allgreat fun, this expansion
stuff. The only thing not expanding is the payroll ‘ we seem to do
more work with the same staff, so there hasn’t been much time left over
for me to work up the right sort of intestinal state that yields these
newsletters. Sorry about that. Here we are, half way through
May, and I’m way behind on distributing the big leather news. Assuming
we have some big leather news to distribute, that is. Don’t worry,
we’ve got plenty of it.Hide prices have gone through
the roof, in case you hadn’t noticed. Hides are traded like most
commodities these days ‘ it’s all about supply and demand, and because
of recent tightening of supplies the price of cow hides has been on the
rise for most of this year. A few customers have asked us why we’ve
increased our prices ‘ the hide market has something to do with it; the
way we include shipping in our prices has a lot more to do with it though.
UPS rates have almost doubled, thanks to gasoline prices, so we’ve done
the Big Corporate Monster thing and passed that along, which is why we
still have jobs and the lights still come on when we hit the switch at
5 am. We do our best to keep our prices as low as we can ‘ the goal
remains the same as it has since we opened the doors over a decade ago:
‘Sell it.’The Deal of the Week remains
a very popular spot on our website, such as it is, and it looks like the
DOTW will soon take over the lead spot from the Clearance page in terms
of popularity. We still update the DOTW every Wednesday morning,
and our thanks go out to each of you who hammer your way onto that page
each Wednesday am, like fans at a rock show, clogged up in the doorways,
trying to get close to the stage. There are always ten items listed
on our DOTW, OK, sometimes nine, and some of them have been on there a
while. Those are items we’re trying to get rid of, or at least trying
to make a dent in the amount of it that’s stored around this barn.
Take, for instance, the beaded clip-on decorations in black and white that
are on there. They look like tassels for something, can’t really
think of anything that needs crystal tassels, but you were always way more
creative than me anyway. Or the piles of decorations, mixed, that
are practically begging you to work them into your next Hollywood jet-setter
arrow quiver with matching moccasins and ear lobe sash weights. Or
Rivet-Palooza, which gives you ten bags of some of the most useless rivets
on earth, unless you’re an aircraft mechanic. Or the leather laces
‘ who doesn’t need lacing to lash together trees that you’ve chopped down
around your place in case this rain really doesn’t ever stop? That’s
the whole point of our DOTW ‘ we’re just concerned about your safety.
Sort of. Just a reminder that we post the updates to the DOTW every
Wednesday morning on the BV Facebook page. Like us and you’ll get
those annoying notices from us every time we post one, but at least we
promise you won’t get any of those dreaded Farmville updates from us.
Live in farm country, dig potatoes for a season or two and playing around
with online farming just isn’t all that exciting.We sell a lot of scrap leather
here; it goes out to homes and businesses all around the country and also
outside of the USA to those wishing to make small items, fix up something
that needs fixing, or they just cram it under the seats in their car to
make it smell like leather in there again (I kid you not ‘ you’d get a
boot out of the amount of leather we sell for this purpose), and for years
we sold rather large pieces of saddle skirting scrap. Week before
last we got in a truck load of stuff, and a lot of skirting scrap was included.
We have the typical tan color, and also a lot in oxblood (deep burgundy);
this stuff is great for making heavy duty sheaths, moccasin soles, or protecting
your noggin from errant sword whacks. Need heavy leather but don’t
need huge panels? This stuff is for you ‘ on the Scrap leather page.Shell cordovan is back in
stock. Black only, and just what you need to make that perfect archery
finger tab glove thing that you’ve always wanted. You want it so
bad, in fact, that the very idea of spending $125 for a piece of leather
that’s the size of a medium pizza makes perfect sense to you. Limited
supply, get them while we have them, on the Sides and Hides page.
Yes, it’s horse’s butt. Go figure. If shell cordovan isn’t quite
going to fit your project budget then take a look at the calf sides we
have on our Sides & Hides page ‘ with a bit of buffing these would
fool anyone into thinking the leather was
cordovan. We’ll keep our mouths shut.A new batch of our Bourbon
Shoulders arrived week before last ‘ a very popular leather that has NOT
gone up in price. Check our Facebook page to see the incredible hats
that Carol makes from this leather. Very cool, in our opinion.Our Lightweight/Thin Leathers
page is chock full of cowhide sides in many different colors ‘ just right
for those of you who like to wear leather, as this stuff is almost all
garment grade. Bone, black, blue, red, pink, navy, chestnut, amber,
and some color called ‘mist’ are all shown there. All are under 3
oz in thickness (less than 1/16 of an inch) so your sewing machine should
be able to go through this leather like green corn through the new school
teacher.New rivet styles, new buckles,
and a lot of other new items all scattered around the site, so if you’ve
got nothing better to do ‘ well let’s say for instance that you’re a fan
of the Baltimore Orioles and you just flat can’t face seeing them get trounced
by the Red Sox again tonight ‘ then you may want to poke around BrettunsVillage.Com
to see if there’s something you need or want or can’t live without.
Shipping to our USA customers is always included in our prices, so there’s
nothing else to add at the end of the transaction. We do our best
to extend this ‘no added shipping cost’ system to our ustomers in
AK, HI, PR, GU and if we’ve missed anybody it’s just my lack of sleep over
the last 23 years that caused it.If you live in the southern
states and feel it’s a bit too warm down there, please send it up.
Flap your arms, use cardboard, be creative. If I don’t get out of
these long underwear pretty soon I may lose it. I know, ‘what’s left
to lose?’ Yes, you crack me up.Thanks-
Churchill Barton, Tape Gun
Repairman
Brettuns Village Leather
Lewiston, Mainewww.BrettunsVillage.Com
Someone’s growing like
a weed.
Indie
