Work Experience

Starting Work Experience

For my work experience this year, I had initially intended to work in a small store in my town that was a cafe, shop, and art gallery all in one, and also had a resident artist working above ground. The artist in question was a book restorer and binder, but I was unable to start straight away as she had too much work, considering that it was leading up to Christmas. I was told to come back to start after Christmas.
As time went on, however, I realized that the placement I had chosen wasn't one that I would enjoy, and for me, it was necessary that I enjoyed the placement to get out the experience I needed, so I decided against going to this place, which left me to find a new placement.

Because my college asks that the work experience be directly relevant to the course I'm studying, it made it extremely difficult to find something to do. The town that I live in and that the town that the college is in isn't rich in artistic places, so I was hard-pressed to find somewhere to work.

After much contemplation and struggle, my friend suggested that I try window dressing, and that there was a charity shop which we both frequent who's owner would be more than willing to let me do the window dressing for her. I asked straight away, and started as soon as the two weeks Easter Holiday was over.

The first thing I did was go through the health and safety run through; I was told where all of the emergency exits were, where the fire extinguishers were, and what not to do in case of a fire. I was also told basic health and safety things, such as not to leave things blocking the fire escape routes, and to not try to do anything that I know I couldn't do myself, getting something off of a high shelf for example, that could bring harm to both me and the customers.

After this, she gave me free reign over how I dressed the mannequins, as long as what I dressed them in was seasonal, using anything off of the shop floor.

The mannequins, unfortunately, are not the type you can put trousers on, nor can you take the actual body off of the stand to put clothes on, but it didn't present much of a problem, only restricted my choices of what I could actually put on them.
As it was the first week, and I didn't really have a plan as to what I wanted to do, I just put the mannequins in dressed, and made sure that any jewelry was matching. The display turned out to be quite formal in appearance.

She also gave me free reign on decorating the table that was in the shop, and so I set about experimenting with colours, shapes, and sizes.
What I like about doing window dressing in a charity shop is that choices are very limited to what they have in stock, and the stock changes every week. Putting clothes on the mannequin was very easy, but dressing the table proved to be very difficult.

A lot of the decorations the shop has in stock are predominantly red, which went very well with the red running through the cushions on the table chairs. Unfortunately, all the red ornaments were all of different shades, which made it extremely difficult trying to match them.
I also discovered that the ornaments worked better in the center of the table, and also looked best in groups of three, as long as none of the ornaments stood at the same height.

Initially, I had been trying to create a running theme of red, and had chosen to use an orange red that ws predominant in the red ornaments, but getting ornaments of varying sizes of the same colour proved to be extremely difficult as well.

I eventually decided to change the colour scheme I was working with, and looked for what else I could use. I chose instead to use a pink/ purple and gold theme, as there were quite a lot of ornaments in this colour as well.

I settled on using a large glass that was a grape purple chade but had gold running through it, and started to choose the other ornaments to match this. There were two smaller glasses of the same design, but having too many glasses of the same shape didn't look right.
I then noticed a small jar that had purple and gold running through it, but also had red in it, which would tie it nicely to the table I was working with. I then chose to use a gold ornament, and settled for a small gold cherub decoration.

As well as doing the window dressing, I also did various other jobs, such as tidying the CD and DVD's in a unit so that all spines could be seen, and also moved around some of the other ornaments onto a different shelf so that it wasn't as cramped. The ornaments I chose to move all followed the theme of fairy tales, as there were a lot of fairy ornaments and miniature houses.

Before I left, the store manager told me that if I were to come up with a plan, I should let her know so that she could go over it and get anything necessary for the plan.