For as long as I can remember there has always been a Father’s Day, a Mother’s Day, and even a Teacher Appreciation Day, but never an official Customer Appreciation Day. Well today TMW is changing history and making a special day of admiration for our frequent shoppers. Every time you make a purchase, tear off the top part of your receipt with your name and address and drop it into the drawing.

Monthly we will pick one receipt and that lucky shopper will win a $50 dollar gift certificate! It’s time for customers to have a special day too!  Will it be your special day this month? 

This blog entry was written by our associate, Breanna.  She is an aspiring journalist.

If you would like to leave a comment on this blog entry, please click here email

The girls and I have been doing some spring cleaning at the store and I have uncovered a treasure trove of what we call “oops merchandise.”  Well, now all of our long time customers are very familiar with this term, but for all the newbies out there, I will explain it.

Oops merchandise happens when someone picks up a candle to give it a sniff and bam; it slips from their hand and hits the floor.  Now the candle has a slight blemish on the corner, but still smells wonderful and will certainly serve its intended purpose.  Should we throw it away?  Heck no!  Mark it down to a silly low price and send it off to the Oops box (or in this case boxes!)

We sometimes get items in that have been slightly damaged in shipping, or we take down some curtains, bedding or other textile that was used in a display.  These all make their way to OopsLand.

I can not throw anything out.  I call my house the land of the misfits because that is where these oops items used to go before I came up with the idea of offering them to you at extremely low mark downs.  If you ever come over to visit my home, don’t be turning my bowls around because you will see the chips, and don’t take out your magnifying glass as you will see the scratches in my picture frames….you know, stuff like that.

We are going to drag these items out of Oops Land and onto the porch for the weekend (5/17 & 5/18) and have an Oops Sale.  Come on by and snap up some bargains.  This is always a popular part of our tent sale in the Fall, but we have so much, we want to do it early this year.
If you would like to leave a comment on this blog entry, please click here email

The social event of the season was held on the grounds

of Things Made Wonderful this past weekend. 

Many were in attendance and all had a splendid time. 

Party goers (Young and old) 

Garden Party details 10% off store wide sale Sat 4/26 & Sun. 4/27 – Rain date will be the following weekend 

Stop on by for some great fun and fabulous ideas for celebrating Spring and outdoor entertaining!  The orders of Spring merchandise have been arriving daily and we still have one more big shopping trip to do next week.  I am so excited over all the wonderful, fun things to decorate and entertain with!  We can not wait to share them with you. We will have some great outdoor settings for you to visit!

§        See Tom & Pam of Natural Designs for some great advice on container gardening.  They are also authorized Unilock installers and will be setting up a sample patio for you to check out.  Give you any ideas for re-doing that patio?  Ask them about their fantastic outdoor kitchen islands.  I so want to get one of those for Bob.  He is a great cook and I can already taste the steak cooking!

§        Holly and Charlie from Thyme Farm will also be here offering samples of their scrumptious gourmet food line.  They specialize in herb, fruit & spice vinegars, barbeque sauce and “Charlie’s chili stuff.”  Holly brought by one of the dips for us to try and let me tell you, it was great.  We were all gathered around to try it and agreed we had to start carrying the line.   Abby was most found of it as she offered to lick the bowl (no, we did not let her.)

§        The staff has been busy dreaming up creative theme parties for you to visit during the weekend.  Each party will of course have its own sampling of food and ideas for decorating and entertaining.

§        We will have music and fun for everyone so mark your calendar and come party with your friends at TMW! 

Things are really starting to come together for our Annual Garden Party. It will be held on

 Saturday, April 26^th and Sunday, April 27^th. 

 Let’s hope for good weather, we may have to put a rain date on this one.  Activities and sales are being planned to help you celebrate the coming of warm weather and outdoor Living.  It is all about enjoying and decorating your outdoor spaces! 

I am going to use this blog entry to give you an idea of what goes into planning this event.  It may actually help keep me on track with the “need to dos,” “the must get it done soon” and the “oh no, got to get it done now.”   

We start with a review of the last garden event we held and then add in a good brain storming session.  This year Bob and I discussed it over dinner at one of our favorite restaurants.  Once we came up with some general ideas, the creative stuff started to flow, (coincidently, so did the wine.)   

I brought those ideas back to the store and started to discuss them with Tracey, before we knew it we had a notebook full of great ideas to work with.  We broke it down into the different party themes such as:  Tea Parties, Wine tasting, Cookouts, Children’s parties, and added in Garden design and Birding.  Now that the major plot is in place, the rest of the staff will be brought into the mix so we can add in their creative input as well.  For each of these categories, we have to come up with:   Entertainment, Furniture, Food/Beverage, and Products.   

Now the fun part, the buying!  We needed product for the event so it was off to the buying shows. In addition to buying for the upcoming year, we had to put a large focus on the spring line and it was coming quick!  As we were going through the different showrooms and meeting with all our sales reps, we kept the garden party in mind.  Always looking for items that would not just fit into the theme, but some really great stuff that would inspire you to decorate your outdoor spaces with the same passion you decorate a favorite room in your home.

(Side note) I usually can tell pretty quickly if something is going to make it or not and Bob can tell by looking at my face if it is going into the order or not.  It is almost comical to go into some of these showrooms and have the sales person going through their big sales pitch.  We had this one person trying to sell us these LCD candles that changed colors.  They went from pink to green to purple and so on.  The sales person was so excited over them and kept telling me how we needed to buy these, they are great sellers…… etc…… etc…..   All I could do was stand there with this look on my face that said   “Ya think so??”   Now I don’t like to hurt anyone’s feelings, so it is Bob’s job to give me an escape so I can graciously back out of there without ordering any of these florescent little gems!    I don’t know, maybe I am wrong, they may have been just the thing to put next to your lava lamp and it could give you a good reason to pull out that old black light from the 1970’s.  “Ya think so??”

Back to planning:  Catalogs get pulled out and we start pouring through them for more product ideas.  This can send you off in a totally different direction; sometimes this can be good and sometimes not so good. 

I will post more on this event as the weeks go on.  After all, it is Monday, my day off and I have to do some laundry, clean the house, run some errands…hmmm is that fresh coffee I smell brewing??