Period Features

How To Age New Terracotta...

New terracotta flower pots or stone statues bought cheaply from your garden centre can be aged very quickly and easily by brushing a coat of natural yoghurt onto them (don't be tempted to use fruit yoghurt, just plain!). This will encourage the growth of moss and lichen to make the item look like it's been in your garden for years. Milk and buttermilk are supposed to work too, but I haven't tried them. If anyone has any other methods, please do tell us.

Old-Fashioned Recipes!

I came across a great site recently, www.history.uk.com, run by a fellow enthusiast for all things historical. It has many interesting features, like the Timeline which allows you to see what happened in a specific year. My house was built in 1876; now I know this was the same year that the Scottish-born inventor Alexander Graham Bell patented his communications device - the telephone. Who knows what you might find!

There are lots of articles on the site, but I liked the intriguing Old-Time Food For The Modern Kitchen section, which is dedicated to the art of preparing authentic-tasting historic food and drink. At the bottom of the page you will find further links to recipes for evocative dishes such as Frumenty, Pokerounce and Roman Honey Cakes. Every month, a new recipe is added, complete with tips and hints for historic cooks. The site also explains the best way to prepare the ingredients and gives you ideas on how to present the finished product to your guests - fascinating! Read more »

The 7 Deadly Sins Of Running A Small Business

This is the speech I gave at the Women In Rural Enterprise Conference a few days ago - I hope it's useful! It is pretty much writen as it was spoken... For those of you who don't know me, my name is Lucie Storrs, I'm 38. Five years ago I was working as a freelance translator, a job which I had grown to dislike and which made me ill as I developed repetitive strain injury. I was also three stone heavier than I am now! I was becoming increasingly unhappy, and decided to look for something else to do with my life. I had always liked Victorian houses, in fact I live in one myself, and could see a gap in the market in my home town, so I set up the shop and mail order company Period Features (www.periodfeatures.net). From a tiny little rented shop, and with no previous experience of retail whatsoever, I now own my own shop premises, employ five staff and have increased turnover dramatically. I was hopelessly naïve when I started, I made loads of mistakes along the way and I'm here to tell you some of the things I've learned, so you don't have to make the same mistakes. You'll probably make mistakes of your own, but that's another matter!

Enquire Within - Solve Your Restoration Problems

Here at Period Features, we're quite good at knowing where to get things - even if it's not something we sell ourselves. Each month in our newsletter Home Help! Tips & Inspirations For Your Period House, we cover a particular aspect of interest. So if you need to know how to repair, care for or maintain your period house, we can point you in the right direction. And we really like being helpful... so we'd love to hear from you, and maybe we can help solve your problems!

Renovation and repair of old locks
Mr Mitchell from Sandon asked where he could get an antique lock renovated, and in particular where he could get an appropriately old-looking key cut. I thought this was a great question which could well be helpful to many of you, as it's not widely known that you can get authentic keys cut for old rim locks &c. One good place to go is The Lock Restoration Company run by Michael Brown. We have used him in the past and been delighted with the results. Another company I found on the Internet (although we haven't used them yet) is The Old Lock & Key Company. Companies that do this kind of work operate on a mail order basis, so you can just take the lock off the door and post it to them.

Don't Eat Soap - It's Horrible!

At Period Features, March 2006 will forever be remembered as The Month When Lucie Ate The Soap... It came about at the Wire Conference (Women In Rural Enterprise), which I was speaking at. In the morning, I had a cup of tea, reached into my goody bag and fished out a rather appealingly-wrapped piece of fudge. Having a sweet tooth, I opened it and popped the whole thing in my mouth. Well, it quickly became apparent that I had made a terrible mistake. Foaming slightly at the mouth, and with a rising sense of panic, I fumbled for the wrapper only to have my worst fears confirmed: I was eating the soap sample instead of the identically wrapped fudge sample!

Giving An Old Bath A New Lease Of Life

An old enamel bathtub can be picked up quite cheaply but is often in need of a little TLC. I happily recommend Tubby Bath Resurfacing Kits; we used one about 5 years ago on the dingy bath we inherited in our Victorian house, and it still looks as good as new. A rubber plug is a good idea though - if you drop a metal one in the bath, it'll chip the surface! Kits cost around £52, which is far cheaper than any other method of having your bath resurfaced. We don't stock Tubby products, but you can find their site here: Tubby DIY

5 Top Tips For Running A Small Business

1. Don't waste money on advertising. I must have spent thousands of pounds over the years on adverts which NEVER paid for themselves. Don't make the same mistake! Instead, concentrate on getting editorial and having products featured on shopping pages of magazines and newspapers. This kind of publicity is seen as a form of recommendation and is far more effective than advertising. It's also cheaper and a lot more fun! Recommendation (or perceived recommendation) is what you need to make your business stand out from the crowd. After all, anyone can put together an advert - it doesn't mean that you are actually any good. I really recommend the PR advice of Paula Gardner at www.doyourownpr.com. These days, I never pay for advertising; I put all my efforts into PR and am having far more success as a result.

The Period Features Packaging Appeal!

We are so busy these days in the shop (Internet sales were up 130% last year) that the packaging coming IN with goods is no longer enough to package all the goods going OUT... This is a great problem to have, of course, so I'm not complaining. It's perfectly possible to buy in bubblewrap and polystyrene packing chips, but it occurred to me that this was silly when I know other companies are just throwing them away. So recently we asked the local paper to run a little feature asking for donations of used packaging. I didn't know what would come of it, but thought it was worth a try and we could wait and see...