David Condon Finds

LEGO collecting as an adult can get out of hand very quickly. What starts as one set for nostalgia, display, or a bit of quiet building time can slowly turn into helmets, UCS sets, retired models, display shelves, and a mental list of sets you still hope to buy one day. That is more or less how it happened for me. I didn’t start writing about LEGO because I planned to become a LEGO expert. I started because certain sets kept catching my attention. Some were sets I already owned. Some were sets I had built. Others were sets I kept looking at online and wondering whether they were worth the money, the space, and the time. This page brings together my LEGO posts in one place. Some of these posts are based on my own LEGO collection and building experience. Others are collector-style or affiliate posts where I look at LEGO sets that may appeal to adult collectors, Star Wars fans, film fans, and people who simply enjoy display-worthy models. If you are interested in LEGO Star Wars, UCS ...

Choosing satin ribbon for a wedding sounds simple until you actually have to do it. Then suddenly you are looking at different widths, different colours, different uses and wondering whether the ribbon that looks neat on a roll will actually work in real life. I had a customer ask me recently about cream satin ribbon for a wedding. They wanted something “not too wide”, possibly 3mm, to cordon off an area. It was a perfectly fair question, especially if you have never had to decorate a wedding car, venue space, invitation bundle or gift table before. But 3mm ribbon is much narrower than many people realise. It is the kind of ribbon I would use for hanging ornaments, tying small tags or adding a fine detail to a craft project. It is not the width I would choose for anything that needs to be seen properly at a wedding. So this post is a practical guide to choosing satin ribbon width for weddings, based on what you are actually using it for. I stock a range of satin ribbon in different wid...

Cheap imported goods have quietly changed how people see handmade products. Many shoppers today are used to mass-produced items that cost very little, and that can make the price of handmade craft seem shocking at first glance. I see this reaction regularly when I sell my woodturning at craft fairs. One moment people admire the piece in their hands, the next moment the price changes the conversation entirely. If you have ever stopped at a craft table, picked something up, admired it, and then quietly put it back when you heard the price, this post is partly about that moment. I don’t say that to criticise anyone. I understand why it happens. But I also think years of cheap imported goods have changed the way many of us judge handmade work. My woodturning table at a craft fair in Manor West, Tralee in 2018 with handmade bowls, pens and small turned gifts on display. A quick note: This post was originally published on my main website, David Condon Woodcraft, but I have moved it here bec...

I launched my first website David Condon Woodcraft back in 2017 . At the time I knew my craft fairly well, but I knew very little about websites, SEO, or how Google actually finds and ranks content. Like many small business owners, I jumped straight in and learned everything the hard way. Over the years I made plenty of mistakes. Some were small, others probably slowed the growth of my business by years. The good news is that a website doesn’t have to be perfect to work. Mine eventually started generating sales and enquiries, but looking back there are several things I would do differently if I had the chance to start again. Here are the biggest lessons. I Would Still Choose Wix The first thing worth saying is that I would still choose Wix . Before settling on it, I tried several different website builders in the very beginning and quickly realised that many of them were far more complicated than I wanted to deal with. Wix, by contrast, was simple drag-and-drop design. For som...