Hello folks - been reading bits on the forum for a week or so now, and been buying silver from Cookson's for a couple of years or so now, and figured it time to introduce myself with a bit of background, so you know 'who' it is asking all the odd questions or giving strange answers

Will try to keep to the short version (not gonna happen I can feel it) but have a massive tendency towards 'ramble' - My name is Shaun, and after far too many years ill with panic/anxiety/depression and the like, I finally had a 'massive' mental breakdown some few years ago now - I couldn't sleep and was hallucinating, at the height of fear and anxiety 24/7 - a lot of these symptoms lasted 12 months, some I still have, but I digress! -

At the beginning this left me literally 'going mental' and I needed something to do to try and distract me, focus myself before I needed hospitalising - my wife asked me to make her some wooden buttons for some of her projects, and that's what I started to do.

Whilst making several piles of highly (obsessively) finished, totally handmade buttons from wood I found at my feet whilst out, I discovered 'spalted' wood and other highly figured or weathered woods and decided these things were gems in their own rights, and became determined to treat them as such.

I put all the energies of my breakdown into to 'hunting' local materials, research, trawling the web and studying + practising with stabilisation of porous materials and such, and started making wooden rings, which after a short while turned into mostly wood and silver rings, working with resins and making rings from cast pine cones and silver, making pendants, earrings and all sorts, and with having no money, I learned how to make/improvise a lot of my tools and such as well.

In the few years of this 'journey' of mine I've learned to do a lot of things, some of them fairly well, and decided to 'make' myself a job doing what I loved, since there was no way I was well enough mentally, emotionally or physically to 'get a proper job', and this is how FloWolFDesigns/EnchantedWoods was born.

I got myself a .co.uk domain and threw together a rough website (it's still rough!) then this April I registered self employed under 'permitted work', and few months later (well before my 12 months permitted work was up) I signed off sick benefits altogether.

So this is where I am now - doing some assembly work for my in-laws as bread-and-butter, and slowly trying to build a business, with no capital whatsoever, and all out of a tiny shed space (surrounded by piles and piles of wood), a corner on a table here and there and some very cramped space in the loft.

I just recently started renting a shipping container on a local farm - it has power and lighting and plenty of space for me to trawl through my masses of collected woods and dig out all the real gems, and generally work on larger/more involved projects - gotta start collecting more tools and machinery now, as I can find/barter/buy cheap along the way, so still some ways to go yet.

Anyway, that's me! Hope I haven't bored anyone to death yet - gives me some time! ',;~}~

Cheers, and be well folks.

Shaun/FloWolF