The shop is moving along quickly now. The interior paint is done and the floor will be laid over the next couple days.These are the sketches the sign painter is working from.

We're expecting the painter to start on the front any day, too, but the most exciting thing is that a local glass artist, Frank Zika , has offered to lend us one of his doors!Frank makes a duplicate for every commission, so he has a stock of extra doors he likes to install in public places. Tomorrow he'll bring us the wooden frame that the contractors will need to finish, and some samples of glass inserts for us to choose.I can't wait to see possibilities for the door!

Tom and I packed our chocolate in our old station wagon and drove up to Berkeley this weekend to be vendors, along with Malena and Clive of The Xocolate Bar (such wonderful chocolate art!!), the folks from Divine Chocolate, and Ethan Ash of The Tea Room, at the North Berkeley Chocolate and Chalk Festival. There were apparently some exciting chocolate events going on somewhere, and, I imagine, lots of chocolate in chalk, but we missed almost all that because we were so busy at our booth. The chalk art I posted here was the best of the handful of pieces between our booth and Peet's Coffee, my sole destination beyond the vending area all day.Such a lot of smiling and repeating the same story! Exhausting, but so worth it.

This is a picture of Karin Sander's "Siegfried" from the German book, Kunst in Scholade (Chocolate Art). Today's mail brought a fine new copy for the store in addition to a few more treasures:

The hot chocolate cup is my favorite. It's Austrian, made by Higgins and Seiter, translucent china with delicate roses and gold trim, and a wonderfully eccentric spiraling handle.I also like the rabbit mold very much, even though it's only half there. He has a rather dignified look and stands on his own.The other books all come from paperbackswap.com, where I've been using all my credits on chocolate books for the library. The shop will have a good library as well as chocolate books, new and used, for sale.I thought I might sell the switch plate, too, but now that I see it, I know exactly which switch to use it on in the shop. Maybe I can find some more to sell...

Here's the shop as it looks today. Its last incarnation was as part of a furniture store that took up much of the block. I've done drawings for what the front will look like - a new glass door and a radically different paint job - but it won't be done for another few weeks.

To get our plans okayed by the health department we're adding an ADA-compliant bathroom, a three bay sink and a mop sink, replacing the old carpet with linoleum (the expensive kind, too - they wouldn't accept our lower cost choice), putting in new wiring and a new ceiling, air conditioning and more.

This will be the retail area. It's small, just 20 x 30, I think. Behind the interior window there's larger area where we'll be doing packaging, shipping and storing the chocolate.

Look - yesterday's haul led me here!

The day the health department showed up at our little chocolate factory to ask if it was really true that we were storing chocolate off-site was right in the middle of the period our employees were making each other cry.For the last four years, Sweet Earth Organic Chocolates has been situated on the second floor of my sister-in-law Joanne Currie's bustling restaurant and bakery, Splash Cafe , in San Luis Obispo, CA. We have a pretty display case downstairs and a successful online business selling organic, fair trade chocolate in as many forms as we can invent.My husband Tom is a truly great chocolatier, Joanne is a brilliant manager, and we have a crew of dedicated and creative employees. The reviews are great. We even won the SF Chronicle's Battle of the Bittersweets . So the orders keep coming: more big bags of bulk chocolate made to Tom's specifications, more co-packing contracts, more holiday business, more new items all the time.All of which equals less space.When the third employee came to Joanne's office in tears (there just wasn't enough room for that many people to do their work well) the moment she got off the phone with the health department, Joanne knew it was time to look for more space. Luckily for us, there was an empty storefront just down the street at 1445 Monterey. The economic downturn worked in our favor. We discovered we could rent a retail space for what we would have paid for warehouse space a couple years ago.So the shop is a bonus, and I am having the best time outfitting it. This blog will mostly be about that. I'm collecting chocolate books for a library (any suggestions?) and buying old chocolate molds, pots, cups and tins to sell, designing the windows and even painting the furniture, while Tom and his crew invent new delicacies for the cases.We're planning to be open in early July. I can't wait!