Shop Update!
Since I was on such a caning spree the last week or so, I reduced, wrapped, photo’d and updated the little web shop. Next on the list is make sets to send on to the Claychicks!
Here’s what’s new or refilled in the shop:
All of these can be nabbed in the shop - in the last page of the flower canes, roses or bugs and critters category, respectively.
Year of Clay - Bugs?!
Most of the time I make rose and other flower canes. They’re pretty, they’re typically symmetrical and they’re fast to make up, once you have the know how. I could make flowers all day! Actually, some days I do.
Bug canes are the reverse. I am not a fan of bugs, even the pretty ones, in real life. Like flowers, they’re sort of grown on me since I’ve begun caning. To make insect canes is a lot more work than flowers - there are usually more than two sub canes - sometimes, five or six - and there are usually several steps of reduction and combining. All of those factors make for big canes that can result in a huge pile of waste clay (bug guts anyone?) if you botch steps. So I make a bug for about every fifty or sixty flower canes I do!
This weekend, I made two. And there are a few others in stages - it’s disturbing, I have little bug bodies and antennae and wings on my desk that I had better not swat! - of production. Hanging out with the bug in the picture is the dark toned ‘marigold’ I made this weekend. The light tone one is coming up!
Daytona Luxury Earrings
One of the best parts about selling your crafts is meeting nice and like-minded people. I love beads and I am always thrilled to what people do with beads. Particularly my beads!
Cindi of Daytona Luxury Earrings makes lovely earrings for her eBay store from a variety of quality materials. I was thrilled to see she has a whole section of earrings featuring polymer clay beads!
She bought a set of my face beads and then turned them into these lovelies which you can nab here. This is probably the best part of selling beads - other artists think up designs that I would never have thought of and yet work just right.
Year of Clay - Long Weekend Pansies
Here are some of the results of my Victoria Day weekend’s caning project:
There’s a little purple and white posie in there and an unphotographed black rose which went right to restocking my web store!
Craft Sales: How Much Do I Need?
A seller on Etsy posted that she was looking at doing craft fairs. Her product is unusual and attractive and she was wondering how many she’d need for a show. Other Etsians chimed in with their opinions and I snuck mine in as well. It’s a question I hear a LOT - and one I ask myself every show. One method to work it is this:
Use the 10x the booth fee rule of thumb. I use 10x the booth fee as my guideline for a good show. I usually aim for closer to 15x now but 10x is still ‘good’. So let’s assume this show will cost $40 for the table. That means, we’d like to make $400 from the show. Sounds great.
Make more than twice as much stock as the amount you hope to sell. I have never sold out at a show. I have sold out of specific items but never of everything I brought. At my most profitable shows I sell 20% of what I bring. So in this case, at least $800 (and really, probably closer to $1200) in stock, to make that $400 in sales.
Have your stock reflect a variety of price points. Yes $1000 in stock is easier to make up if you bring 20 $50 items. Most of the shows I do are small community ones. People shop for gifts. Most of my sales are in the $10-20 range. I just don’t sell that many items in the $40+ range. My stock reflects this - I have a lot of impulse items in the $1-$5 category. I have half or more of my stock in the $10-20 range. Then I have a few items in each price point after that - 20 to 30, 30 to 40 and 40+.
There are problems with this method. If you only plan to do one sale a year, you will be left with a lot of stock, even if your show does well. This method works best if you plan on doing sales regularly, for a while, because you can use it flexibly that way - as items sell, you can update your stock, move pieces into other venues and plan for larger shows or smaller ones.
For your purposes a ‘good show’ might only be 8x. Or it may have to be 20x. $40 a table is actually the higher end of the little community and school shows I do here but in some areas it may be the bare minimum. And while I’ve been told that the same 10x (or more) rule applies when your booth fees get into the 100’s or 1000’s of dollars my mind boggles at the amount of my stock that represents.
Year of Clay - Fruit Slices
I enjoy the nearly instant gratification of simple slice beads. The canes for these are simple to do and are either made small (10-15mm) or reduced to that size. The resulting beads are tiny little treasures.
As you can see, todays batch had fruit. There are more summer fruits ahead and a few (dozen) more flower types!
Anyone want to drill holes in a couple thousand tiny little beads for me?
Claychicks Weekly - Not so Weekly
I thought the Canadian postal system was enemy enough but working as half of the Claychicks, I’ve had to learn to deal with the US one as well! Part of my shipment to Carolyn arrived so I listed part of it being that slightly obsessive keener that I am… 3 of my favourites from this boxful include:
Caro is working on getting her stock sorted out and into the Claychicks shop too. She’s planning out little grab bags of canes - good segments by weight but not in any particular size as right now her wrists are on light duty only. Not that there is such a thing as light duty with infant twins!
Year of Clay - Infinite Ideas
One of the upsides of even the slowest of shows is you meet the very best people. Mid-April I had the luck of a show that got snowed out. Very few of the vendors appeared to set up and even fewer customers! So as happens at slow shows, the vendors sort of chatted and hung out. As I tend to do, I went and got the jewelrymakers to come take a peek at my beads.
One of those vendors was Nadine of Miyaw Designs. She was interested in some of the simple logo beads I had and asked if I’d be able to do something with a symbol they use (mother-daughter team) often in their work. So I agreed to give it a whirl, and here’s the prototype:
The infinity symbol is used as one of the symbols or logos of the Metis nation, most often on a background of navy or red. Armed with that I tried it in navy, making the rectangle first then making a segment of that into a round cane. Next, I’m working with some embellishment ideas to make more ‘interesting’ slice beads. Here’s one:
Happy Second Birthday!
April 2008 marked the second full year my blog-web site combo has run! The site averages just about 600 hits a day with 120 unique visits. There are more than 40 pages and 120 blog posts now. There have been nearly 200 comments on my posts and Akismet tells me that it has munched 8,890 spam items since I installed it.
The most common entry pages are my free tutorials. The web shop has more than 80 items (though some seem to regularly, gratifyingly go out of stock!) with a few being added each week.
The site got a redesign and new gadgets added this year. I streamlined some parts and added the widgets for the web shop and contact pages. There are a few new freebie tutorials in the works and I am slowly fleshing out my gallery section. I started using Flickr to keep a record of what is happening with my art over time, added my polymer clay blogroll to my sidebar on the blog front page.
Overall I’ve learned an awful lot just by the exercise of running this place - improving my photography, my technique, focusing on the core parts of a project, social networking and on and on. Here’s hoping that year #3 is just as gratifying as the first two.
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