Swirl Your Lentil
As I’m doing shop updates I thought I’d make a note here, too. I plan to offer lentil shapes for all my colour themes but I also plan to offer them as swirl versions. It’s an added interest to a classy looking lentil.
The standard lentils are on the left and the swirl versions on the right. I will add the items as I make batches but feel free to request them if you are ordering lentil beads!
And the store will also offer categories based on colour ways. That way you can find canes, bead examples made with them and jewelry made with those type of beads to use as ideas all in the same section.
Bowl Goals: Getting Started on the Hearts
The bead making is rolling along nicely. This week (well, and last, too) I got started on some canes I needed for the beads I had in mind. So, progress for the week includes some canes in whites and beiges and a couple in light pink for upcoming Valentines and moms day designs.
In the bead bowl we have slice beads (which fell to the bottom), southwest coloured nastasha beads, some finished and polished pendants and the first of the heart beads. In black. I promise to have some cute pink ones too!
Making Bugs
Making bugs, as a post title, probably amuses me more than most people. Throughout college I had several friends working as assistants in fly labs so they literally *made bugs*. This is the closest I’ll get.
I got a bead order in that required some canes I was out of - so I got down to that today. One of those canes was another cream butterfly. This cane was not big as far as butterfly canes run - it was about 3″ across by 3″ long. The slice on the side of the picture is the first slice after the part that sucked in and I had very little loss or distortion, so I’m thrilled.
The first time I made a very complex cane - a face - I followed a tutorial. To this DAY I still have many, many feet of that cane left and while it was alright, it wasn’t great. After that, I did a little planning before doing complex canes.
One thing I learned was that you need tiny amounts of clay to make the individual parts of most of the fancy canes. In this butterfly, for example, the entire body of the butterfly is 1/16th of a package of black clay. All of the wings and brown detailing in them is another 3 oz of clay *in total*. The rest is translucent and there is about 5oz of that.
Where do YOUR Earrings Live?
I used to keep my earrings on their racks between shows, then tape a bag over the rack. Earrings would fall off the racks, get caught in each other and generally make a mess.
This year I bought packages of perforated business cards at the dollar store, drilled holes in them, punched them out and folded them. Then I hung one pair to each card and put the carded earrings, 20 pairs to a baggie. Voila! Less wear and tear on everything.
It makes setting up the rack and clearing it a little more time consuming but not as bad as you’d think. And when a pair sells, they go onto a card and into a little poly bag. Next year I’ll use branded earring cards for this.
Visual Goals
I don’t know about you but I do better when I can see things. I’m a smart gal but concepts are so much easier once I have a picture. The same with goals. That’s probably why they tell you to take ‘fat’ pictures of you for diet motivation.
I have an ambitious goal for the end of May. And I got a bit of an early start this week. This bowl of beads has 161 beads in it. Yes, I counted.
Now, for the purposes of my visual goal setting here, I made me a chart which I’ll update on a, hopefully, weekly basis.
25 bowls of about the same amount of beads should get me close to what I’m aiming for. I’m not too worried about hitting the figure exactly. ‘Close’ is good enough in this case!
The Last Show of the Season
Yesterday, I finished my last craft fair of the season! After a very mild fall we got slammed with the expected winter weather - temperatures of around -40°C with the windchill and new snow made the show a tough one to get to! We persevered and setup for the Highwood Community Show in the nick of time. This was one of my best shows last year and I was looking forward to it!
This is my booth on a 6ft table - a little more compact than the regular 8ft ones but it still works fine! I display with less ‘white space’ for these shows (or should that be black spaces, given my drapery choices?). I forgot most of my booth signage as well but at these small shows that doesn’t seem to matter much. In the New Year, I’m going to see if I can’t talk a screen printing cousin into letting me whip up a few booth banners!
By this point, my daughter is an old hand at these shows. And we have an arsenal of things for her to do to keep her occupied because I have to admit the kids that run around at shows drive me crazy. One of those things is building a fort under the booth table since my stuff packs up quite compactly(and I store boxes under the table).
Some of her other preferred activities include minutely rearranging items on the table, making faces at herself in my booth’s hand mirrors and carefully picking out what she gets to spend her show money on. I long ago learned that my ‘no spending’ at the show policy was a bother so now we set aside an allowance to spend at the show- treats for us, sales for our fellow vendors, general goodness all ’round. She bought finger puppets for a cousin’s gift (and a few for herself).
Despite the weather - this is a piece of the parking lot - we did get brave souls come by the show! My first two customers, in fact, were repeats from the show last year who came looking for me. Talk about flattered!
This is Joyce’s table - her website is not up yet - and she sells lovely Christmas picks and baking! I’ve seen her at quite a few shows the last two years and I think I’ve bought at least a few things each time. Her amazing shortbread cookies were my breakfast this past week! This time, we got oatmeal and raisin cookies for my long-suffering kidlet.
My sales were way down this show from last year but that was sort of expected with the weather. I had the same fun talking to vendors there, gathering cards and networking. Lois the organizer was VERY organized as usual which makes it an easy show to do.
Now, I have to take a look at all my figures for the season and decide how the next year is going to go! I’ll post a recap of the season once my brain is unfrozen.
A Little Customer Service
I love the Internet. It’s given me the chance to do amazing things. One of those has been the chance to sell my art and craftwork through various venues including Ebay and Etsy.
Ebay is huge and can be very complex, expensive and downright confusing but I have to say the two times I had minor technical issues I was able to get live help and email help within 20 minutes and 1 day respectively. On both occasions the help was correct and pleasant.
About two years ago, I created my first Etsy account after having watched the site for about 18 months. In the first 6 months we operated the Claychicks shop I had to ask for admin help twice, both as a result of site generated bugs. Both emails were directed to their general support email as there is no live help and the forums, even at the time, were a coin toss. One email went unanswered. I figured out the solution on my own in two days or so as I’m fairly technical.
The second email, a simple bug related to my outdated software setup, received an incorrect reply (this is my industry, hello, I was not merely guessing when I mentioned what my issues were). Worse, the reply was dismissive and rude. While I’m aware that written communications don’t pass tone of voice on well… this was dismissive. Our shop went on hiatus for most of a year.
When we came back to the shop, I answered a call in the forums for help with bug fixes. Support had asked for users with a specific issue to send them info either via the thread or email. So I did this - it’s my industry and I appreciate any customer who takes the time to let me know something is wrong instead of just walking away.
That email also received a reply. It was - in addition to being poorly written - rude. There was no ‘Thanks for your feedback’. There was a snippy remark (I kid you not) about how I had provided more complex info than requested and it was not helpful.
No other communication I have had with Etsy ever produced a result - no item or shop I flagged was ever removed or changed when I looked back.
Have I sold well on Etsy? Yes. The price is right and there are some amazing artisans there. But the service is very poor.
This week, in an effort to look into other venues (I’ve looked into many - like Etsy, once upon a time), I joined Artfire. The site is in Beta and it’s a bit of a mess right now. That’s fine - I’m pretty tech savvy.
I had a minor issue with the form controls not working correctly during my signup process. I was able to complete my signup despite that. But I did take the time to write a bug report.
I received a sort of form email from the CS quickly - it explained they were swamped but would look into my issue ASAP. This morning (half a day after I signed up), I received a personal reply from CS saying they had corrected my issue (and they had, I checked) and that they had passed on my bug to Engineering. It was concise, polite and it was honest.
What a nice change.
Refining What Works
Simple pendants on a black cord are easily my best seller at shows. I usually make these as heart shaped swirlies, a fun technique that uses up my scraps and pieces. This season I’ve been refining the shapes of these to make them more contemporary and incorporate other shapes. One was a bevel edged square shape that resembles fused glass ’tiles’ I’ve picked up over the years.
The hearts themselves are a little thinner and quirkier instead of my puffy, round ones. I think I’ve just been in a quirkier mood heading out of 2008.
Bright Spots
This is the view outside of my balcony door at the moment:
Of course, in the wonderfully quirky world we live in this is what my violet is doing this week:
The violet picks the oddest moments to decide it’ll bloom like mad but I’m sort of happy it’s doing it this grey, snowy week.
Completely Unrelated Items
The other day when I was posting about how to plan for events that require large amounts of inventory, I mentioned Lori’s article on this. And in the article is a bit about making groupings of items. And I do this, honestly. I’ll make a dozen pairs of earrings at once or string 20 pendants. Groupings of like items make a very impressive statement in your booth!
That said, both of these items were in my booth on the weekend they are about as different as they get. Luck of the draw - the bowl is the remaining one that came home with me and the earrings are duplicates of ones that sold, in my Christmas season beads:
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