My Work for Sale
Find Me On
Etsy
Motivate Me!
I’m just like a lot other people. Sometimes the motivation to reach big goals goes right out the window. Last year, as I was putting my online craft selling self together, I stumbled across Thing-A-Day. The premise is to make something every day for the month of February. I did it last year, more or less, and signed back up this year! You can see what I did in Feburary of 2008 by looking at my entries on TAD from then.
The picture has nothing to do with the post, really, except that it’s one of the things I made this week. A customer asked for a cane of her graphic which was a simple triskellian. I quite like it.
Anyways, if you need a kickstart to meet your productivity goals come join us on Thing-A-Day 2009! It’s a good way to start a new and positive habit.
Bowl Goal: Beads in the Morning
Back to the bead making the last week or so. There are actually several bowls this size in works but this was the only dry, baked, one at hand!
The window I do my photos by has a west exposure. I get good, clear sun at about 11 am in the winter but as you can see from the shadows, it’s very high contrast. Usually I shoot my photos in a light box but the bowls don’t fit! I may end up having to invest in a ‘real’ one soon.
Winter 2009 Giveaway
Bloggy Giveaways is doing it again – it’s regular, it’s quarterly, it’s fabulous – so I am too. Pretty much the same terms as last time, too! I’ll just format it better this time.
The Giveaway:
- $20 in any of my venues: my Etsy bead shop, my Etsy clay cane shop, my ArtFire shop or my web shop
- Free shipping of course! And that includes international. Everyone is welcome.
To Enter:
- Take a look at my shops: my Etsy bead shop, my Etsy clay cane shop, my ArtFire shop or my web shop
- Then come back here and leave me a piece of constructive advice (or even just a comment). Last time I got such good advice, it was incredibly helpful!
- Some ideas are: colour or subject suggestions for my beads or canes, finished jewelry ideas, photography hints, spelling errors, basically anything to let me know you had a look! If you have questions about my work feel free to email me, I am always happy to spread the polymer clay love.
- You do not need to leave your email in the comment. When you fill the form part in, your email is required but will remain private.
To Win:
- After 6pm my time on Friday (that’s 8pm EST) January 30, I’ll pick a random number. The person with the corresponding comment will get an email from me.
- If I don’t get a reply by Monday, I’ll redraw.
How to Have Even More Fun:
- Check out the insane amount of free, cool stuff being offered during the carnival by visiting the carnival often.
Good luck and thanks ahead of time for your help in making this work!
Boxes
I recently changed my web shop’s categories to allow shopping by colour which is pretty cool to me. I then had a small brain wave. Why not organize my pieces like that OFFLINE? I mean, they all lived in boxes before hand but it was somewhat haphazard and I waffled continually about what would go where.
Now, the boxes are arranged by my colour codes: top left is the yellow & orange and red & pink, below it are the blue & green and purple, to the right are the black & white and brown & neutral (plus cane components that usually live elsewhere).
The box with the bags in it is where my unlisted beads go and the bags are labeled the same as the canes: blue & green, purple, yellow & orange, pink & red, black & white and brown & neutral. So much simpler.
The Shop: Cane Edition
The week has been beautiful here. Warm weather, west winds and melty snow everywhere. We are due for the Return of Winter quick enough so maybe that’ll get me to buckle back down and make beads. This week is all about canes instead, with lots of bright springy colours:
The juicy fruit pieces make adorable slice beads and this is my last set of these for now. I’ll make more for the spring I’m sure, as they are some of my favourites.
Bowl Goal: Other Milestone
This week there were no new beads or canes. I spent the week slowly neatening up and inventorying because I knew the weekend was going to be crazy.
Why crazy? Well someone else hit her milestone birthday: Chloe turned 10 on Sunday. We had a few of her girlfriends over to eat, giggle and do little tween things.
Since sometimes even the 10 minutes to decorate a few cupcakes is too long to go without some cake drama we have:
It does mean that the whole apartment is clean and ready to get clay-filled again. And that is a super way to start the week off.
That’s a Lot of Canes
I sell a cane sampler of pieces on my various venues (here at Etsy or here at Artfire or here in my shop) and today I updated the photo for it because the canes in my collection have changed. My goal is to update the photo seasonally.
Wow, that’s quite the stack of canes! There are others in my boxes but these are the ones made and used for sale. Their friends (2-20 of each lol) are tucked in several multi sectioned plano tackle boxes.
How Are These Alike?
We have the pink candy like lentils, covered with little flowers and bugs:
The swirled pink hearts:
And the fabulously red swirled lentils:
Apart from all being polymer clay beads or all ‘Valentines’ interpretations they’ve also all gone out to Scotland!
And as an interesting side note: the reflection on the right side of the beads in the picture is my window and vertical blinds. I will need to watch that next time!
The Shop: ArtFire Edition
After all the chatting about ArtFire on the handmade crafty folk ‘net lately I decided to bite the bullet and give it a try. I bought the verified account – which is about the price of 35 Etsy listings, around my regular ‘listing’ budget for my Etsy shops in a month – which has no Final Value Fees. In other words… you get best value if you load it to the gills!
The goal is to stick 50 items in there. I’m almost there! Here’s a sampling:
Perhaps the best value of the ArtFire account is that it has in-house stats for paid accounts and access to Google Analytics stats as well.
Etsy has recently added Analytics for it’s account holders as well but it isn’t performing correctly yet, returning results that are not correct as well as hiding proper referring data. Here’s a hope they’ll step up to the plate and correct that.
Bowl Goals: Pink, Red and Heart Shaped
This half bowl full is mostly pink and red beads – hearts, swirls and lentils. My week was busily spent making up canes so the poor beads got short shrift on the assembly line. Next week we will have beads made with the canes though! And those’ll be cool.
The little chart even has a half filled bowl to keep me honest:
