Bowl Goal: Other Milestone

Posted on January 19, 2009 by Elaine

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

Posted on January 16, 2009 by Elaine

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?

Posted on January 15, 2009 by Elaine

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

Posted on January 14, 2009 by Elaine

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

Posted on January 13, 2009 by Elaine

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.