My Work for Sale
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Etsy
Featuring ASecondTime
In my wanderings on Etsy I’ve lucked out in meeting up with some really neat people. Joan, of ASecondTime, is another member of the Alberta Etsy Team. She’s based in Calgary, so I’ve even had the good fortune to meet her in person!
Her work has a lot of elements of steampunk style – a mix of intricate Victorian detailing and industrial components such as gears and watch movements – mixed and matched with beautiful glass, stone and, yes, even a few of my own beads.
Here’s one of her recent pieces with one of my own sea garden lentils. Joan also has a variety of other, more contemporary, pieces in sterling. She also has a sweet sculpture in her Treasure section:
Great Big Mushy Thanks
The Alberta Street Team is a pretty awesome street team and one of the very awesome things it does, week in, week out, is to do a thorough critique of member shops. Yesterday was my turn. Most of the critiques are of newer members but we managed to find a nice little stack of polishing tasks for my bead shop on Etsy.
So my great big mushy thanks of the week has to go out to Joan of ASecondTime who is the host and ringmaster of the weekly circus.
What sort of items did I get suggested? Add a little bit of personality to my shop announcement, a bit about my years of experience to my profile, more navigation links in my descriptions and to include additional photos, perhaps using completed pieces to show scale and examples. We discussed advertising, promotions and how to market better. It really is easier with a little help from your friends.
Come Meet Some Friends
I’m pretty lucky – I’ve had some success selling my beads and canes online. And even more awesome people like them enough to include them in items they choose to sell themselves. In an effort to be a bit more sociable I’m going to start featuring others and I figured where better to start?
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ThePoshPalace makes impressive jewelry and has a few pieces with my beads. The earrings to match this bracelet are here.
Check out this lanyard that had custom green rose beads as well. |
| Curlynetto picked up a set of my crimson roses beads and made this lanyard.
It would be the perfect seasonal lanyard, too, with tones of red and green and plenty of sparkle. |
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Patricia of theColorofDreams makes beautifully finished beads with, among others, my canes. My lavender dahlia and purple rose work beautifully on this pretty set.
I see some of my canes on other beads in her shop. All top notch work which makes my inner perfectionist happy. |
Festival Fun
May 31 I had a booth at the Lilac Festival in Calgary. It’s a very, very big street fair and when the weather is nice it often has in excess of 100,000 people. The weather was amazing and there were an astonishing amount of people.
The show is the biggest one I’ve done yet and I’m very pleased with how it went. The money was good, the traffic was unbelievable and best of all the things that need fixing – more stock, better displays, better table layout – are things I can actually do.
I did learn a few things about doing this show, in comparison to the smaller (not all of them were much less expensive mind you – just smaller) shows:
- Canopy, tent or umbrella is necessary. The booth across from us, with jewelry as well, had some very very sunburned vendors by the end of the day
- People to help you or a smaller setup. Not both. I could not have run this by myself. I would have had to have a much smaller setup to be able to answer questions, help customers and still keep an eye on things.
- Enough stock in a variety of price points but avoid anything fussy (in terms of change or items – I damaged one expensive piece.). Accept credit cards. Decide what your policy is about bill size (I won’t accept $100s at shows for example). Decide what to do about hagglers.
- Put your literature at several spots. At times we were too busy for people to get across the booth to find my pamphlets or other business cards or freebies. So I put bowls with these at each end.
- Bring a first aid kit, office supplies, a toolkit and water. Make sure you know where they are. I usually also bring tools and items to fix or trade out small components but in this show, there was literally no time for that.
- A good banner is fabulous. Good signage is also fabulous. I was lucky and my cousin made me a banner with my logo and I have the software to do relatively good signage. It was complimented frequently.
- Smile, be positive, helpful, cheerful, give your neighbours a hand, try to work with the organizers, volunteers and staff as much as you can.
There are a few more pictures of the parade, friends who dropped by on my Flickr. I’m already looking forward to next year!
Swaps for Everyone
When I was new to the online polymer clay community, I joined a lot of swaps. I had been claying on and off for years by that point but hadn’t had much exposure to more refined projects yet. I joined quite a few swaps those first couple years!
My goal was to see what others were doing, how they put pieces together, how it worked. There were whole ranges of people in each swap, too – published experts and first month newbies.
This year I joined two I had done before. Connie’s Bug Swap (which you can see a post about on her blog) and Sarajane Helm’s ambitious mask swap. Below are my entries – the masks are a spoiler so don’t keep going if you’d rather be surprised when that swap closes.
And the masks, which share my fascination with the little clay faces in the flower patches you see a lot of in my other work:
Happy Earth Day!
What strikes me as the best part is just how many different people I’ve seen talking about Earth Day and being ‘green’ lately. While I’m perforce talking about the online community it’s still an increase in consciousness about how necessary each step is.
For example, I read a variety of productivity and personal finance blogs, craft and community blogs as well as surf several art and craft related forums. The conversation is carried from one to the next. And some of the ideas are idealistic or unrealistic but many are normal people’s real life solutions. Take a look:
- SherryTruit, a well known Etsy seller, started a useful thread on the Etsy forums
- J.D. Roth of Get Rich Slowly has a post for today about how frugal and environmentally conscious go hand in hand
- Julie has several posts on Polymer @ CraftGossip to do with clay
- Katie Hacker has bead people ideas
- Artfire has a little article on setting up an office from a greener perspective
- My previous Earth day posts for clayers and for general craft and small biz types
Kids Help Phone
I donate to charities or help friends fundraise when I can. I’ve made items for breast cancer fundraisers and cystic fibrosis ones. The groups that are near and dear to my heart, though, are community ones (both local and world community). The food bank. The local shelter network. The urban projects society. The Night to Fight fundraiser show I did recently.
May 3rd marks the 3rd year that Chloe and I will walk for the Kid’s Help Phone. She goes with me because it’s a short walk and they spoil their walkers – there’s treats for the kids, music and games and it’s a family speed walk. I go because growing up I had friends who needed it. It seems ironic to do a fundraiser with the devout hope that YOUR child will never need to access the resources you raise funds for. And so we walk.
On the left hand side, right up at the top is a button to Chloe’s pledge page (I’m a little late setting up the electronic version, her paper one is doing fine). If you can sponsor her, it’s greatly appreciated and I promise that it goes towards a cause that does help troubled children. Drop her a note on the ‘message wall’ there even if you can’t chip in this time.
Easter Egg Hunt
Before I forget! The Trans Canada Etsy Team is hosting an Easter egg hunt on Etsy. A whole bunch of us have hidden eggs in our shops and the person who finds the whole basketful gets entered in a gift certificate draw.
For the easy click version of the contest check out the team’s Etsy shop here: TransCanadaTeam.etsy.com
These are what you want to keep your eyes peeled for:
Combining Interests
In the fuzzy and distant world outside of my clay and bead obsession I am a freelance web developer and computer geek. By the time I was in middle school I was doing not bad in school and had that decidedly geeky bent. While math was never my best subject it was still an interest.
I do love clay for the fact that I can mix and match my interests. Today is ‘Pi Day’ – March 14 – and the little pi cane was the proper celebration. Fellow clayer and inverterate geek, Julie, of Polymer Clay @ Craftgossip has a couple items devoted to the day as well!
Clay Bugs
I joined Connie’s bug swap again this year – I did it in 2005 or 6 as well – and while I won’t post what I made just yet I will show what I made from the scraps of one group and what inspired the other!
One of my bugs for the swap is a butterfly. The remains from making those made a regular butterfly cane. The other bug I made was inspired by these, very bright little Costa Rican shield bug young. Mine are a little bigger than the 1/4″ things in the picture.
A really awesome feature of the online polymer clay community is the sheer number of swaps on every topic happen. It’s a wonderful way to see what techniques others are doing and to contribute in your own way. My next swap is Sarajane Helm’s Mini Mask Swap! A quick spot to get started finding clay swaps is right here.
