Bloggy Giveaways Winner and the Next Giveaway Launch
And according to the wonderful number generator on Random.org the lucky winner for my Bloggy Giveaway is comment #128 which corresponded to Nikki!
While Nikki picks out something lovely from my collections of goodies, please consider my next giveaway which is part of the much larger (one item a day, for a month) giveaway at the Sweet Figments blog. You enter by creating a blog post about the shop of the day (though, feel free to enter a few times every day about a few different shops - just make sure to comment with a link to your post for each entry you want to make saying that you posted about the shop!)
Here’s what’s up for grabs:
Bloggy Giveaways
My very first blog giveaway! Since this is my first time with this, I think I will keep it simple and offer a $20 shopping spree at my Etsy shops (feel free to mix & match between the bead shop and the cane shop) or website shop. There’s all sorts of good stuff! And to make it even sweeter, free shipping, so the shipping is not counted against your spree.
To enter the giveaway, simple post a comment on this post. I’d love to hear any opinions about the blog re-design, any requests for colours, patterns or shapes for my future work or even clay how-to questions! It’s all good! You can even just say ‘Hi’! You do not need to be a blogger to enter, just need to make that post and use a valid email address in the form.
On Friday, after I’m back from taking my little goblin out trick-or-treating, I will close comments and pick a winner. This should be somewhere around 9pm mountain time. I will announce the winner on Saturday, after my show (wish me luck even!).
I’m happy to ship anywhere, so I welcome entrants from around the world. The more the merrier! And don’t forget shipping is free 
For a truly awesome list of other bloggy giveaways check out the Blog Carnival on Bloggy Giveaways. There’s an expected 1000 plus participants this time around! That’s an awful lot of free goodness! Bloggy Giveaways also does regular giveaways even outside of the Carnival and it’s always fun to watch.
* The very fine print: the $20 is face value - you’re welcome to buy from my web shop or my Etsy shop but in the interest of keeping it simple, I am going to consider the $$$ equal. So you could spend $10 on my Etsy and $10 here and that would be the gift certificate.
The Blog Giveaway Bandwagon
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I am jumping on the blog giveaway bandwagon next week. Some of the lovely women in the FAM Street Team on Etsy are going to be participating in a blog giveaway and I thought, why not join in! It’ll run next week - October 27-31 - and I will post all about it on Monday! Check back to see what I’m offering
Right after that is the 30 Days of Christmas promotion being organized by the very talented TheTinyFig. Every single day of November there will be a piece of handcrafted goodness available as a giveaway. The contest will be run on the sites and blogs of all the participants with TinyFig’s blog site as the hub. You can win more than once and entries are by making comments on participant’s blog sites. The black and white bangle is my giveaway for the contest! |
Site Updates
There will be some serious dustmaking the next day or two on here as I swap the theme (the look) of the site out, do version upgrades on the shop and generally make a big mess. The urls for pages in the blog or tutorial sections should not change. The shop will be updated to actually work correctly.
Cute as a Button
I recently got tapped to teach a basic polymer clay class to a local fiber arts guild. I’m excited about it and I suggested buttons as a beginner project (well, buttons, beads and all sorts of good stuff but for this exercise we’ll say buttons). I used to make buttons for sweaters my grandmother would knit so off I went searching for some of those. And I found none.
They’re probably here somewhere - and I always say how hard it is to lose things in a small apartment - but until they show up I made a few more.
These are all caned based ones - either cane slices, cut from cane sheets or cut from cane sheets and coordinating bases - except the two swirlies which would make great toggles for those felted handbags. I don’t suppose that shocks any of us. I have a few in a laundry bag to go through with the jeans to test them out but they were fun to make up!
I wonder if the fiber arts folks would teach me how to sew them on?
Patchwork Orange Logo
On a message board I watch someone asked for logo beads with their patchwork orange design. I volunteered. The design wasn’t far off my usual oranges - replace the segments with little bits of ‘patchwork’ design.
I was happy with how it turned out! The artist who’s logo it is has an Etsy shop in the works at - no surprise! - a Patchwork Orange.
Teaming Up
A big part of selling on Etsy is marketing and getting your name out there, in front of people. Etsy encourages it’s sellers to do advertising for each other, to support each others marketing efforts and generally work as teams to solve some of the common issues with sales.
To that end, Etsy has these groups called street teams which are associations of sellers grouped by region, medium or some other interest. Last week, I finally joined up with two more of these - I had belonged to the Polymer Clay Artists Guild of Etsy last year before I took a break: The Alberta Street Team and Fabulous Artistic Moms.
The first makes all sorts of common sense - I’m in Alberta. I do shows in Alberta, I buy supplies here and I meet a lot of crafters doing this. So, let’s bundle it together and get a bit more organized.
The second group is a team a friend of mine referred me to which is more of a supportive network. The common thread is that they are all moms (as well as all vendors). The Fabulous Artistic Moms are a more established group with many activities and a lot of members.
Street teams tend to have group activities like forum threads on Etsy, group ad buying, promotional posts about each other and things along those lines. It is one of those occasions where spreading the work around makes it a little easier.
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.
Claychicks & Tooaquarius Weekly
Wow, we did it. The Claychicks are back! And the Tooaquarius Shop on Etsy has launched! I reloaded the Claychicks Etsy shop with clay canes and added a few beadsets to the new Tooaquarius shop as well as the webstore.
Some features from the ‘chicks include:
and 
And in the Tooaquarius Shop and Tooaquarius Etsy I added quite a few sets of beads, all at $10, including:
and 
To get a good look at the Tooaquarius web shop’s collection, try here for sets in black & white, purple, blue or a warm tropical set.
The Tooaquarius Store
It’s taken some doing and some testing and a bit of hair pulling but here it is, The Tooaquarius Shop. To start, I’m offering polymer clay canes, available singly or in sets. The beads are being added each day.
All of my canes are made using a combination of the old Fimos, Premo, Kato and Sculpey 3. Regular canes are approximately 12mm or 1/2″ diameter by 50mm or 2″ long. This first batch that I’ve uploaded has some sweet florals, bright spring colours and a few accent or novelty canes like butterflies and dragonflies. There are more than 40 flower canes alone!
My beads are made from the same clays as my canes, properly cured, and with 1.5mm(1/16″) holes unless otherwise indicated. The cane covered beads are available in several colour-related themes and are sanded and buffed to a nice sheen. If a waterbased acrylic finish is used on them, this is noted in the item’s description. Prices vary by quantity and size but a single millefiori round will be $2 CDN with sets having discounts (ex: buy 5 get 1 free).
The slice beads are smaller beads, slices off my own - or fellow artists - canes and perfect for charms, accents, sewing, fringe or quick fun projects like these earrings or this daisy chain set or these wine charms. They are available 25-50 cents each, in groups of 12-20 for $4-5 or bagged groups of 50. Most of these are tiny, 1/2″(12mm) or smaller with 1.5mm(1/16″) holes.
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