Can’t get any last minute than this!!
Two days ago I was invited to share a stand at the Sunday Market, TODAY, 6th June. http://www.sundaymarket.nl/
I’ll be outside the Hot Ice Gallery on the Polenceaukade (where my opening was). Come and say hello if you’re in the neighbourhood. My first market … wish me luck!
(I know, I know. I haven’t even written about the last Show. I’ve been really busy … filling orders! selling stuff! The show was a success!)
Okay, it’s time to push myself out there again. I’ve booked some gallery space and sent out the invitations. We’re gonna have a party!
Here is the invitation. It’s a bit hard to read here, so click on it to view a bigger version. You can also download the PDF version.
The invitation
This lovely necklace was made by Kate from CatsEye using my purple honeycomb lampwork beads. Great design, Kate! And thanks for the photo.
Kate's necklace
I always forget this, and I forget that it applies to routers too. I’ve been having some weird problems lately: I couldn’t connect to my bank’s website, my son couldn’t connect to the AppStore from his iPod, and I couldn’t view my favourite forum, Lampworketc.com (LE). Actually that’s not entirely true about LE, you could see the page partially loaded (all the ads) but then it just hung. But if I turned off the wireless connection, bam, all of a sudden the page would finish loading. Lots of subtle, weird problems. Anyway, after puzzling about this for a few days I finally thought about restarting the router, and my computer too, for good measure. Ha! Problem solved!
I’m only just getting around to reading it, but a couple of weeks ago there was an interesting Special Report (series of related articles) in the Economist about the deluge of data that is being produced and the neat things that can be done with that data.
There are about 10 articles in total. In particular check out the “Sources and acknowledgements” which has links to some pretty cool diagrams.
One of my lapel pins has been included in an Etsy Treasury! To answer your next question, a Treasury “is a member-curated gallery of short-lived lists of 12 handpicked items each.” A Treasury usually lasts for a couple of days, and then disappears. I have been included in other treasuries but hadn’t figured out how to blog about it, because the link would be broken in a short time. Last night I realised that if I took a screen shot then it would be available forever. So here we go, my lapel pin is in the middle of the top row:
Etsy treasury including my lapel pin
Oh, and this is handy too: the Craftopolis website where you can see if you’ve been featured in any Treasuries. Until now I’ve only know because the curator has told me.
Trying to psyche myself up for the next round of marketing/promotion/PR.
Ugh.
Okay. Don’t dwell on the ugh-ness of it. Just think about ways and means. Besides the newsletter that I still haven’t gotten around to writing, I’ve been looking into ESellerAds.
As far as I can figure out, ESellerAds is a way of offering my Etsy shop wherever I want to on the internet. Well, okay, that was the gist of their marketing story. It could even be true.
Let’s see: at the moment ESellerAds is free in exchange for my email address; it offers to show a rotating exhibition of my Etsy shop either two, three, or four items at a time. I’ve replaced the Etsy Mini, in the blog sidebar, with the three-at-a-time version of ESellerAds. It looks okay, but doesn’t always seem to revolve. Mmm, and it doesn’t seem to be showing any of the newer items that I’ve listed on Etsy since installing it. Which would be a bit useless… Oh, okay, I see. You also get your own ESellerAds web page where you have to tell it to update your ads by pressing the update button. As an added bonus you can check your Ad Performance stats from the same page.
I almost forgot the most useful aspect is that by clicking on an image you can read the Etsy listing, the price is shown and you can “Buy it!” and be taken directly to the Etsy shop. Another interesting feature is that there is a Share button under the ads, so that you (I mean You, dear reader) can share my ads in all the Hip places (y’know, Facebook, Twitter, etc, etc, etc). Isn’t that modern?
I have been making Smiley lapel pins and push pins today. I love the different personalities that emerge from two dots and a line.
Smiley push pins (top left) and lapel pins
I was getting a bit fed up with apologising for my website because it hadn’t been updated in eons. Part of the problem was that my photo organisation was out of control. So I finally sat down and did something about it.
I purchased Adobe Lightroom 2 a few months ago and have been figuring out how to use this rather powerful beast. It’s a neat program, I’m really impressed with it. I use it to catalogue, process and output my photos.
Lightroom is modular and it’s pretty easy to add in third-party engines. There are five modules: Library, Develop, Slide, Print and Web. If you have used Camera Raw and Adobe Bridge, then Lightroom will feel familiar.
I purchased the SlimBox “web engine” from The Turning Gate. After messing around for a while I managed to output different galleries and seamlessly integrate them into my website. So now I finally have galleries of my most recent work: lapel pins and stud earrings, and drawing pins (aka push pins).
I love Lightroom. I’m gonna be writing more about it…
Black and silver lampwork glass stud earrings
Actually although I make it sound like stud earrings are the next logical progression from the lapel pin, I have been working on these stud earrings for a much longer time. It has taken me a long while to come up with some good designs as these are so much smaller than a lapel pin.
In fact I have been reminded of the old saying, “Be careful what you wish for.” I am too impatient to make large beads as it takes longer to melt the glass. Well, these are much smaller quantities of glass, but the designs are also correspondingly smaller and more difficult—it’s a smaller canvas.
Each earring is small and light: about 10-12 mm in diameter and weighs about 2 grams. They are secured with clear rubber disk earring clutches (backs) which keep the earrings secure and flat on your ear lobes.
Here are some pretty cute ladybirds (ladybugs to our American friends).
Ladybirds lampwork glass stud earrings
