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.
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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?
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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
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If you have been following this blog then you may have noticed that I have been obsessing about drawing pins for quite a while. In which case you may be pleased to know that I have been working on the follow-up to the glass drawing pin. Ta dah! Lampwork lapel pins.
Here is an example from the Line Art series, an opal yellow base with raised silver scroll work in Triton. Triton, made by Double Helix, is a very special glass, containing minute amounts of silver. By waving the bead/pin in a reduction flame (low oxygen) the silver particles are brought to the surface of the glass. Triton reduces easily and consistently (unlike a lot of silver glasses) and is so much fun to work with.
Opal yellow and silver lapel pin
The lapel pin measures about 15 mm (5/8 inch) in diameter. It comes with a military clutch so it can used as a lapel pin, or a scarf pin, or a hat pin, or a tie tack. You can pin it on a sweater, or a jumper, or even a shirt (but I would avoid fine wool or silk as the pin shaft is 1.1 mm thick).
I love making these lapel pins, as they are a neat cross between a bead and instant, multi-functional jewellery.
Here’s one from the Net Effect series:
Copper green and black lapel pin
I have several others listed in my Etsy shop and I’m pleased to say that I’ve already sold one on Etsy.
Note to self: The images were produced with the imagemagick montage command.
montage -background "#666666" -geometry "x400+1+1" yip*.jpg montage.jpg
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Here are some more drawing pin sets that will be going up on Etsy in the coming days.
I feel like I should point out that the pin heads are 100% glass. I’m often asked what material the decorations are made of. Which always puzzles me for a second. But the decorations (the symbols) are also made from glass. I use what is known as a “stringer”—a thin string of glass—to draw the pattern. It’s a fine juggle between getting the stringer warm enough to manipulate but not too hot so that it melts into an unmanageable mess.
I like to leave the stringers “raised” on a lot of pins. So, the next trick is to carefully melt the stringer enough so that it fuses to the glass pin base, but not too much so that it melts into the base. In this set of blue pins, for example, the spiral and dots have been fully melted in, the rest are raised.
As to the title of this post, I’ve been toying around with this as a push pin “slogan”.
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So I have finally got myself organised to list sets of drawing pins in my Etsy shop. Each set consists of 9 handmade glass drawing pins in a gift box. Here is a picture of some of the sets that I have listed—I rather like the Sudoku-ness of the 9 x 9 arrangement.
Nine sets of Designer Drawing Pins
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Yes, yes, I’ve been a bit quiet. I’ve been struggling with my photos again. Here are some beads that I recently listed on Etsy.
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Well, after much procrastination I have finally opened my Etsy shop, and thus now offer online sales. The shop’s still a bit empty (understatement), but I’m getting the hang of it, so I will be filling it up. A trifle late for the holiday season, but better late than…
So, what is Etsy? It typifies itself as “Your place to buy & sell all things handmade.” A sortof eBay for handmade goods, but then without the auctions (the seller determines the price). Purchases can be paid for by PayPal, or any other intermediary that the seller chooses. You do need to be a registered user of Etsy to purchase something, but registration is free, and as far as I can tell does not bring you bad karma (I don’t think I experienced any leap in junk mail for example).
Let’s see if this works. You should see a set of images, clicking on an image should take you to my Etsy shop.
If you have any questions about Etsy, PayPal or about buying my beads, please don’t hesitate to ask. (End of commercial :-)
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