A friend emailed me recently, commenting that she enjoyed reading my post from August about the Procrastination Hack. I’ve just re-read the post and figure it must be time for an update.

Where am I?

Well, I’m a lot further along than I thought I could be. My stuff, er, I mean, my Artistic Output, can now be seen in four shops here in Amsterdam. I’m pleased to note that three of the shops actually bought my A.O. instead of taking it in on consignment. I earn a fraction less but it’s so much easier than consignment, where you haven’t actually sold it, but you also don’t have it as part of your inventory. You have to keep meticulous records. And, you also have to remember to go and check up on it periodically, which I’m really bad at.

Anyway, to continue. I have also sold several boxes of my Designer Drawing Pins. I’ve even had a couple of international sales with my drawing pins, which makes me very happy.

My Etsy shop is not so empty. There’s not a lot of variety yet—there’s a lot of drawing pins—but it’s a work-in-progress, so I’m not too worried.

Photos. Grr. Photos. I’m getting there, but …

I suppose the best part is that I’m happy. No, I’m better than happy, I feel content. Now when someone asks me, “How are you?”, I spontaneously reply, “Good!” There’s no longer a big internal discussion along the lines of, “Well, I feel okay, but, well, not really. Actually, I feel quite depressed. But do I really want to explain this, and, anyway, are you even remotely interested?”

Answering “Good!”, is so much simpler :-)

And maybe I’ve found a way of dealing with the oh-no-one-will-want-to-buy-my-stuff blues. I woke up last Friday feeling somewhat down. And instead of wallowing in it, as I would have done a few months ago, I decided that I would approach a couple more shops. Which I did. I didn’t sell anything, but I have the email addresses of a couple of purchasers. But, that’s not the point, I’m just so pleased that I did something active: feel depressed? then it must be time to go and find a new outlet.

And guess what? Later on that same day I sold a box of drawing pins to a friendly person in America who discovered my Etsy shop. Is that what they call Karma?

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Several weeks ago there was an article in The Economist about how falling fertility is going to affect the world, for the better. It was an interesting article and it had an especially interesting chart showing fertility versus GDP on a global scale. The chart came from gapminder.org which of course I looked up.

Gapminder has developed this really neat piece of software, called Trendalyzer, that can show statistics in a meaningful and interesting way. The data that they use comes from organisations such as the UN, the World Health Organization, and the World Bank. (In the meantime Trendalyzer has been bought by Google. Surprise, surprise.)

Go and check it out. Have a play with the Gapminder World software. I recommend watching the video tutorial as there are lots of buttons to play with. It’s also worth your while to go and watch some of the videos by Hans Rosling, the brain behind Gapminder, who is a very entertaining public speaker. He has just recently given a TED talk predicting when Asia will overtake America in terms of average income per person. Fascinating stuff.

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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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