Well, that’s everything! I had a lot of fun putting this series together. It happened quite by accident… after getting a candy vibe from the three bracelets and the Unicorn Sprinkle Palace also being pretty candy oriented, I just kept going with a few more.
Now that I feel like I’m on my way to establishing a routine with the beads, perhaps I might decide to make it a ritual to clean my house after my updates. I definitely don’t have time or energy to do that before, and it’s always such a weight off when I’ve gotten everything ready to debut on time, and I do like to keep a clean house. Cluttered, yes, but also clean. Finding time to clean is practically a guilty pleasure for me these days.
Thanks so much for coming and having a look at the goodies! If you need anything or have questions, give me a jangle.
There will be a Sweets themed shop update this Sunday! April 24th 3PM Central Time. It’s going to be extra fun and vibrant, come have a look! I will post here again when I load up my shop, and if you’re subscribed to this blog via email you will get a notification the minute it happens.
Dayglo Lolly bracelet series – we’ll be in the shop Sunday!
Thank you once again for another great sale weekend before last. I appreciate your continued support, I really do. I used to do this all so flawlessly, but I also had an established routine and zero social life. I don’t know how you guys feel about how I’ve been doing these sales, I do realize the times and days are kind of all over the place. So far that’s what my schedule has allowed, what with orders and personal responsibilities. Once upon a time I listed my ebay auctions to end on Sunday evening, and it was nice to be able to get things packed up and off to the post office first thing Monday. As far as time of day, since I’m smack in the middle (central time) I’ve been updating my shop in the mid afternoon to accommodate people on both coasts… 8pm Central time might be too late in the evening for those off to the east because it’s 10 there. So, I don’t know, if you have any input feel free to share. Meanwhile, I think Sundays are probably going to be shop update days, and it may vary between afternoons and evenings, depending on what I can manage. You can pretty much count on it never happening in the morning, because morning is for the birds and squirrels and stuff, not weirdos like me.
the Unicorn Sprinkles series – see us this Sunday!
Well, that’s everything… thanks for taking a gander. Give me a holler if you have any questions or need something special. Made to orders are always welcome, no order is too small!
In my shop, Sunday April 10th, 3PM Central Time, to be exact. I just like to do what I want when I want, especially after the sun has buggered off, and so many places either close early on Sunday or aren’t open at all. How dare anyone take a day off!? Harumph. Not me, says the workaholic. Honestly, as usual, Easter came ahead of schedule as it does for me every year, and since I have a theme going, I don’t want to be even a day late. I actually managed to make Easter eggs BEFORE Easter! In fact, it’s the first time ever for this to happen and I’m pretty excited about it because they’re so stinkin’ cute.
Here’s a little peek at what will be available – this isn’t everything:
BTW, WordPress reminded me yesterday that I’ve been quite the little Etsy activist once or twice in the past, which I had somehow forgotten about. I never felt the type of attachment to the site that would inspire such passionate diatribes. I guess I was never a strong believer in Etsy, but I am a strong believer in creativity. My creative work is probably the only thing keeping me sane. That time I took off was something I might have needed to avoid burnout, but it was also more detrimental to many aspects of my life because I didn’t have that productive outlet. So, my advice to anyone reading, if you don’t feel quite right, make something. Try something new… a new stitch, a new knot, a new color. It won’t solve all of your problems but it might help you feel better for a while.
new family member
In other (old) news… a longtime colleague/client I hadn’t heard from in quite some time emailed me last fall and inquired about my address, she wanted to send me a housewarming gift. I said sure, ok, expecting nothing in particular. Later she revealed it was glass related, and I thought, cool, probably a vase or some rare old stock or something interesting that might find its way into the fire at some point or another. So when it arrived, the box was surprisingly heavy in a shape I didn’t quite expect. I opened it and was completely, totally stunned to find a Bethlehem Piranha inside, and two pairs of bad-ass earrings. I actually cried a little, if we’re being honest, the sentiment was so touching in so many ways at just that moment. Oddly, a couple of weeks before, I was talking about Bethlehem torches with a different client, and even went so far as to see if any of them might be for sale anywhere. Not that I planned on buying one, but just out of curiosity. I didn’t find any, I think people hold onto these because they’re just so freaking cool looking, and they’re so functionally well designed.
I bought my beloved Bethlehem Alpha in 2013 towards the beginning of its release, I even called around to find one with a round metal base because it just looked cooler than that square thing they replaced it with. I had been using a Nortel Minor for about 10 years before that and the jets had burned out so badly that it needed repair, and that’s pretty much why I bought the Alpha so that I could send the Minor off to Canada for a fixer-upper. But I instantly fell in love with that Alpha, and in the immediate following months my life got so off track what with my dad getting sick, I never sent it off. I may still eventually. Anyway, I got hoses for it but haven’t had the opportunity or werewithal to hook it up yet – predictability is a precious commodity these days, isn’t it? – and want to take my time with the Piranha. It’s probably not much different than the Alpha, to be honest, but I kinda wonder if the flame chemistry might be more to my liking. I guess we will see. But I hope HM wouldn’t be too mad if I painted the metal base hot pink…
Anyway, enough blah-blah, I’m gonna go get those beads ready for their ball this Sunday! I’ll post here again when they’re in their proper places. Until then!
Yes, I do have opinions, about all sorts of things, but I tend to keep them to myself most of the time. Life is so heavy these days. I’ve been saying this for what feels like a decade. 10 years ago me didn’t know the half of it. So it isn’t that I don’t care about the current state of things, I guess I just want you to be able to visit my various spaces without feeling preached at.
That said. Artsy craftsy types need a nice place to sell their handmade things, and people interested in buying such things need to know how to look for them, and preferably, everyone can buy and sell in one place because it’s really so much easier that way. A marketplace, if you will. Etsy was once such a place, until those moustachioed sock monkeys grew fangs…which happened, some say, when Etsy “went public”. That’s generally when the bottom line begins to bite the hand that feeds it, and by most accounts, it has continued to gnaw it to a bloody stump. I left Etsy in 2017 and had been blissfully ignorant since, but there’s another dust-up in the crafty aisle so big that even I caught wind of it.
You guessed it. People are real mad at Etsy again. Please read the link below for the full list of grievances. It’s a petition and a call for action. Sign it or don’t, participate or don’t – but please read it. I bet some people are completely clueless about what it’s really like to sell on Etsy and this petition reveals quite a few things. These are legitimate complaints about how Etsy screws with the livelihoods of crafters because they’re greedy and because they CAN. Etsy takes advantage of the fact that they’re the most prominent online craft market. The fee increase is getting the most attention, and in my opinion, is the least offensive thing on that list, mainly because it’s the only thing they’ve actually been up-front about.
Etsy’s lack of transparency is the reason I abandoned my shop in 2017. The (then) new policies concerning how they were going to be handling my money (by wresting the control away from myself and Paypal, my preferred online payment handler) and maybe even arbitrarily holding onto some or all of it for indeterminate lengths of time, were purposefully vague. I also had a problem with being asked to submit sensitive information via email because they weren’t resourceful enough to gather such information securely and properly. To add further insult, customer support was (and apparently still is) very lacking, with people waiting weeks or months for a direct response to questions like “why did you close my shop” or “why have you been withholding my payment for 3 months”. No answers on the Etsy community board or other social media outlets, either. Dissenters had their posts deleted and their questions went unanswered. It started to feel less like a professionally run marketplace and more like a swap-meet on the bad side of town.
remember when bad crafts were the worst things about etsy?
Some sellers are “going on strike” (to say this is a boycott would be more appropriate) and are also asking buyers to stop buying from the Etsy site for an entire week starting April 11, 2022. It probably won’t make any difference unless literally everyone who sells on Etsy participates, and that’s not going to happen. While a lot can be said for temporarily sacrificing for the greater good, people are understandably too desperate and concerned about their own bottom line right now when they’re wondering how they’re going to feed themselves.
However. I do wonder if supporting Etsy sellers Offsite (haHA, how’s that for a turned table) so that sellers don’t have to pay fees or make sales on Etsy during that time might be a better idea. Some sellers don’t have their own website, but any seller who does and offers the same items on their website or takes custom work would likely appreciate it if you made an extra special effort to shop without the middleman during that time period… or, maybe indefinitely. I do this whenever I can anyway because I know how much those fees can add up for a seller. There is usually a way around things that will benefit the good guys while the bad guys are too busy being bad to notice. And yes, I believe this is truly bad, and that’s why I’m bringing this to your attention. Some of this stuff Etsy is pulling might be legal, technically, but I wouldn’t call it ethical by any stretch. I feel like the whole point of Etsy, especially at the moment, should be a way out from under the greedy corporate thumb, a means of making our own way by doing something we enjoy, and Etsy promotes itself as the crafter’s white knight while mugging them when nobody is looking. Standards ought to be put in place, and transparency required by law. I don’t see how they keep getting away with this crap.
wow, I have over 1000 followers on etsy? I had no idea
Things changed so much during my time away, and social media seems to have become the best way to promote yourself these days. But the truth is, I don’t enjoy social media. I loathe facebook, for purposes both professional and personal, and instagram is a lot more breezy, but also just plain annoying most of the time. I’m going to try and endure instagram, at least… but if I thought I could trust Etsy at all, I’d probably go back, for no other reason than the google search results and categorical listing. It’s great advertising as long as you know exactly what you’re getting, how much you’re paying, and have some say about how you’re being promoted. Hopefully Etsy can turn themselves around, but I’m not going to hold my breath. Then again, my favorite Chinese restaurant declared they were closing permanently a couple of months ago and it ruined my entire week… and then a couple of weeks ago they decided to reopen, and I was sure the clouds were about to part. So. You never know.
I don’t have the knowledge base or resources to create such a thing, but wouldn’t it be great if there was a crafters database of sorts… where crafters with their own independent web-based shops, like mine, were listed, categorically, so that a person with a need for a specific handmade item, like wooden furniture or baby bows or ugly toe rings could easily be found. Maybe for a low yearly due, if not free, if it can be managed. Something that can’t be bought off by a craft tycoon (side-eye @ artfire), something that only exists for the love of crafts and crafters’ natural inclinations to be independent, free to create, and save as much money as they possibly can. We will continue to eat out of date food because we’re artsy fartsy dingbbats to the core, but at least we will have a few extra bucks to buy that jar of preserves to begin with.
If you’ve gotten this far, thanks for reading. And yes, a sale is coming soon, within the next several days. You’ll be hearing from me again before then.
the z-beads blog 