Exciting!

I'm still sick, but I got a few things done that I wanted to - not that I needed to. I mentioned to someone earlier that I am SO undisciplined - I am really bad with time management. There was silent agreement to that statement. :)

I made my first ankle bracelets today, I'm excited about that. I know this post says Sunday - but to me it's still Saturday night. Anyway, I made a few of them, as well as a necklace and a couple bracelets. I have an idea for a necklace in my head but no explanation as to why I didn't do that!

Anyway, wanted to post a couple pictures and I will be done for the day. For Saturday. I did finish getting all my earrings on cards and into baggies today, took pictures of earrings on Roberta that I needed to and updated listings with the new pictures. So I got some stuff done today, just not the stuff I was planning on, and not the stuff that needs doing around here.

Hopefully I will feel better tomorrow.

Work must be done!

I absolutely MUST get some things done today. Somehow I manage to sit at this computer for hours and hours and while I am learning a lot about selling and beading and wire working, I still need to actually DO that stuff. I also need to clean my house.

Today I was checking out blogs - looking at blogs I normally do - and clicking on blogs they like - and I ran across a blog called ND Homekeeper. It is written by a lady whose family is homesteading in North Dakota, her husband, 4 boys, and herself. I was facinated! And also somewhat embarrassed that I cannot seem to get normal every day stuff done when people like that are doing almost everything the hard way. I need a better work ethic.

I don't feel very good - have a splitting headache, feel nauseated and shaky. I'm hoping a little food will settle me down.

I finally found my weapon of choice to put holes in my earring cards - the pointy end of a seam ripper! After posting a question in Etsy forums asking what other people use - (thanks everyone!!) and finding out most do not use hole punches - I went on a search of the house to find my best tool. I am pretty sure I will find something better but in the meantime - the seam ripper wins!

Started poking holes and putting earrings on cards, putting the rubber stoppers on the backs, and putting them in baggies last night. I have plenty more to do - but I want to at least get one picture of each on Roberta before I get them packaged up. So - I have a lot to do today, most of it not jewelry or Etsy related. Need to start with food.

Okay, I give. Pouting.

I have to admit that I have been getting carried away with my bells and whistles. I LOVE slide shows - before I found beaded jewelry I was obsessed with creating slide shows to use as screen savers. So when I found all the options on the Internet to create moving colorful displays of pretty stuff - I couldn't resist! But.

I realize it was getting a bit extreme. Too bad - I found another slide show thing today. So - I actually still have the pics but I moved them down to the bottom so you actually have to look for them, as opposed to them assaulting you while you are trying to read. See me pouting still.

I also removed a pic from yesterday's post and made the others smaller. I'm trying. Really. I just like bright and pretty things - and if they move - so much the better! But like Ysabel at work says - those kinds of things make some people's eyes go all twirly. Oh well. I don't think I'll stop messing with pictures, I will just try to keep the amount to a minimum and instead of adding more - I can just swap out the ones I have. Big sigh-h-h though. Wonder if there is a 12 step program ... ?

Still gonna close with a nice picture though. Don't want to stop that. Can't make me. (can you sense the pouting?)

Don't know where this is, but in looking back at the other landscape pictures I've posted, I really like blue. Really really like it.

A couple things

Another late night for BetteJo. I am just proving that I'm not very bright, aren't I? Hmm. But I had fun tonight, messing around on the Internet on a site I found called Freeweb - or is it Freewebs? Anyway, has anyone heard of it?

I am too tired to remember how I even found it tonight but I DO know that I found it and said to myself - ooooh - another place to put pictures and get my name out there! And I started to play with it. Didn't research it - have no idea what kind or how large a community it has - I just created a site.

VERY much in it's infancy, hell - I'm not even sure I'll keep it. I might trash it and start all over. But I'm curious if anyone else has seen it - used it - any word about it at all? Here is the link to my baby-site - http://www.freewebs.com/bettejosbeads/ . Please let me know if I am last to the party on this one or not. :)

The OTHER thing. Driving home from work tonight I had a random thought - for some reason I cannot explain I was thinking about shopping on ebay - and that I hardly do it anymore - I shop way more on Etsy now of course. But for some reason I remembered something I saw on ebay that if nothing else made me laugh and that you will never see on Etsy! One reason it made me laugh was because I WANTED IT!!!!!!

Someone listed a huge Ziploc bag full of Lucky Charms - charms! They had pics of themselves - about 3 guys and 1 gal I think - probably college age - all sitting around a table with rubber gloves on and bowls in front of them for sorting the charms out from the cereal. Now I have a sweet tooth unlike anyone else I know - so that really appealed to me! Forget the fact that I would experience severe gastrointestinal problems for DAYS after eating even an 8th of the amount pictured - it still looked like a whole bunch of marshmallow goodness to me!!

Of course I didn't buy it, the idea that a bunch of college students were sifting through cereal (even though pictured using the correct universal precautions) gave me a case of the heebie jeebies. I imagined them drinking beer and taking off the gloves when the camera was put away, probably randomly petting a pet sitting in their lap. Gack!!

Still ... Lucky Cha-a-r-r-r-m-m-m-s-s-s ... with NO cereal!! I can only dream about it because I don't trust college students to get me an unadulterated sampling. Just sounds SO good.

Now if someone were to ask me - what is your blog about - what could I tell them? There is no good answer. :) That's okay, I like it.

..and .........they know me here. :)

Wonderful new toy!

I found a wonderful new place to create slideshows, I am afraid I like them just a bit too much! It's really really really late and I need to get to bed. Still I am going to bed happy with my new picture book of jewelry right here on top - and a slide show of my babies at the bottom of this page. Babies! Ha! They haven't been babies for a very long time, it just goes by so incredibly fast. Always be MY babies though. :)
Nite!

Sorry

A nice gal who has offered me encouragement and advice is going through a hard time right now. Boy if I could even begin to explain some of my emotional ups and downs, relationships on and relationship off, well, it would take a long time to even start. Suffice it to say - I've had my share of heart aches - and caused some too. You don't get to this point in your life without experiencing or causing any pain. But whatever has happened - I've learned from it and moved on and in a lot of ways I am stronger now than at any other time of my life. This gal is younger than me and most likely has a lot more to go through before she gets here - but she will. She'll learn from every good emotion as well as bad - and she will keep moving - getting better and stronger with each step. I wish her well ...

On another note entirely - I just visited the Etsy forums and I must admit I am astonished. People are so nice and so helpful - but God help the newbie who asks a question out of a lack of knowledge about how things work - and they can be beaten to a pulp. Sadly tonight a brand new seller set up her shop yesterday, listed her items today, then had the audacity to ask in a forum thread if it was possible to have a heart removed from her shop. She was jumped on - poor lady. Not everyone was mean, but there were quite a few people who were unmerciful and it was really disgraceful. Someone posted and said that some of their artist friends laugh at them for having a shop on Etsy because of the "middle school" atmosphere. That atmosphere turned into a stench tonight.

Turns out the poor lady mistook someone's avatar as spam - thought it was someone playing a joke - didn't know what calling out was - much less that she was doing it. At about PAGE 20 of the thread giving her a pounding and poking all kinds of fun at her expense - she emptied her shop, posted one more time with an explanation of why she had asked the question - and took her toys and went home.

Is this what we want Etsy to be? I am SO new compared to a lot of people but I recognize certain people already who are all too willing to jump on top of the pile if there is someone being crushed at the bottom. I won't buy from those people. They can say - well they don't need people who can't take a joke etc. Well - that's their choice. But I don't want to push people away (especially customers) and I certainly don't want to hurt anybody's feelings. It is really naive to think that people WON'T judge your shop by the personality they see exhibited in the forums.

Amazing. Amazing and sad. We don't know what that seller could have brought to Etsy. Could have brought some established customers of her own who might have looked around and become all around Etsy customers. Could have brought some good ideas, a fresh outlook - could have been someone who would have featured people on her blog all the time- or been great at promoting Etsy as a whole.

And she just might have been a really nice person besides. But now we'll never know. Sad.

How do they do it?

I need to ask - how do people do it? I see shops on Etsy where people are listing things every day, with beautiful detail and variety, gorgeous photos and great descriptions.

I just spent a good 2 - 3 hours - just working on pictures for 9 items I will be listing soon. First there is the picture taking - some on the piece of ceramic tile, some hanging on that cup - some on the other cup - oh - that vase would work good - and maybe a few on a book, let me find one. Tonight I used 2 books, a pottery mug, a carnival glass mug, a piece of ceramic tile, a blue luster vase, a large fairy figurine, a rice bowl, I hung some earrings from ribbon on the front of an antique chest and I took pictures of Roberta (our mannequin gal) modeling earrings and necklaces. And don't doubt I may have left something out because I am sure I have.

After taking the pictures there is the deciding which pictures to use, resizing and cropping them, etc. Thank GOD for digital cameras! I pop out the little memory card and pop it IN to my computer, moving all the new pics into a folder. I go through all the pictures, narrowing them down to 5 photos per piece. Mind you - tonight that means a total of 45 pictures. I crop them, re size them, cut out any stupid things I didn't see like the stray cat hair - (which makes me crazy because I am SO careful about that) - and them review them all again. Inevitably there are a few I decide I don't like, I delete them, go get the camera off it's little charging dock - and shoot a few more pictures. Then comes the transfer, the cropping, resizing, etc.

Now, for 45 pictures being the end result - I spent 2 to 3 hours - and that was constant. A potty break here and there but that's about it. Actually - it was probably longer than 3 hours - I totally lose track of time when I am doing this stuff.

Of course the whole thing starts with making the jewelry. That involves the design aspect which a lot of the time takes more time than the physical act of putting the piece together, but the assembling and crafting of the jewelry takes a good amount of time too.

So, after making the jewelry there is the photographing. After the process I went through tonight, there is the listing. Listing alone takes a while, one problem for me is remembering what all the stones are that I have used, and remembering to measure things BEFORE I list it. Pricing everything. Going through the step by step process of listing items - describing them, making sure all the details are there, making up tags, uploading pictures. There are those pictures again! Deciding which one is going to be the first picture is important because it is the one that goes to the front page and a lot of time determines whether or not someone comes to the shop to see the other 4 pictures of that item.

I am not complaining about the process at all, just explaining it. And wondering aloud how other people do it - AND keep their houses clean, do their laundry, I'm sure a lot of them cook, work full time jobs, and have a bit of a life with their families and friends besides. Something has to suffer! I know there are several artists who are able to support themselves with selling what they create - so that eliminates the full time job part. But I tell you what - even if I did not have the full time job - I'm not sure I would be disciplined enough to keep everything going at the pace it needs to - in order to keep things competitive and fresh with new listings at least 5 days a week.

I have spent a lot of time lately working on promotion, designing postcards and business cards and ahem - blogging - how DO people do it??? I am sitting here right now enjoying an infomercial for Time/Life's soft music collection. Wow - taking me back with every single song - ' oh-h- Daniel my brother - he was - older than me ..' 'baby I'ma want you - baby I'ma need you .. ' . But I digress. :) The point is - it's Saturday night and I'm up late enough to have hit the infomercial hour!! Tired.

I will keep on keeping on - making my jewelry, promoting, doing what I need to do. I know that jewelry sellers make up the biggest group of sellers on Etsy so there is a ton of competition. I just have to work harder. I believe in myself - probably more now than at any other time in my life - but that story is one for another day. :) Haven't sold anything for a while - but that will change. I'm learning and getting better every day. Yay me! Okay I'm a dork. A tired dork.

'Saturday - in the park - I think it musta been the 4th of July ..'
I believe this is Oregon - a wild and rocky coastline. Nite!