Lampworking Tutorials (playlist)

Adventures in Woodburning

I got a woodburning tool last Tuesday! It was 39.99 at Micheals but it was on sale for 19.99 (bam)
I'm not looking to become a pyrographer or anything I just want to make some decorative bits and bobs for an upcoming project that I will be blogging about in the next few weeks.... anyways, here's my crack at it:

So I've done this henna-esque picture frame, a little heart plaque with mine and Mr.Spook's initials, a bat plaque with heat transfer text, and this little button. I don't have a picture of the first thing I made, which was just a little kitchen clothespin. I'm also working on a birdhouse right now, pics to come when I'm finished.

My Favorite Etsy Tips

A few of my 'real life' friends have joined Etsy in the last few months, and one asked me for promotion tips. I shared with her the following:


Encircle and Etsy Love
-Use the ever-loving hell out of your 'circles'. The more circles you're in, the more your name and shop and product are on the 'activity' page. Same goes for just general 'etsy lovin' - hearting items and faving shops.

Know your roots
-Search Etsy for local items and spread the love so that they (the local sellers) know you exist. Give specials to local customers and offer local pick up instead of shipping for those who are close enough.
-Attend craft fairs and farmers markets.
-Promote at the mall with free samples, and give everyone a business card.  (This was specific for my friend, who sells cookies, but would work for people with similar goods)

More items means more sales
- You probably hate hearing it as much as I do. Yeah, it's really time-consuming to make, photograph, list and promote everything by yourself, but the more you have the more 'serious' you look. I am not a good example of this.

Drown yourself in social networking
Use twitter and FB, share the love there like you would on Etsy.

Geeky Computer Nonsense
-Tagging and SEO are really important. If you think you've got your tags right, try searching for your own items with keywords that pertain to your shop. If you're on the first page, you did it right. If you're not , google some tips on Etsy tagging and SEO for Etsy to improve your ranking in Etsy search and other search engines.
-use Adwords, Analytics and Craftopolis.
-'crawl' your page on all the search engines you can- this makes it more visible in search engines. Yahoo is the only search engine that charges to add your site to it's directory.
-Blog.

I know you asked specifically for promotional tips, but I shared with you everything I do/know/ or think I should do/know.


Here's my most important nugget of advice, and I can feel your eyes rolling all the way from here but really hear me out:
Don't feel like you have to be perfect and don't obsess over not making sales fast enough. You have to really nurture an Etsy shop to get it off the ground, and sometimes even with countless hours of self-motivated hard work (the hardest kind of hard work, you know) you may have virtually nothing to show for it at the end of the day. There is no failing here, there is only learning.

Cheers,
Kacie. 

Etsy Tips from around the web:

 How arists and crafters can make more money

Running Your Etsy Business  

Getting Traffic to Your Etsy Shop: Seasonal Color Merchandising

8 Tips For Getting LOADS of Etsy Sales | Handmadeology

Etsy Shop SEO Tip of The Week – Week 2 {Etsy SEO Basics – Free PDF Download from Etsy}

 

  Etsy SEO Guide - Tips from Sellers | Handmade Marketing

The Daily Etsian: The Etsy SEO Problem

20 Ways How to Drive Traffic to your Etsy Sho

 

The Technium: 1,000 True Fans

 

Pikaland’s 9 Tips to be More Creative | The Etsy Blog

 

Seller How-To: Tag-o-rama With Descriptive Keywords | The Etsy Blog

 

Sellers Assisting Sellers

 

The Etsy Blog | Discover How-To's, Interviews With Makers, and Curated Shops
 

Using Twitter to Promote your Handmade Products

  » Etsy :: SEO optimization really pays off!! » Untangling The Web

 

Preparing an Effective Etsy Listing

Etsy Sellers: What is your favorite way to promote your shop?

Tools For Etsy - Buyers, Sellers, and Developers. Hearts, Views, Front Page Treasury Lists

The Etsy Seller Handbook: All Our How-To’s About Selling | The Etsy Blog

 » Etsy :: SEO optimization really pays off!! » Untangling The Web

Oh,Home - 7 craft tutorials of cozy,home-y goodness

In a little less than 8 months the Spook family will be moving into our very own first house! I need FURNITURE! I need like.... shit to put on my walls, and shit to sit on...and spice racks and shit!   


I've made colour palletes via colourlovers.com to help me plan for the big move! 
This first palette is the basic color scheme for my house, with the exclusion of the last wine-red color, which is just a kitchen thing:
 
Color by COLOURlovers
Color by COLOURlovers

These 2 are the extras,to make the rooms "pop"
 
Color by COLOURlovers

Color by COLOURlovers




Use your imagination with me, and lets see how The House of Spook is gonna look c:


1.Chair Makeover from Domestic for Dummies

For The House of Spook: Cream+Dark wine upholstery

2.Fabric Tapestry by CraftCuban on Craftster

For The House of Spook: Keep the super sweet Indian/middle eastern imagery but in neutral creams, whites and yellows

3.Chevron Pattern Fan Blades on DesignSponge


For The House of Spook: Spray the whole fan creamy-white and stencil yellow floral swirls

4.DIY Dessert Tray by Ladypie on Craftster

For The House of Spook:  just change the color to a blackish-brownish-red

5.Pompourri Rug on Cut out + Keep

For The House of Spook: Peaches+Cream colored!

6.Checkered Floor Tutorial from Craftzine

For The House of Spook: Dark Wine + Cream

7.Paint-Dipped Cutlery by Oh!Crafts

For The House of Spook: All my chosen colors, plus maybe a few teal ones....

Random Craft Tutorials

From Random-tutorial.com, a database of craft tutorials with a search engine that will randomly pick one- it's like craft roulette!

On the house: Free graphics for personal and commercial use!

So I made some fun little handmade badges tonight, now available under my new "On the House" page, wich will feature the graphics that I have made, 100% free for commercial and personal use.

        

Have fun,y'all!

Reaching International Customers

Second to the U.S., the most hits I get from my etsy shop are from France. Parisians like bug jewelry, who knew? I have other hits from places like Latvia and Romania, which I could honestly not pinpoint on a map for you. (No child left behind in geography class!)  All my shitty cartography skills aside, there is a real thrill in knowing that other people in the world are viewing your products. It's so cool to know people who speak a different language and are from a completely different cultural background are interested in your hand-made American goods.

So, how do you get more international views and thus international customers?
Fish where those exotic little fishies are. 
I think my biggest draw for international views is DeviantArt. There are many excellent professional and aspiring artists on this site, ready to be supportive of you and your awesomeness! It's not hard to get people to pay attention to you on DevArt, while great artists share a bit of their portfolios, there are *many* heart-wrenchingly awful MSPAINT files uploaded to this site and called art.


How else can you connect with people overseas?

Rape and pillage your analytics. Find where your international customers are and learn more about their locale. It can't hurt.

Online art/craft communities such as Crafster, Cut out + Keep, DeviantArt, ect.

Social networks like Twitter (best bet), Facebook and Myspace (I include myspace because I hear people still use it)  - Follow/friend some people from around the world- blogger is also a great place to meet new people from different places.


SEO for overseas- try tagging your items with alternate spellings- jewelry is jewellery in the U.K.

Show some good-old-fashioned Etsy Love to 'foreign' sellers  Poland makes pretty much the best goth/metalhead clothing in the world. 

 Like what they like, make what they're making.- Decoden is JUST NOW getting some kind of popularity here in the states, and even the people wearing it have never heard the term before. Scope out trends in other countries (my favorite is Japan) to see what will be popular in a few years!

 
Good luck, y'all!

Sell-able Graphics Ideas

Know photoshop? Maybe you can create these customizable products and sell the files to online customers:

Logos
Business Cards
Banners & Icons for online stores such as the ones on Etsy, Artfire, and Zazzle.
Clip Art
Scrapbook Printables and Paper Sets
Printable Toys and Paper Models
Patterns, like sewing or crochet
Stencil Sets
Recipe cards or Cookbooks

What I've been doing (that's not blogging)

Keeping it real with my Etsy: 









 Creating designs for my Zazzle store, Simon Spook:







Being ill. Don't have pictures.

Bug Process

I'll give you a not-so-enlightening glimpse at my bug jewelry process today!
These are the bugs I caught last Saturday:

From left: Grasshopper and (dead) Damselfly, crane fly, Damselfly, cuckoo wasp

The Damselflies still in molds. I decided to pose the one on the right to look more alive than scientific.

The cuckoo wasp and crane-fly, unmolded. Crane fly has now background yet, and I used a marble effect for the background of the cuckoo wasp.

Here are the finished products!  Click the image to see the listing at my Etsy store.

Damselfly Necklace

No-kill Damselfly Necklace

The glue on the crane fly isn't dry yet, so I'll post it when it's listed

Foodie Friday: I missed national Taco Day!!

As you may or may not know, Nation Taco Day was on Tuesday. (Oct. 4th)  There was not a taco in sight at my house, shame on me! To make up for it I'm making Taco Soup tonight, it's super super easy and super super wonderful. This recipe is very versatile, you can put pretty much anything in it and I cook mine in a crock pot.

Daddy's Taco Soup

Not winning any beauty contests but it's damn delicious!

Ingredients:

1lb ground turkey or beef -or whatever you like

2 cans of diced tomatoes - you can use 3 if you like tomatoes.

2 cans of beans, don't drain -  I use pinto beans and black beans but my MIL uses kidney and navy beans. It's totally up to you and your tastes. 

1 can of corn or hominy, drained

1 onion, chopped

1 can of green chilies - or a few hatch peppers or some jalepenos this depends on how spicy your tastes are.

1 cup of beef broth 

1 packet of Taco seasoning 

1 packet of Ranch Dressing mix

Salt and Pepper to taste 

On high heat, cook onions and meat. While that's cooking, add all the other ingredients EXCEPT the taco and ranch seasoning packets to your pot or crockpot and set on HIGH. Right before your meat/onions are done, add in the Taco and Ranch packets and mix well. Spoon meat/onion mixture into your crockpot/pot and stir. Cook for at least an hour, on High in a crockpot or Medium over the stove.  You may serve your soup with lime, shredded cheese, and tortillas like I do. I <3 this stuff, after I make it I'll even eat it for breakfast!

The KillJar Influence

These are all the places my customers are from.

It was like pullin' eye-teeth to find a decent "pin"able map online, so if anyone needs one I encourage you to use Zeemaps. 

Shop Makeover!

I drew my logo in illustrator to re-do my banner and icon. I also used my new vector logo in the corner of my pictures and added a rounded edged two-color border. Good,yeh?

Before

After

 

Close-up of banner with the fancy new logo:

Foodie Friday: I do not like them, Sam I am.

Ever eaten pickled eggs? You probably have a strong opinion about them either way. I'm not really an "egg" person, I'll have scrambled eggs a few times a year and I think omelets are foul, but I happen to think hard-boiled, pickled eggs are damned delicious. Here's how I make mine:

Pickled Green Eggs

You will need:

Eggs

Vinegar of your choosing - My favorite vinegar is apple cider vinegar and I always prefer it, but white vinegar works fine too. 

Salt and other seasonings as you see fit.- I like mine spicy so I use about 2 tablespoons of salt, about 3 tablespoons of mustard, onion (powdered or little slices) and a few drops of Louisiana hot sauce.

Green food coloring - or whatever color your want them, if you're cool and want to eat fun-colored eggs. If you're boring, food coloring is optional.

Veggies - also optional if you're boring. I <3 pickled carrots, cauliflower and celery but I don't always have them on hand.

Boil eggs for 7 min. , only using enough water to barely cover the tops of the eggs. Pour eggs into a bowl of cold water that has been placed in the sink- let cold water run over to cool them down. While the water still running, use the pot you cooked the eggs in to bring your vinegar, spices and food coloring to a boil- I never measure my vinegar, you need about as much as the water you used to boil the eggs. Peel the eggs and add them to the boiling vinegar mixture. Turn down heat, still keeping it hot but not letting it boil. Add veggies. Cook until eggs become a brilliant green (or whatever color you used. If you just use my salt/mustard combo,they will turn freakish yellow). Cool in a plastic container, cover tightly with a lid. Let cure for at least 24 hours. BAM! Home-made pickled eggs!