First Impressions

Yesterday I was flattered to find my items included in these two stunning treasury selections on Etsy's front page ...
(Double click on each image if you want to see it larger).

I've read a lot of divided opinion about the Etsy front page and the items chosen for it, but it's rare that I see a front page I don't find interesting and well put-together and super selections like these make for a fantastic first impression that has much more impact (I think) than the more random selections on other crafty sales sites.

DaWanda has recently changed its front page set-up and it's much improved, and though I think it's a bit busy and still lacks that POW that Etsy's often has the navigation guides are much clearer. Similarly, the navigation bits on the Folksy front page are fab, lovely and simple tabbed sections and a nice big clear search bar... but that wow factor is currently still lacking. It will be interesting to see what changes are made as the site develops!

Front Page Goodness

I got a lovely message on Etsy this morning from PamGlew letting me know that one of my poppy hairbands had made it onto the Etsy front page - she even took a screenshot for me:
Thanks Pam! I did actually manage to catch that one in all its autumnal glory, but normally I miss my front page moments so it's always nice when people take the time to give me a heads up. Luckily these days there's always the excellent Etsy Front Pagers flickr pool to check if your views go up unexpectedly.

The Front Pagers group is the brainchild of an anonymous Etsy member who uploads dozens of front page screenshots a day to make a unique archive. It's great to check if you miss your own item on the front page but it's also a fantastic resource for seeing the variety of items that show up on the Etsy front page and the sorts of themes and colours that make a successful treasury (if you fancy trying your hand at making one yourself). For example, at the moment autumnal themes, Halloween, leaves and orangey tones are making a strong showing along with lots of selections in soft and muted tones. Additionally it's a great at a glance guide to the quality of photography & types of images that are most popular - great inspiration if you're working on improving your images, which we all need to do from time to time!

UPDATE: My poppy design is now available as a sewing pattern! Visit my shop to see all my printable PDF patterns

Recharging My Batteries

Boy am I tired. I've been crashed out on my folks' sofa all day, even out-snoozing the cat!

I definitely needed these few days a way to catch up on some sleep & generally get a bit of rest & relaxation.

It's also (already) nice to be thinking about my crafting without being able to get on and do it, if that makes sense. I can make plans, but there's no pressure to get started on any of it cos all my supplies are elsewhere and I can't access my files or my photos or my accounts or anything like that. It's just me, and my head, and thinking about things. Which is rather nice.

Two things have come up already:
1) how much time supplies selling has taken up over the past couple of months (and how much space it takes up in my spare room!)
2) how many designs I have sketched and scribbled on scraps of paper awaiting sewing

These two do seem to be vaguely related. The supplies thing was a bit of an experiment and I definitely want to make being creative my priority, devoting as much time in my week as possible to actually making stuff.... so I think I'm going to cut back on the felt squares available in my shop sometime soon. I'm definitely going to carry on selling my 60 mini squares packs for the time being because I love them, but the 9 inch squares will probably disappear once my current stock runs down (I'll put a proper announcement about it in my shop & my felt listings soon). I love sending out little bundles of colour to crafty people, but I have to be selfish and make my own crafting a priority.

Crafting-wise, I have been sewing together a bundle of bird ornaments that have been in my wip box for at least a year I think. Three of them won't be coming home with me as my mother has already nabbed them for her tree (an early Christmas present!). I've also started turning lots of those roughly scribbled designs into pattern-ready drawings to work from when I get back home.

Oh, and one of my brooches was on the Etsy front page last night (or was it early this morning? while I was asleep at any rate). Thanks so much to lazygiraffe for including me in her sunset-inspired selection and to fivedot for letting me know & for the screenshot!
(oh, and belated thankyous to Munieca and Bombus for sending me screenshots of previous front pagers - lovely Etsy people one and all!)

Sewing and Selling (C365/274)

Yesterday I crashed out in the heat (gorgeous weather here at the moment) and appliqued some pincushion tops:
When they're finished, the pincushions will look like these ones. They were born out of my growing mountain of felt scraps - the small scraps are used to decorate them, and the tiny scraps used to stuff them. Felt as a stuffing material makes for a lovely firm and chunky pincushion, great for sinking lots of pins into.

I also had a small overnight flurry of sales in my Etsy shop. The UK-US time difference can be a nuisance sometimes but it is so delicious waking up and finding you've sold stuff while you were sleeping!

I sold a couple of medium poppies, no doubt because of the exposure they got from their week rotating atop the front page. In about a week I think they got around 1000 views (I don't know for sure because once they've sold the view count goes down to an unhelpful 1) and my shop seems to have been a bit busier than usual in terms of views, people marking it as a favourite, etc. I definitely see now why some sellers make all their listings white knockouts: the free exposure is pretty darn awesome.

Ooh, maybe I was wrong about that: turns out another of my red poppies (my poppy hairband) was on the front page last night in this lovely treasury, so maybe that was it? Mysterious mysteries...

UPDATE: My poppy design is now available as a sewing pattern! Visit my shop to see all my printable PDF patterns

Eeeee!

I've not been too well today, and was expecting to skip yet another day of blogging and opt instead for curling up with a nice cup of comforting tea and some trash telly on youtube... when I logged out of Etsy after adding a new listing and saw this:
My medium poppy got picked up by the robot that looks for "knockout" listings to rotate at the top of the Etsy homepage! Eeeeeeeeee! So exciting, and so unexpected as I didn't think any of my images really counted as proper "knockout" white backgrounds. That one was just an accident of a very sunny day!

I am going to do a small happy dance now. And then go watch me some youtube...

UPDATE: My poppy design is now available as a sewing pattern! Visit my shop to see all my printable PDF patterns

The best laid plans... (365 days 229 - 233)

Sometimes things just don't work out how you plan them. I did a little too much last week, and rather knackered myself out... so I have had to abandon my "design a day" project (temporarily) until I am awake enough to actually, you know, design stuff!

One of the most wonderful things about this crafting lark is that I can carry on "getting stuff done" even when I am totally exhausted and crashed out on the sofa gazing into space a little gormlessly. I suffer from M.E. (most annoying) so this does happen more often than I would like, and it's always great to be able to make stuff even when I'm otherwise "useless" - not awake enough to write emails, do the washing up, etc etc.

So, thanks to my crafting 365 project instead of just watching lots of videos over the past few days I watched lots of videos and also...

... cut up a couple of vintage books (bought cheap in charity shops) to make thankyou cards for my orders. A book of birds (I love birds so much) and the most darling kids book from 1955 - check out the end paper with all the animals reading their bedtime stories. The owl is particularly awesome:
... appliqued a big batch of poppy shapes to their black backgrounds ready for making poppy brooches:... dug out some yummy vintage snap fasteners from my stash ready for a new (currently top secret) design:
... and then yesterday, after the courier showed up with my delivery of felt (all 60 colours back in stock! hurrah!), I started to make up lots of bundles of mini squares, cutting them out and wrapping them in tissue paper so they can be stored neatly until posting time:
Every time I make up a big batch of those I worry that no-one will buy them and I'll be stuck with all these parcels of felt, but I rather like felt so I wouldn't really be that upset... and it's such fantastic colour therapy making all those little rainbows.

In other news: thanks to lovely Curiosity, my pink poppy pin made an appearance on the Etsy front page at the weekend, amongst lots of UK Etsy lovelies. It snowed that weekend, but spring had sprung on Etsy at least!

UPDATE: My poppy design is now available as a sewing pattern! Visit my shop to see all my printable PDF patterns

365 / 225 - Pinkness and a Nice Start to April

Last night's craftiness: a pink version of my little poppy pin...
... my very favourite shade of pink! Medium and large pink poppies to follow. I wear a lot of pink and purple so I think these will become staples of my wardrobe before long.

Today is the first day of my "Design a day" challenge - thanks for all your great suggestions (no more, please!) - so hopefully there'll be lots of fun new things to show off to you all everyday this month. April has certainly started off well, with my rainbow circles artwork turning up on the Etsy front page today and getting about 1200 views in the process! Just staggering. Thanks so much to SarahLousieDesigns for the screenshot.

UPDATE: My poppy design is now available as a sewing pattern! Visit my shop to see all my printable PDF patterns

The Power of the Etsy Front Page

It was a glorious day today, the first proper day of spring, sunny and mild and generally rather cheering. I took full advantage of the weather and spent the day tinkering with plants, having a bit of a spring clean and flinging all the windows open so I could do some pungent DIY: mucking about with primer and varnish and making a terrible mess in the process :)

I did however neglect to take my 365 photo, so it shall have to wait for tomorrow. In the meantime, here's a screenshot from yesterday of one of my moustache disguises on the Etsy front page...
... for anyone who has ever wondered about the "front page effect": they were viewed about 600 times while they were up there! The exposure also led to 19 people marking them a favourite (and 34 marking my shop as a favourite) and caused a flurry of convos and a couple of sales. Many thanks are due to missbeahaven for curating such a stylish treasury and for being kind enough to add my item, and to gemmafactrix for being such a great model!

365 / 212 - 320 Pieces of Felt

As I was feeling a bit under the weather last night (better now, hurrah), I decided to sit and watch some Poirot dvds and cut out some felt for new projects...
... rather a lot of felt, in fact! 160 pieces for one mobile, another 160 for another mobile, and a few more pieces ready for other projects. Every single piece was cut out freehand, no patterns and no fancy cutting machines, just me and my eyes and a pair of scissors. I had meant to only cut out 96 pieces for the second mobile (making it one-sided only) but I was rather half-asleep and kept accidentally cutting out two of all the pieces so I just went with it :)

Some fun and happy news:
I hit my 700th item sold over on Etsy last night - such a huge number. I keep thinking about it and grinning... and then thinking about the amount of hours I must have spent in the post office over the past year, and grinning slightly less! My little poppy was apparently on the Etsy front page yesterday morning - thanks so much to Saysie for letting me know, and also for this sweet mention of my Felt Fancy pincushions. My bluetit is proving popular over on the French version of Dawanda, even showing up on their little front page widget for most popular items...
... and a couple of my flower brooches were picked for Dawanda's (English) spring accessories feature. I was also dead chuffed this morning to see that my ribbon brooch get a mention over on the Craft blog. A few other sweet people have mentioned my work recently, but I have temporarily misplaced the list I wrote! It's probably buried under pile of felt. Oh well, I'm sure it'll turn up. All these nice features and it's sunny today. Wonderful stuff.

365 / 206 - Ribbons and Rollercoasters

Yesterday I started picking ribbons for a new series of one of a kind designs...
It is still miserable weather here, too dark for taking mobile photos (so annoying!). I have been slightly distracted anyway with a rollercoaster of a day... When I got up, my inbox was filled with loveliness. Sweet blog comments to moderate (thankyou!), friendly convos, and a couple of Etsy sales accompanied by charming messages from the buyers (always so nice). Then I sold my violets brooch because it was on the Etsy front page - shame to miss the FP but lovely Kala got a screenshot of it for me:
Unfortunately, it turned out to be some kind of prank purchase as the buyers address was gibberish letters like kdfjyjh3ohhfw, seemingly some malicious person trying to bump me off the front page! Not a nice thing to do at all, it left me with a very sour taste in my mouth. I'm only glad that I've been on Etsy a while and know how nice Etsy people normally are, and how smoothly transactions normally go or I could have been very put off!

Having been put in a grumpy mood because of that, I was then totally delighted to check my email at lunchtime and discover that I'd made my very first sale on Dawanda! Yay! It is so nice to no longer have that zero staring at me, and very interesting to see how their payment process works. The boyfriend says "interesting" is the wrong word to use, but it's interesting to me at any rate, haha. My Dawanda shop still needs a lot of work (and a lot of items adding to it) but it's getting there slowly... off to add another item now, in fact...

No Craftiness Whatsoever

Yes, you read that right: yesterday I did nothing crafty at all! Nothing! It felt very very strange.
My day was absolutely packed with other things - work, cleaning the house, our free stuff party, my mother-in-law visiting - and there was no time to even sit down for ten minutes and sketch some of the brooch ideas floating round my head. Rubbish!

The free stuff party went well though, and my sewing box was one of the first things to get snapped up. Lots of swapping, and no-one spilled any red wine on our carpet so all in all a good party. I was supposed to be tidying up and cleaning the house today, but instead I have been supremely lazy and sat about in my pajamas until about 3pm eating biscuits! Hah, what a high-flying go-getter I am...

News: Etsy has been treating me very kindly this past 24 hours as my Violets brooch was picked by the Storque for a "leap into Spring" feature and matching front page, and now my little plush birdies are on the front page as well! Many thanks to lovely Etsians jahnut and JJMFinance for the violets screenshot and letting me know about the birdies :)

365 / 144 - moustaches, plus! Featured Crafter: CharlotteNarunsky

Last night I did a little bit of moustache-embroidering, and then I did a little happy dance as my grey squirrel pin was on the Etsy front page! Hurrah! Thanks to Bombus for the heads up and the screenshot.
Here for your visual pleasure, some embroidered moustaches ready for being turned into disguises and pins and today's lovely Etsy post - parcel 1 of 2 from ouou, note the lovely packaging and the printed cuteness on the envelope:
In other news: I have decided to do a series featuring members of my Crafting 365 group, finding out how their 365 project is going and showing off a few of their photos. I find their work fascinating and hugely inspirational and I hope you will too!

The first featured 365 crafter is the lovely CharlotteNarunsky, who blogs here. Charlotte has a great eye for colour, mixing patterned fabrics together quite beautifully in her quilts and bags.
She also makes needle felted flower corsages, created somehow (by magic perhaps) from materials such as these:
Charlotte writes: "I have found the crafting 365 challenge to be incredibly helpful to me, largely because my obsessive nature means that I can't bring myself to miss a single day! I have been so much more prolific since I started, and have also become more creative because of it - making the same thing for 365 days would not be much fun at all! It has been inspiring to see the work that others are doing, and I feel like a little less of a freak in the crafting wasteland that is my home town!" - I am so with her on that last point! Not very much going on round here for the crafting-obsessed...

365 / 94 - Spring Cleaning and Scissors

The "spring" cleaning continues... but I'm feeling a lot better about it. For one thing, I'm actually making some progress - parts of my house are both clean and tidy! Getting rid of a lot of the clutter and properly organising things is making me feel better already (so many of our possessions were still in their "that'll do" places from when we first moved in) and I'm pleased with the pile of stuff we now have to give away.

Most importantly though, I did some crafting last night, hurrah! Not the largest or most exciting of crafty tasks, but one I have been meaning to do for ages - cutting up old envelopes to make, er, new envelopes:
Some of the new envelopes will have our address on the inside so I'll keep those for my personal letters etc. but the plain brown ones will be matched up with my new map cards (I do so love the look of the brown paper with the vintage maps) and the blue patterned ones I'll use for sending out zine orders. I've been using my spare map & giftwrap envelopes for sending out zines recently and the difference it makes is just huge. Even the normally stern cashier at the post office was entranced!

In Etsy news, my tea and cake obsession was blogged on I Like, my ornaments got a mention on Funky Finds and my moustache pins were on the Etsy front page early this morning - too early for me but you can see the treasury here. I was also delighted to find sweet mentions of this very blog here, here and also here - so, so nice to read other people's reactions to my witterings :)

In other news, it's lovely and sunny here this morning - even if I had anything crafty to show off yesterday I'd barely have been able to take a photo of it the day was so dark and gloomy and filled with rain. I'm hoping to get some gardening done this afternoon if the weather holds... does gardening count as craftiness, I wonder?

365 / 88 - Poppies and Packing

First up I have to mention that there will be no photos for a few days as I am away and unable to upload them (I have gone off to visit my mother for a few days, leaving the boyfriend to fend for himself and rearrange his book collection to his heart's content). I am still taking my crafty photos and shall still be blogging the project so all of a sudden these posts will have photos and this bit will look a little strange :)

Yesterday was a day for poppies. My little poppy pin was in a beautiful Remembrance Day treasury over on Etsy, and it sold super-quick when the treasury appeared on the front page. Most pleasing (always nice when people like your work enough to pay real money for it) but also slightly disappointing as I was denied my front page happy dance! Ah well. Then in the evening I sat down to make a few more of the poppies and managed to throw a whole box of seed beads all over the sofa! Not good. I got most of them after much scrabbling around, but lord what a mess. Note to self: balancing a small box of tiny beads on your knee is Not A Good Idea.

Then late last night I had to do some packing, preparing a kit-box of my works in progress, the custom patterns I'm working on and my packing supplies so I can keep busy (and keep up with things) while I'm away. There will be a photo of said box crammed with little bags of wips, lots of felt, my accounts books, some jiffy mailers and assorted other oddments once I am able to upload it but for the moment you will just have to paint a picture with your mind :D

UPDATE: here's the picture...

365 / 81 - Brr! and also Yawn!

Brr! because it is still COLD here thanks to our lack of heating (I am now a walking bundle of wool and have made a treasury to celebrate the fact) and Yawn! because I did very little crafting yesterday as my accounts needed doing...

Here is my snazzy accounts book, along with the teeny bit of creative stuff I managed - sketching out possible shapes for a forthcoming conker (horse chestnut) brooch (having made one with a little acorn I just have to try to make a conker!) :
I was very bad and impatient yesterday and instead of waiting and spreading out all my new listings, I went and listed them all at once, including all three sizes of poppy. I will be donating £1 to the poppy appeal for every poppy brooch purchased from my shop this November.

I was also most delighted to get an email from the lovely charlottenarunsky letting me know that one of my mobiles was on the Etsy front page as part of a "picks for baby" treasury.

365 / 76 & 77 - back on the wagon with pips and pins and more moustaches

Okay so yesterday afternoon I got so engrossed in my craftiness that I never got around to blogging day 76... so here it is:
A whole bowl full of moustaches! I don't really know why I took a photo of the moustaches inside a piece of vintage crockery, but after the biscuits on the saucer it somehow seemed like a good idea. Endless photos of moustaches can get a little dull, I feel. Now at least you have some crockery to look at.

I cut out LOTS of moustache pieces in preparation for many an hour's patient stitchery (they are marvellously relaxing things to make, particularly at the embroidery stage) and completed seven of the little fellows ready to package up and take to the post office yesterday. The women in the post office continue to be delighted by the stickers I put on my parcels (I'm sure they recognise me by my stickers alone), I can only hope that my customers are similarly charmed. Decorated packages are so much more fun to receive, I reckon. When the stickers run out I am planning to buy a permanent marker or two and do some doodles :)

Thinking of post offices (not the most exciting topic this world has to offer but please bear with me), it never ceases to amaze me the wide variety of service you get depending on which post office you go to and (in many cases) which window is free when it's your turn... Some seem never to have sent anything airmail before, while another couple are the very soul of efficiency (one even commenting how pleased she was to get an organised customer!). Some write "small packet" on the parcels, some don't. Some believe in "printed papers" as a category, some ignore it. I have even been told off by one assistant for doing things another told me I had to do! Craziness. My personal favourite was the assistant who was totally foxed by the proof of posting I handed her - it was proof of posting for three items, with three names and addresses clearly written on it (as per usual with my parcels) and she wrote "one" in the number of items! So annoying.

That really wasn't an interesting digression, was it? Ah well.

On to day 77 (yesterday) ...
Yesterday I cut out lots of pieces for a batch of apple pins, stitched their white insides and their brooch backs and then sewed on half the required little brown pips. I also cut out pieces for green and purple "I love tea" pins and dug out the bird brooches from my wip pile and finally gave them brooch backs and their little beady eyes. Not particularly satisfying work as nothing got finished but lots of things progressing nicely. One of the apple pins will have to get listed as an "oops" though as I made the pips just ridiculously large. Here is last night's work table:
In other news, I have been spotting my stuff in lots of nice places. One of my peacock-esque mobiles was on the Etsy front page as part of a peacock-themed treasury. Yay.

My moustache pins (and also the UK Etsy blog which I am still shamefully behind on updating) got a lovely mention on The Monobrow, and someone posting a comment yesterday pointed out this charming review over at Roadside Scholar - I particularly love the mention of my English vocabulary, "great words like “chuffed” and “witter”!" :)

Oh, and I totally forgot to mention before, but in a recent Storque interview with the awesome guys behind Circa Ceramics my mobile was featured as one of their "top Etsy picks", which just made me smile hugely as I adore Circa Ceramics, their colour palette is just so zingy and delicious.

365 / 67 & 68 - sewing around a wedding and lots of parcels

I have been a bit busy the past couple of days. This featured seller lark has rather increased the number of orders I've been getting, and my kitchen is currently a bit of a bomb site of parcels and packing materials and lots and lots of little post-it notes with things scribbled on them like "check address" and "remember labels!" and "which colour?". Happy chaos.

Then yesterday we were at a wedding for most of the day... the day before I did a bit of sewing with an eye to packing up my works-in-progress and taking them with me to the wedding, and then before the wedding started (during the choir rehearsals) I carried on with the sewing (never hitch a lift with musicians!). Here is the box of goodies I took with me...
... and then here is the result of the day's stitchery:
Other than this I have no real news, except to state the obvious which is that my Etsy views and hearts, my blog views and also my Flickr views (now up to a -to me rather staggering - 23,404 views! crazy) have gone rather mental in the past few days. The lovely, lovely messages have kept coming too - thankyou again to anyone who has sent a kind word, each one has made me smile hugely. Sorry if all I've had time to send in return is a quick thankyou! Hugs all round :)

Right, I have to go and package up a few more things now. Having to attend to parcels is a most excellent excuse for getting out of doing the washing up, hehe.

365 / 66 - Oh My God How Chuffed Am I?

I am still a bit ill, and pottering about my house wearing deeply unstylish pajamas and clutching a cup of tea as though my life depended upon its soothing deliciousness... but there is a big fat grin on my face because (hurrah hurrah) the Etsy gods have smiled on my and I am the latest featured seller. Yay! When I first found out I thought possibly I was imagining it, and I was a little worried I might throw up or faint or something equally ridiculous but now I am just dead chuffed. I read a lot of the other featured seller interviews when trying to write mine and my gosh there are some AMAZING artists that have been featured before me, I am so in awe of some of them and now my little penguin avatar is sitting amongst them and eeeeeeee! I am so over-excited :)

HUGE thankyous to everyone who has sent nice messages or left notes on my Flickr or here on the blog! I have been quite overwhelmed by the sweet kindness of the comments and blushing at many of them.

As well as spending quite embarassing amounts of time looking at the Etsy front page yesterday, I did some crafting too... lots of it was done whilst sitting on the sofa, listening to the radio or watching the latest episode of America's Next Top Model (via Youtube, the only way I can get my fix!). This was my workspace (also known as the coffee table)
As you can see I have been making more tea-themed brooches, and a little batch of cherry blossom pins (using the last of those lovely beads). I even finished that batch of moths I've been working on for weeks! Hurrah! (At the bottom of the picture you can also see my dinner plate from last night which so far today I have been too lazy to take to the kitchen, tsk tsk).

365 / 57 - Doodling

No genuine crafting for me yesterday evening as I wasn't feeling very well - very frustrating as I had some lovely soothing sewing bits planned. Ah well. I did manage to get some more doodles drawn during a slow patch at work (I say "slow patch", my boss says "when you were slacking off") so I guess that's something:
Some of those little scribbles are ideas for felt things, and some are just little scribbles (I was a bit bored). Not my finest artistic hour in either case!!

In other news: one of my moustache disguises was used in the October newscast from The Storque, the Etsy newsletter. I wouldn't really recommend watching it, it's a little bit lame. Jam packed with what my dad sneeringly calls "undergraduate humour". I do love Etsy, but that newscast was not their finest hour. Oh well. It was nice to see the moustache getting used for larks and japery though!

Other moustache-related news, thanks to the lovely heidiburton my moustache disguises were on the Etsy front page yesterday afternoon as part of a selection aimed at 8-11 yr old boys. Most marvellous. I even sold a couple of them, placating my boyfriend whose usual response to my gleeful "I'm on the front page! Yay!" is "yes but have you sold anything?" :D

365 / 55 - Pastel circles everywhere!

I have been sewing lots and lots of pastel circles of felt together... and after a lazy Sunday mostly spent sewing I've nearly finished all the discs for this mobile. I probably could have finished the whole lot (only 6 more to go) but I got distracted by doing some work on little apple pins. Here are all the discs I have finished, stacked neatly in sixes in the little box I use to carry my crafting out of the house - ready to take when I went ribbon shopping today. It's very useful to have the real thing for comparing colours (though I should have taken some business cards with me cos I got asked what it was I was making!) ...
Oh, and in the wee hours of this morning it seems that a couple of my little baubles were on the Etsy front page. The lovely insomniac ColdCell snapped a screenshot for me which I have now stolen to put on my blog, thus: