Thursday, December 30, 2010

Zibbet and Computer Troubles

My computer's AC to DC adapter cable went caput, as they say, so I'm working off of my boyfriend's computer right now...it's a bit of a problem, since I have a ton of photos and information on my computer that I need. I need it because I'm starting to sell on a couple of other platforms...and I need my stuff in order to set up shop. Very bad timing. We'll see how it goes.

See, while it's free to have an Etsy account, and free to set up your shop, it's not free to list things OR to sell them. $0.20 per listing for 4 months, and a certain percentage - 3.5% at the moment - of your sale. Sites like Zibbet and Big Cartel and Handmade Spark and ArtFire, on the other hand, have different policies. They don't charge a listing fee or a percentage, and instead they charge a monthly having-a-shop fee. At the moment, this isn't good for me. AT ALL. Etsy would be cheaper any way you look at it. Not counting the 3.5% sale fee (which has probably totalled to like 3.50 since I started selling) I'm being charged like $1.25 per month...that's like 20% of Zibbet's "best value" yearly $69.00 fee ($5.75/month)...not to mention its monthly fee...if you sign up monthly instead of yearly, they charge you like $10.00. Then there's Handmade Spark, which says it has a free account but I can't find out how to get one because no matter what signup I do, it wants my paypal account for $6.00/month. And Big Cartel, I don't even remember how much it was. But Zibbet and Big Cartel (and disappointingly, not Handmade Spark or ArtFire, that I can see) have free accounts where you can set up a little shop and have fewer items than you want and fewer features than you want and see how it goes. Big Cartel, appallingly, only lets you post 5 things for sale...REALLY not enough. Zibbet lets you do 50, which is enough for me at the moment...though there are some crazy Etsy shops with thousands of items listed. It's very strange that these sites use this method, because I can either pay nothing and have a small shop, or pay extravagantly and have a big shop, whereas on Etsy I pay a little and have as big or little a shop as I want. I'm definitely a fan of being on Etsy when I look at it like that.

And I think Etsy's way is the best way...how much you pay depends on how much you are trying to sell and how much you actually do sell...which in my case turns out to be a modest $1.25 a month and small change. It's working out pretty well for me, so far, and I've made 17 sales through that site. Not as much as I want, of course, but that would be impossible, because if I got as many sales as I wanted, I would never be able to keep up with it. It's allowing me to keep making jewelry and I'm breaking even with a little profit, too. It won't sustain me or let me live without needing another job, but it's funding itself right now, and that's my short-term goal.

Etsy also gets the most traffic, the most views, the most google hits, the most everything. Etsy is, in a word, gigantic...and for a little seller, that's the best way to be. My pictures pop up every now and then. Sure I'm not on the first or third or even fourth page when you search etsy for origami earrings...but somehow I still get sales. Probably because mine are the best :] hehe. But in all seriousness, there are so many people looking through that site, all the time, looking for their specific things or just browsing the aisles, that people I don't know actually come to look at my stuff. And not only that, but there's a massive community involved that I actually need to get more involved in soon, joining teams and adding circles and stuff. Etsy is all very interconnected, and very good at making its members feel like they are really members of the massive handmade community that they ARE members of.

But of course, it's best if I come up in as many searches as possible. I want to come up on Zibbet and Big Cartel and Handmade Spark and ArtFire - if only I could.

I guess overall, I'd love to be on Big Cartel, it seems awesome, but it's unlikely. I am going to be on Zibbet. ArtFire seems just disappointing to me. And Handmade Spark is a good community site, but I don't see much selling coming from there. I get the newsletter, that's all. So we'll see how this goes. As far as ripping me off just to let me sell my products, it still seems like Etsy is the least-bad offender...and gets the most traffic anyway. But it's still good to have other options. I wish the others would adopt a more reasonable payment system, though.


Something else: thethingsiwant.com. I don't expect people to go looking for my list to buy me presents, but since I'm now buying supplies from more than just one site, I figured a universal wish list wouldn't be out of order...it's very useful to combine the things you want instead of just having a bunch of separate wish lists. And the way it adds things is that it puts a button in your bookmarks toolbar that links to the thing that adds things to your list...so you just go to the item's page and click one of your bookmarks and then the thing is in your list. Very neat.

...so now, mom, if you want to know what I want for my birthday, and "jewelry supplies" is too vague to cut it, you can search for the wishlist of letterboxlion@gmail.com (I think it searches by email, but it might be by username, in which case it would just be letterboxlion.) It's purely a list of supplies that I want, some with notes like "for wire-wrapping" or "must get with X gauge wire" so it's pretty handy. And it lets you use priorities so while I can keep track of that butane fusing torch, I can realistically note that I should not be even close to getting it yet. :)



More news: I don't have my pictures to post up yet because of my computer problems, but I did make awesome pendants with a few of the cabochons I put up last post...I'll post them when I get my new cable. But good news is, the first person I showed my work to who is outside of the nuclear family with whom I am staying decided she wanted to buy one of my pieces for her daughter-in-law! Her husband's father was an experienced silversmith, and he told me that I have talent. I think that means that I'm off to a good start, when people who have experience with jewelry and metalwork think my work is up to par! I'll post pictures soon, I'm so excited! And hopefully soon I'll get them up on my site! Oh man, so excited. I never expected to be this involved in the crafting world, but it's happening very excellently.

And my new baby is a pair of nylon-jawed round-nose pliers. Thanks to Evan! After he gave it to me for Christmas I pretty much went crazy and made a bunch of pieces, some serious wire-wrapped ones as well as some silly little hammered pieces that were just fun to make and a good way to spend a few crystals. Itching to put them online, let me tell you. Positively fidgety. Well, that's life!

Wednesday, December 22, 2010

Lots of pretty photos! And vacation.

I'm now on Christmas break! Though, I know for most people those days are probably far behind them, and "Christmas break" just brings back memories of airport rushing around and trying to find a way to get your mom to take you to the mall so you can buy her a gift without her knowing what it is. No airports for me, this year I'm staying in Boston with my boyfriend and his family, who are all amazingly nice. It's very exciting!
My boyfriend's brother has already 1) taught me how to solder (which I've been itching to try for a long time), 2) given me his old soldering iron (he has a new one) 3) given me some solder specifically for use with silver, which is what I'm going to DO, 4) given me a bunch of old, useless and incompatible-with-anything RAM sticks to cut up and use in jewelry...silver and gold accents on an intricately patterned deep green color. I'm so excited! Such possibility. Some of them even have holes already so I can string them if I want.

But I don't have a file to get the edges nice, or a saw to cut them up into smaller pieces, so I might have to wait before I can do what I'd like. I also don't have flux, which you usually need for jewelry soldering...Evan doesn't need it because he just uses it for electrical stuff, but jewelry is specialized in a different way. Maybe when I get going on it I'll post up a tutorial or something...which, knowing me, will be "How To Get Away With Soldering Jewelry Without Following Most of the Steps"


...AND IT'S NOT EVEN CHRISTMAS YET. Also he and Boyfriend of Mine have a bunch of old computer parts and they say they could help me make a good, fast desktop (something I do not have at all at the moment) for $100. A good deal. I'm surrounded by so many nice people!


So finally I'm posting up my awesome rocks. This is, apparently, standard procedure for jewelry-makers with blogs, but it's mostly because I want to, because I am so excited about them. Actually, I think that's WHY it's standard procedure - those people all get excited about the same things that I do.

First of all, I'd better link to these folks: rockcutter62 and terrafinds. They are the awesome people from which I ordered most of this stuff...both of them are awesome and I have no qualms advertising for them...Terra's stuff is more beautiful than her pictures (and she takes very good pictures) and she has sales often enough to make me want to buy all her stuff, all the time. She finds some of the prettiest labradorite I can find, on etsy or off, and sells it for less than almost everybody else sells theirs. And Ron (rockcutter62, of course) is an awesome retired man just cutting cabochons because he loves to do it, and selling them for beyond-reasonable prices. He even threw me in a free gift because he thought one of the cabs I bought was too "marginal"...a totally bizarre standard in my opinion, (the price I bought it for was $1.00!) but I'm not going to complain!

Here's some pretty rocks:

Itty-bitty lapis lazuli cab with pyrite inclusions...such an intense blue, I love it!









Okay, this one I bought because I'm a sentimental baby. My boyfriend's eyes look like blue lace agate, so I bought the least-expensive one I could find that still looked nice and usable (It's not even a cabachon, it's a pendant bead)...I intended it to be my first wire-wrapping experiments so I could be all sentimental and a baby, but I RAN OUT OF SILVER WIRE. More on that later.

This is a sweet little one. Owyhee jasper. I like it because the little blossoms on the side have a hint of pink to complement the brown. This was the one I got for free with the other (non-marginal) one that cost only $1.00. I probably wouldn't have bought it by itself, but now that I have it and can see it up close, I like it a lot.




And, uh, just...let me reiterate that.



Okay so the second picture isn't too clear, but at least it shows some of the color. I love this stone. Dark green, a color that really doesn't show up adequately on camera, shines like glass, has lots of depth...and like any good seraphinite, it looks like somebody squished an angel into it. I'm so happy about this stone. And it's BIG. BIG. (And Ron sold it to me for $5 because it was 50% off...when anyone else would have sold it for $20.) I'm such a big fan of this rock that I bought another one from him as soon as I got it:



AHHHHHHHHH. SO. PRETTY. I can't wait for my silver wire to come, because I am going to have a LOT OF FUN.


*breathe* Okay. Some even shinier things:

These are both from TerraFinds. Gorgeous high-quality garnets and labradorite...I had more of each, but I put them into Christmas presents, which I will post up AFTER my friends tell me they got them and oh man so shiny and well, I don't really like red but I'm sure it will go with something. The garnets look dark, dark red and shine lighter red on whatever they are near.
The labradorite is a smoky grey with shiny flecks in it, that at certain lights, does an impossible-looking color-change and becomes teal-green, or this brilliant shade of blue. The color-changing effect is so awesome and unique that it's named after the stone: labradorescence. Speaking of which.





BAM.

















Oh, uh, sorry, didn't catch that?

















I mean, enough said. You can see right into them. And like the other ones, they change in different lights. These ones are cabochons (no holes), so I need my silver wire (!) to wrap them...I can't just string them on wire and let them show off by themselves. But they are top-notch, really gorgeous. The other ones are awesome in their smoky-grey-ness, but these are crystal clear right up to the layers with the gorgeous colors. Breathtaking, really, for something so small.



AND here's where I post my first attempt at wire-wrapping. CAVEAT: It's not ultra-stable. I was so impatient to start wire-wrapping that I had to do it with the only large-gauge wire I had at the time (other than full-hard copper soldering wire) which happened to be gold-filled 20G dead-soft. Translation: it's really soft wire. I hammered it and everything, but it's still easy to take the stone out by bending the top back. Which I guess is okay, since you actually have to lift it out even if you take the top off...the bottom is secure. I wore it all day yesterday and it never showed any signs of not staying in. But it's not realy sell-able...though since it's my FIRST WRAP EVER I guess I wouldn't sell it anyway. BUT HEY. I didn't even make a total-failure-mess-of-things, as expected. My FIRST WRAP EVER and it's WEARABLE.



And pretty, too.












Now tell me, does that stone look "marginal" to you? Does it look worth $1.00? Because that is what I paid for it. It's not only the only one of these cabochons that really goes with gold wire, it's also REALLY. PRETTY. Blood poppy jasper. I would have paid more for it without the free gift thrown in. Seriously, give that guy some business.


So, I owe this blog a few more pictures...I'm going to post up the presents I made because I like what I did, but of course I can't post those until after their recipients see them. And I may not, depending on how much they like them.
Those should also go up under "recent creations" on my site, so don't let me forget.

Monday, December 6, 2010

Goings-on

Whoo! So much going on. Ballroom competition...eh, it went ok. Made some semifinals. Didn't actually go as well as my first competition did, which is strange because it was about the same size. And there was no internet, so none of my paper got written because I had no sources to work from...Well, so it goes. So tired! My feet, oh my feet.
Sold some more stuff! AND got it done in a timely manner (three custom orders at once!). So proud of myself. Christmas is a really inconvenient time for there to be finals to worry about, but I think I'm handling it pretty well (so far). Better blog now, this week is going to be a busy one.
My website client, weebly, also emailed me to tell me that my website views are skyrocketing. (Which I would hope, since 1 is infinitely more than 0.) Score! Oh man, so tired. Need to write paper. Wait what have I eaten in the last 24 hours?

Wednesday, December 1, 2010

NEW WEBSITE

Ok I know I know I just posted today. BUT I GOT A NEW WEBSITE. That is, I made one. Weebly is an awesome and really intuitive free website-maker application...I recommend it so far, and it has capabilities for things like blog and facebook integration, so it's really handy. Slideshows, movies, you can do tons with it. My site isn't done yet, but with only a couple of hours of playing with it I've got something pretty solid set up.

SO GO CHECK IT OUT PLEASE. And hey, 22 people "like" it already ;D facebook is pretty scary that way, I don't even know how it knew that that facebook page and that site were the same thing.

A Conundrum

I made a necklace:

Lariat-style(?...I think that's what it's called.) celestial-themed, long and silvery and neat. However.

It's designed specifically to look good on people of my body shape. Basically, it's long and it goes into your cleavage, to make it look like you actually have a little. It draws the eye downward. It is really not designed for people who ACTUALLY have cleavage, since I can easily see it getting really uncomfortable for anyone who has anything there. And while I can describe that in the etsy post, I think it's not very clear to just say "wear it if you have small breasts and want to show it off" - few people probably want to show that off, and it's difficult to make it clear that the necklace is designed to make your cleavage a little MORE impressive, not just make your lack thereof more obvious.
It's also a little long right now. I think I'll shorten it up a bit.
But meanwhile, do I take photographs of me wearing it, to show how it's supposed to look? Does anyone really want to buy something they have seen in someone else's cleavage already??
I'm afraid it would be misleading to just post the photos of it on the table because it's impossible to show the real size or scale or how it would look hanging.

It occurs to me to perhaps take the toggle stick off and thread the chain through the toggle hole. I'll have to look into that, too.

Monday, November 29, 2010

Flustered! So flustered!

Meh!

I need to keep my grades up, especially in Japanese and Computer Science...those are the two that have been suffering the most from how busy/distracted I've been. Here I thought I was doing work all day, (mostly on the business) and then I discovered that I haven't really gotten anything done. Well, that's not true. My homework isn't done, that's for sure, but I have plenty of time for most of it...I'm just paranoid enough to do work due Thursday on Monday night. But I did some research, found out more about gemstones, ordered a couple (be careful, Leo...)...And posted up some photos on my new Letterbox Lion Handmade Jewelry facebook page, which you should check out, using the handy new widgety-thing on the side of the page =========>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>

Though to be fair, this is probably more interesting. Hopefully.

Also, I made some price changes - I lowered my prices for things I was, in retrospect, charging way too much for considering the price of my materials...it pains me that the most effort-intensive and least rewarding things I make are the ones I can sell for the least, though, (while still managing to be the ones I can most reliably sell) and I have to control my tendency to try and make up for it on the higher-end stuff. I DID up my shipping prices though, after finally admitting to myself that charging less for shipping than shipping was costing me was really not an effective strategy. So, lower prices, higher shipping. All in the name of necessity, I assure you.

By the way, add craftywillows (or littlebitcrafting on blogspot) after Fantasian to the list of people I absolutely want to BE. Her blog is old stuff about how she's getting started wire-wrapping, trying tutorials, etc..."we'll see how it goes"...and her shop stuff is absolutely amazing, so far beyond those tutorials as a beginning, and so unique. It's really (REALLY) encouraging to know that from where I am right now, I can get to where she is ...with luck and perseverance and enthusiasm and experimentation...and, in this business, some capital.

We'll see how it goes! I'm getting a few cabachons, and I'm about to order some wire. I want to see what I can come up with if I actually try wire-wrapping, for real this time, legit, this is not a drill.

(HAHA GET IT. CAUSE THEY'RE NOT DRILLED. HA. Oh man, I just got that. *wipes tear*)

Wish me luck, anyway :)



EDIT: OH AND BY THE WAY. I've been meaning to post up more things throughout today and yesterday, but somehow I managed not to pull it off. With my crazy schedule (and my computer losing its internet connection, resulting in an IT visit today that ate up some time) it's been tough to find a chunk where I can just sit down and write descriptions with any personality...not to mention that etsy has no save function, what's with that? Anyway, I'm going to go post something right now.

Sunday, November 28, 2010

Yay, photographs! And a paragraph of bragging.

It's been so long since I've managed to take good photographs. Thank goodness for vacations...they are the times I can go to buildings that are well-lit. And be back to them in time. Since I moved to New England, the weirdest part of adjusting has been how early it gets dark here...Michigan is my home town, and it's as far west as you can go in the Eastern time zone, so where in Boston it gets dark at 4:30, (FOUR-THIRTY. AHHHHH.) it waits for another few hours back home. Oh, man, I need to make a lightbox. Oh dear boyfriend sitting next to me, want to make me one for Christmas?

Juuuust kidding. I'll get around to it. Life is oh-so-scattered and OH LOOK I HAVE A FOLLOWER. HOW DID THAT HAPPEN oh never mind I know you. I love you anyway! :)


So, the advice I've been reading is basically all "you need to re-do everything you've been doing." I'm working on adjusting my shop announcement to be more google-search friendly...and I have to do the same to EVERY SINGLE POST that I have made, and every one I make from now on.

The main thing, too, is "have a product that people want"...I'm sure they want jewelry. They definitely want origami jewelry.


AND ON THAT NOTE I WOULD LIKE TO TAKE A MOMENT TO BRAG. I am, as far as I could tell either by googling OR by searching on etsy, the ONLY PERSON who will make you earrings with more than one crane on them. They're BIRDS! Did seriously nobody else think of a flock? Man, now that I've cornered the market, I wish I could patent the idea. I think that's considered cheating in the art world. But I've been making them for a few years now, without ever realizing I was making something so unique, nobody else is doing it at all.

(Of course, maybe it's because my main materials are so light - the really, really nice handmade washi chiyogami paper is thin and lightweight, but the yuzen paper (not handmade or as expensive) is normal-to-really-thick paper thickness, and it would be harder to make flocks of. I've been using starburst wrappers, which are really thin, light paper, so I've had an advantage...to easily make a flock I have to either use the really cheap materials, or the really expensive ones. Now that's odd.)


Oh and also, advice says, post photographs everywhere. Facebook. Flickr. HERE. So I'm posting photographs. HERE.

Everybody (EVERYBODY) says "don't post all your listings at once. Space them throughout the day, because you'll get a bazillion times more exposure that way." It makes sense. If you only post once, but you post a bunch of stuff, if the people who happen to be on at that time don't like your stuff, they'll pass over it for stuff more up their alley in the just-posted box. So by posting every few hours, maybe, you can get all the crowd that shops on etsy at various times of the day, even if your post is only visible for a few seconds, let's be honest...those are important seconds.
SO, here are some photographs, and they are so new not even Etsy has seen most of them yet. Let me know if you like.


A gold wire-wrapped "apples and honeybees" set I made for a custom order.











A glittery green "bamboo forest" pair accented by swarovski crystals - so much green! - on wire-wrapped silver flowers.










A sodalite and green pair I've been thinking of privately as "the whole world round" and connecting with the earth...gemstone, metal, circles, green, it all fits, right? Add to that that the sodalite ironically looks like the sky, and I'm really happy with how these work.



A palm-leaf-inspired pair that fan out. Have I been focusing on green too much?

















And a pair that I love oh, so much...I've been getting all poetic about them, it's almost embarrassing. They have a lot of dark blue, and sodalite in general looks like the sky, no matter what shade it comes in...it just always manages to look like some form of weather, or clouds...and the dark, glittery blue shines like stars, and so does the star-flower wire-wrapping in sterling silver, and the matte beads are the spaces between the stars, right? So the dark blue glittery ribbons dangle down from the silver flower, just as the night sky hangs from stars. That's the way I think of it, anyway. Poetic, am I right? But I'm not even kidding, I love them dearly. I'm tempted to keep them, but I only ever wear one earring of a kind at a time. These ones are posted on etsy already, I could not resist

Saturday, November 20, 2010

A New Obsession

I have fallen victim to the plague that besets (suddenly and violently) pretty much anyone who ever even thinks of learning to wire-wrap jewelry. That is, I can't stop looking up gemstones. To buy them, maybe. To scout them out, to find places that sell them for the cheapest prices at the best quality, yadda yadda. Mostly just to stare at them. Soooooo prettyyyyyy.
Old favorite: labradorite, still high up there. New favorite, seraphinite. It looks like feathers! Me and my fascination with anything related to flight. I've gathered from reading, though, that I can expect to have a new favorite at least weekly from now on.

I'm in kind of a strange position, I think. There are a lot of blogs written by Etsy sellers of things similar to those that I either make or want to make. However, I think most of them were, at my age and level of experience, not yet selling, probably at least not selling online, or at least not yet blogging. I'm starting out with a good deal more resources and practical advice from people who have already done it at my fingertips. I have contrariwise, a lovely and so-useful blog about selling jewelry online, telling me that my pictures have to have better backgrounds, and I have various other blogs bookmarked (from back when I didn't have a blog to use to "follow" them) telling me how to drill holes in shells without breaking them, posting up wire-wrapping tutorials, recommending this and that and you should get business cards if you're serious about this, Leo, and I know you are.

Long story short: I'm finding fewer things out the hard way, I think. I'm lucky that way. But I'll look back on these posts and cringe at what I didn't know. Ought I to get business cards when I'm barely selling enough to call it a source of income, let alone a business? I'm pretty sure I can't afford business cards at the moment. I think I'll make some stuff to take to that gallery - what's it called? That's near here. But for now, focusing on Christmas/Chanukah gifts =)

A side-effect of being in this strange position is that if people who have already done this stumble upon my blog, it will probably look rather familiar to them, just in a more electronic format - I'm having the same struggles that they were, once upon a time. I can't afford a cabachon or wire to learn to wire-wrap that cabachon and sell it for money to buy more cabachons and get better at wire-wrapping and oh, capital, capital. If only everything were free, I could just make art all the time. Silly reality, getting in the way. Mostly, the problem is that I can't count on selling things (or even being successful at them the first time around) - I expect a few catastrophic wire-wrapping failures, wire-tangled-like-a-bird's-nest-start-over type of failures, and when that happens I need to have the wire to pick up and try again. If that wire is all I have (and the money I put into it is money I need to get back), that puts some limits on my ability to experiment. How strange to think that I am not at all unique in being here, having to think about these things...I'm just here NOW, able to blog about it, while my predecessors look back on it semi-fondly in THEIR new blogs.


I did read some good advice, though, put here for action later (2:13?! How is it late so early?):


Get a flickr account, and start posting up photos! ....Aaaas soon as I take some.
Put a little personality into my blog? Don't just post new stuff I've made? Well hopefully I've got that down.
Get my "business" a facebook page - sorry, contrariwise, but I'm going to forget myspace for now. I don't know anyone who uses it anymore. I'm tempted to get a Diaspora account for it, actually :D
Make blogger friends, etsy seller friends, and absolutely STALK the etsy forums for advice. Talk to people, get involved.
Umm, POST MORE. Roughly translated as MAKE MORE STUFF. If I were less lazy/gemstone-research-obsessed with my time, I could make plenty of jewelry, and take lots of pictures. Okay, true, it gets dark really early here. Which leads me to:
Make a lightbox, and take some better pictures
Business cards??!?



By the way, if anyone's reading this, fantasian's etsy shop really doesn't have enough sales. She's got awesome skill, amazing talent, her works are unique and beautiful and so inspiring.
(And much cheaper than the guy who makes the Twisted Crystal jewelry, bless him, his stuff is so unique...birch bark? (Larimar?) Oh, yes, I would love a wire-wrapped birch bark necklace...but I could never afford his. Far out of my range. Still, though, those are my two sources of wire-wrapping inspiration at the moment.)

Monday, November 8, 2010

A very late first post

...You know how it is. I have class. I have homework. I am struck by sudden beading inspiration and nothing else counts until I'm done. I'm doing this because I managed to put "blogging" in the same category as "beading" in my mind. Let's hope it stays there.

So, exciting things have been happening on the Letterbox Lion front. Today was a landmark day in lots of ways, which is probably why I have such an urge to blog about it. I mailed my tenth online sale - of course, it's not my tenth sale, only the tenth that happened over etsy, but still. I started experimenting today, too. This was the first time I have worked with gold (!) ever (!), and since it wasn't as snobbish to work with as I'd imagined, I'd like to put it out there that I'm more than willing to do it again. I don't have much, since for my first ever gold project I didn't order much, but I'd be happy to have an excuse to acquire more, and use up the rest. ALSO TODAY I got my first gemstones.

Okay, let me stop to talk about that. I've always been wary of using gemstones, in the way of a little girl in awe of horses. Swarovski crystals are so consistent, and I shouldn't buy gemstones, I won't know what to do with them, they don't come catered to my order, they won't match with anything I have, blah blah excuses blah. If I want crystal, I can get it in practically any plausible (and some not-so-plausible) combination of color and tint and shade and coating and sparkle and opacity that I could POSSIBLY want. Gemstones, however, do what they want. They are all different. They are whatever color the earth formed them in. It's intimidating. It's exhilarating. I am having SO much fun.

I don't know why fusionbeads.com is discontinuing sodalite beads. They are gorgeous. I am so glad I bought them, even if it was because I wanted to try gemstones and those were the ones on clearance sale. If I had been updating this regularly, you'd already know that I have a weird fixation on dark blue beads...most of my inventory is some form of dark blue or something to complement dark blue. While I have been trying to branch out, I thought when I ordered them, hey, I lucked out - sodalite is blue, too.

Shockingly, though, it is ACTUAL blue. It's not some subtly purpley green shade of off-blue. It's not metallic or matte-coated iris shiny whatsitcalled. It's blue. It's unadulterated, I think I'll be light blue! I think I'll have a white band! I think I'll be this awesome stormy dark grey with blue flecks! Ooh, ooh, and I'll be deep ocean never-seen-light-before blue. (Spoken by individual 6mm beads). That kind of blue. I've already got big plans for these beads, not only because my crazy metallic-shiny-and-or-matte-possibly-sandbblasted-slightly-purple-or-green-or-both blue beads often go well with blue, but because I also have green. And honey-colored, and dark red, and more green, and amber. I have crystals and spacer beads. I have not enough spacer beads, as I discovered only halfway through my sodalite-induced beading delirium. I made a sweet earring with a design I'm very proud of, incorporating a lot of dark blue symmetry and silvery sparkle, and oh, I'm so happy with it. I am 6 spacer beads short of making the other one in the pair. And off to order more!



And here is a sad note, to explain my near-total lack of activity, as though anyone out there on the internet knew about it:

So, almost all of the pieces I have sold so far have been my flocks of cranes. I'm all right with that. They are excellent. They are my babies. They are cheap to make and cheap to sell. They are cute and rather awesome, they get lots of compliments, everyone likes them. I have a pair for every mood, and somebody comments almost every day. I was the only person on the whole internet (!!!) that I could find who would sell more than one crane on a single earring - nobody else seems to have thought of a flock. Too bad I can't patent the idea.

But they are a LOT of work. Like I said, they are cheap, but they take a very long time to make, and then I have to seal them with varnish because, come on, I'm not the kind of person to sell something that I would expect to fall apart immediately. They're made of paper, they're not in it for the long haul, but I still want to give them an advantage, and so I double- or triple-coat them in whatever the best varnish is that I can find. It takes FOREVER.

See: Even at five minutes per crane (a lowwwww estimate) 8 cranes per pair makes it 45 minutes JUST TO FOLD THEM. Forget measuring and cutting the paper into neat little squares, forget measuring the head pins and eye pins and making them all hang together. THEN the varnishing, which in itself takes a huge chunk of time because they need to dry between coats. And then, as if that's not enough, I have to photograph them in attractive poses (cranes are not meant to lie down) and resize those pictures and make them square and post descriptions...

I guess I've made my point. The whole process bogs me down. I feel the pain of poor Tessa Stone, the writer of the most excellent comic in the world, who just got absolutely killed by con season. It's all the extraneous stuff that takes you away from your art that ends up killing your inspiration. I really don't want that to happen to me...but since I lost my job, this is my sole source of income at the moment.

I am actually losing money on making those...that is, they do not get me enough money for all the time they take. If I didn't like making them and enjoy seeing other people like them so much, I couldn't do it anymore. I end up folding them in class, at lunch, in the middle of social events. Add to that the fact that I am losing money on shipping, too, since I've been needing to buy boxes in which to mail them, and I really don't make anything on this. I am praying that the word gets out that my work is good, and that soon I'll be able to start selling my higher-class items, the ones that cost me more and are triggered by artistic inspiration, not by ooh-that's-neat impulse. Not that I am expecting to make a living on Letterbox Lion just yet...but I need another job! So sad that what you're good at, what you like to do, and what make enough money to pay off your college loans don't always coincide.

END SAD NOTE. This has been a very good day.


And a big thank you to my boyfriend who gives me encouragement by sitting there and saying "I like it" when I hold things up at him.