Silence On My Part

Eating my words, combined with things that speak for themselves makes this a blog post full of silence.

Eating my words:

ArtFire not only has a free basic account, it has the most fantastic free basic account of anything anywhere ever, with unlimited listings and no commission fees or listing fees! It's so beyond worth it for me to post there, since all it costs me is time, and the interface rivals Etsy's even without the pro features. Once I get good at this, maybe Etsy will be even more expensive than ArtFire, who knows...I've made some friends lately who spend more like $50 on Etsy monthly, and are grateful for the $10/month pro plan on ArtFire. So anyway, it costs me less to sell on ArtFire, so I guess I'll redirect my traffic there to what extent I can. Go check out my ArtFire shop!


Things that speak for themselves:
































More later! Lots of rigamarole to go yet, getting the photos into posting shape. But the first two are up, on Etsy and ArtFire.

Twitter and a tea wallet

I finally caved, yes. I got a twitter account.
This could be good, since I like to talk. This could be bad, since I like to talk.

After all, right now I just spout at length into blogspot...but that at least requires an hour or so of thought, some preparation beforehand if I want to post pictures, etc. Twitter is always there for me to type my one-hundred-and-something characters of whatever and worry about it later. But maybe talking and being interesting and interested and connecting with other people and finding people who like to follow crafters' twitter accounts will help me get more involved in the handmade community. And luckily the format should keep me from getting too verbose...I can see anyone contemplating following my blog immediately switching to twitter at that news. :)

Anyway, @letterboxlion. Surprise!

I can't wait to post some more pictures, oh man. I've been getting better at a crazy rate, and my style is evolving by the day into a more artsy, more capable way of thinking - out of the earwires I bought? Not a problem if I've got some half-hard wire on hand. Out of half-hard wire? I can hammer dead-soft wire! Would textured earwires be comfortable? No? I can just make that test piece into a pendant, then. My sitting-down-and-getting-to-work times have been more fruitful than ever...my biggest problem is that I don't like to take pictures!


TRANSITION PHRASE. I have a miraculous best friend. She makes everything. Sewing, cooking, baking, jewelry, whatever it is, she probably has perfected it. (Need some vegan cookies that are moist and yummy? I can hook you up, let me tell you. The only way you can tell they are vegan is that they are extra-delicious, it's bizarre. Anyway!) She made me a tea wallet. Now THAT'S some targeted marketing. Basically it's another example of her knowing me far too well and giving me something that I had only vaguely registered that I should want, considering the tea I always carry around with me is getting squished in the pocket of my backpack that is also used for pens. I received a wallet from her, and it had tea in it, and I said to myself, "Hey, score! I could use this to keep my tea from getting squished!" And told her I would continue to use it for tea, whereupon she informed me that it was made for that purpose. No wonder it's so perfect. I mean, it even has leaves on it. I GUESS THEY'RE TEA LEAVES.

Anyway, if only there were a way for sellers to know their target markets that well...haha, but then we'd want to give it all away. I already have that problem enough.

Some pictures, some typos, customer service

I have no good excuse for being awake right now, except that I turn nocturnal during breaks from school...it's now 7:43 am and I'm thinking of making lunch. Anyway, forgive my abysmal grammar, spelling, etc. during these tough times, I'm only half-awake. I'm one of those lovable people who, when they get very tired, start to say things as though they were drunk, so if I say anything completely whacko, forgive. I probably won't notice for a while.

Anyway, some pictures.



These are the gifts I gave to my friends for Christmas. The first two were for my best friends from back home, but I had to ask them for forgiveness for how obviously amateur I am at wire-wrapping...I didn't have heavy-enough gauge wire to do the projects I was planning, and I did them anyway because I didn't have time to get more...so they're made with the wrong materials, improvised and basically practice projects. Leo doing whatever with her last bits of wire. But that's what they get for being friends with a jewelry artist...the ones that are good I have to sell, but they can have plenty of okay ones :) At least they said they liked them. But gotta love 'em, they'd probably say that no matter what.

The last one is made of half-used soldering wire (for a soldering gun) that I scavenged from the floor of the theatre shop at school (they were going to throw it away!). I said, "Evan! What can I make you for Christmas?" (By the way, it is VERY hard to make anything for men for such occasions when all one can make is jewelry.) And he said, "I'm asking my mom for a bag for Christmas. So make me something I can hang on a bag." And so I did. It turned out to be perfect, actually...the bag was leather, so it was a perfect color, and for some reason it ended up being the perfect size and everything. Serendipity. The thing is, I wanted to make a double-helix, because they're awesome. But I couldn't make a stable double-helix, so I made a 2D projection of one...a shadow, basically. (He's a computer graphics person. It works out.) It's easiest to see it (for me) if you look at one of the points where the wires cross and imagine that one is actually farther away at that point, farther into the screen. Then if you imagine that one alternating each time, you can imagine that it's a double-helix and you're looking at it head-on. ANYWAY.

I came into a lot of supplies recently...I say that like it was a surprise, but that's only half a joke. I bought a ton of wire and beads...and chain, and ball head pins...a TON, like, I've been getting so many packages...hooray for Etsy's supplies category, which can hook me up with $.70/foot oxidized copper chain. But the thing IS. I did it with money that was no longer capital. It was with the money that had gone into my paypal account from my sales. I used money that I had MADE to buy things to make more jewelry. That's how a real business runs, and I am putting everything I bought to good use, knowing the work I put into earning the money to buy it. It's much more rewarding than the office job I had last year (though of course I wish I still had one like that...). Also, my boyfriend's sister gave me a gift card to a bead store for Christmas, so I got to go a little crazy the other day...I spent like 4 hours in the bead store. Jewelry supplies are the only thing I can shop for and buy without getting horrible buyer's remorse, I don't know why...I'm terrible at shopping for that reason, but I love shopping for beads!

And I have been going so crazy making stuff that I'm out of wire again...at least I already bought some more this time, and won't have to wait too long. I'm making my entire stock of wire copper, at least for now, because it's SO much cheaper and looks fantastic anyway. Got tons of gems, mostly green and blue. Sodalite, tree and moss agate, Chrysocolla, a little kyanite. Then there's the fire agate in green, but also in red, with carnelian to match. I am so bad at pink, I hardly ever like it, and that's been a problem because most of the custom orders I get are for pink and I rarely think it looks good, so then I feel bad about selling it no matter how much the buyer likes it. However, I did get some awesome hammer-faceted rose quartz nuggets and some itty-bitty pinkier garnets and made some fantastic earrings, those should be up soon. Takes something really awesome to make me like a pink piece of jewelry. Once I really am at a loss for what to do without wire, I should get around to taking some pictures of what I've been making and putting them up on Etsy.


By the way: buy handmade. Seriously, since I started shopping for supplies on Etsy I have only looked back at my other supply sites to confirm that Etsy is almost always cheaper. Of course they usually do charge shipping, so it's sometimes more expensive...once in a while. But everyone is so NICE. A good 50% of the people I've bought from have sent me free gifts, one person sent some random other things like silver-plated toggle clasps and a few beads...the best ones are the ones that send extra of what you actually ordered, because then you know you can use it. I got 7 lapis coin beads instead of 6, 4 extra copper earwires, and one seller sent me 8 feet of copper chain when I had ordered 6 feet! Just one of those things. No warning at all, either, if I hadn't held it up to my 6-foot measuring stick (my boyfriend) I wouldn't even have known I had gotten extra. People are just very nice. The one order I had to complain about (I hardly ever complain, I promise) the woman explained that she employed kids to pack her beads, had probably just missed the problem ones, apologized, and offered to send me some more to replace the broken, sub-par ones that I had received.

It's probably a very exploitable system. Every seller on such a scale as a handmade goods shop wants her customers to be happy, especially in a forum like Etsy where there are direct repercussions if you don't live up to people's expectations...if you don't have 100% positive feedback, immediately people trust you a lot less, and of course you know you've done it - gone through the reviews of something or someone to find the person who thinks they're terrible and find out why. Buyers have been known to just completely make things up, being totally unreasonable, and that reflects not on their credibility in this case, but on the shop owner's. Nobody wants negative feedback, so every Etsy seller asks for communication and a chance to fix a problem before you respond negatively...and I've been reading lately about customer service and how annoying customers often get free stuff. I didn't want to be a squeaky wheel anyway, so I told her right out that A) I wouldn't give her negative feedback anyway, since the problem was so minor, and B) I would give her another chance if it was a fluke (which it seemed like, since my other orders from her were both fine), but she still offered to send me new beads. Long story short, the customer service on Etsy is fantastic.

I was worried about my own practices until I remembered that I've been sending mine in handmade paper boxes with extra origami...I think it's just a thing that handmade sellers naturally do. Nobody asked me for little paper stars or flowers, but when it came time to start packing things, I just made them and put them in.


And on that note! I'll leave you (at 8:45) with the last-bits-of-wire pieces (L-BOW, ahaha! Forgive me if I use that again) for that time of wire-having that just passed.

Gemstones

Yay! Two new items up on Etsy:



and





Told you I'd get to work. I have a few more, and they'll go up throughout the next day or so, and I'll get around to posting them on here.

This post actually has something to talk about! Rather than just a list of pictures. Though the first two things are (surprise!) pictures. I wanted to comment on the gemstone rating system. Look at these two pictures.
























































These are both of kyanite. One is shimmery (chatoyant, for the elitist) and one is transparent. Well, they're both shimmery. But one has, you know...stuff in it. Sadly, I don't have these...I just got the pictures from Etsy.
Gemstones are graded by "quality" - basically the appearance in terms of clarity, color, presence of inclusions and imperfections, etc. The clear Kyanite, for instance is grade AA...and if it were slightly clear-ER, it would be AAA. In general, the clearer a gemstone is, the higher-grade it is. And vice-versa. Of course, both kinds of kyanite up there are absolutely GORGEOUS. But I am of the opinion that often, a clearer gemstone is much less interesting, and therefore much less desirable. I was never a fan of diamonds...I told my boyfriend, if we ever get married, don't get me any diamonds...I mean, they aren't even a COLOR. They might as well be at least SLIGHTLY interesting as well as sparkly and expensive.

For instance, okay, it isn't true of labradorite that the high-quality ones are boring. Labradorite at all different qualities has different mystiques, and I like it when it's flecked and grey only slightly less than when it's clear as water up to its shining layers. But if it were entirely transparent, instead of just transparent to the point of showing awesome color, it would be utterly boring. While this is not true of the clear kyanite in the picture, for instance, most high-quality garnets look like red glass, and are almost indistinguishable from it at first glance.


This is what low-quality, bad garnet looks like. Bad picture, I know...out of focus, but you can still see the glimmeriness. I bought this at the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History (which reminds me...) meaning to cage it somehow. I just really liked the shine that flashes from deep inside it. By contrast, high-quality garnets are completely clear...I mean, they're definitely PRETTY...And it's good to know that that color is made by nature and not a measured mix of chemicals...But if you search Etsy for garnets you'll come up with a lot of similar-looking things, and many of them will be glass that people just put "garnet" in the name because that is the proprietary name of the color. That and quartz - clear quartz is dyed so many colors that you even can find "emerald quartz" - emerald is a PRECIOUS stone, definitely not a quartz, but it can look like it, and trap blissfully unaware amateur gemstone buyers. One exception, though, is rutilated quartz - that's clear quartz with neat inclusions, mostly strands of gold-colored I-don't-know-what. That is rightly valued for (of course) how clear it is, but also how neat the inclusions are. That's more my kind of thing.

I don't mind using gemstones that don't have inclusions, if they're pretty, but the others seem so much more worthwhile. Basically, I've decided that I would much rather work with labradorescent stones and chatoyant stones...the ones that have STUFF in them that looks cool. Labradorite, seraphinite, kyanite, pietersite, tiger-eye. Low-quality of most things, like garnet. And of course, the ones like jasper, that aren't really gems but cool rocks...things are much more interesting when you can't get glass that looks just like it. No diamonds for me. SO BORING. Anyway, that's thoughts.






Also, here's a picture of the one that I just out-of-the-blue sold in person:



This one was the first I did with the stones in the previous post. I'm pretty happy with it...I was worried because the stone is so thick, and I didn't know if I could make it secure. I'm proud of the tiny and intricate work I did there, and all the extra flourishes just add to its stability. Of course, that's at the expense of hiding the stone a bit, but the people who said they would buy it from me didn't seem to mind.

Posting that garnet reminded me of some more pictures I owe this blog. This summer I went to the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History in D.C. for a day. I went to the gem gift shop and walked around, and of course bought some excellent fossils (and that garnet). I have some awesome ammonite to make stuff out of, and I've been meaning to post pictures ever since I got this blog. I keep forgetting. Maybe this will make me remember.