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.