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.

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!

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.

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?

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.