Something Fun in the Works

We're busy acclimatizing to the new Household order around here so things are a little behind here as we all get settled into schedules. I do have a good sized blog post in the works i the form of a product review which is also translated into a special deal for you if you're into that kind of thing.

I've been getting back into a creative head space working in a sketchbook, photographing and getting a new line of ornaments for PeanutButterPie on the go.

I'm hoping to get the review post up by this weekend.

Just for me

There are a few things I've been up to lately that are doing a wonderful job of (to put it all smooshy like) feeding my soul.



Picking raspberries is one. Harvesting the lavender is another. I love the intense blue violet of the tiny blossoms, the smell is divine and a big sniff can undo any amount of stress for even just a second which is so worth it. Also there's a soothing drone in my garden that comes from the bees who come to visit for the lavender and thyme flowers.

Also feeding my soul is the few minutes here and there that I've been able to be creative again. It started for the Peanut's birthday with a Chinese lantern chandelier, a stick a hat on Quack poster and a tiny tissue cake banner. Since then I've been playing around with image transfers.

I've been using images from the Vintage Moth blog which are fantastic by the way. I've almost perfected a transfer technique using liquid sculpey and my mind is whirling around ways to put it to good use. I recently bought some small cradled panels that I want to make into shadow box art pieces which would work well with a little translucent imagery.

So don't let me air out all my soul feeding ways alone; what's been feeding your soul lately?

Library, Laundry (like I'd not have any to do) and starting something new

As the title suggests I've got a library trip planned today, laundry and plans to start a new project.

What is this project you ask? Well it's one that I had on my list from last year and hopefully it's something that I can get done before the Bean makes her debut. Also it's going to allow me to brush up on my book binding since what I'm planning is to make a bedtime book for the Peanut of the Poem Wynken Blynken and Nod by Eugene Field.

It's a poem that my Dad used to recite to me when I was small and something that I want to pass on to the Peanut and the Bean. I've already done a painting for the Peanut's room but I wanted to also have a picture book that we could read and keep.

First on the list of things to get the book done is to decide the size of the book and decide how many pages so that I can cut the paper down to size. Not as simple as measuring and cutting since paper has a grain that makes folding along one side easier than the other, so I'll have to make sure that I keep that in mind when I pull out my paper. To decide on the number of pages for the book I'll be taking a copy of the poem and breaking it up into bite sized chunks, which will also break the poem up into illustrations for each page.

I'm excited about getting started on this in the new space and I'll be posting on my progress too.

What are you working on today?

I need slippers

Something I can just slip on my feet without having to bend down and reach my feet. I'm planning on sneaking out of the house today to pick some up.

Yesterday I cleared off the plastic folding table that has been my work table for a year now. The husband and I went on a little after holiday shopping spree and picked up some stainless steel tables, a new storage shelf and one or two other things from Ikea.

A part of me wishes that I had the time and the resources to source second hand stuff to furnish my work space with. But I don't and I usually end up succumbing to the call of the Ikea catalogue. What we have tight now are the bare bones of what we would ultimately like to have the space look like, perhaps I'll keep my eyes peeled for some of those surprise vintage/ second hand finds to add to the space. It's half assembled and there are boxes, and stacks of supplies everywhere. By the end of the week I'm hoping that it will be set up and all the extraneous furniture will be out.

After that it'll be all about keeping it organized so that I'm not moving into the kitchen to do some painting.

What reorganizing project are you working on for the new year?

and it seems like it looks better in life

I mentioned in my post this morning that I would include pictures of the curtain that it took me two years to complete.

Done Done Done

And it only took me two years to do it.

When we moved from our one bedroom apartment into the two bedroom I got it in my head that I had to make the Peanut a curtain for her new bedroom. So I set out, found a ready made curtain that fit the colour choices for her room and pulled out the embroidery thread. Back then the Peanut was gaga for ladybugs so I decided that I would hand sew random ladybugs all along the bottom of the curtain. She still likes ladybugs just not as passionately as she loves her dinosaurs (and there is no way I'm starting a new curtain with dinosaurs at this stage in the game).

I'll be honest, I thought I'd be way more focused on getting it done but things popped up, and I'd set it down for a few weeks and the weeks would turn into months and then I'd pick it up again and add a few more bugs and the cycle would continue. Until a week ago when I decided that it was so close to being done that I would make a final push. Last night I tied the last french knot into the final ladybug and pronounced it finished.

We'll be hanging the puppy up in her room today (I'll post pictures once it's up). It's not the same room that we started with but it'll fit just fine and it's going to look so much better than the dark blue denim that I've had hanging there to block out the light for the last two years as a stop gap measure. It feels good to get it finished.

Work in Progress

I splurged a little bit on my shopping trip last weekend and picked up a few new colours of glass paint. The plan today is to pull them out and give them a test drive.

With the holidays closing in and holiday shopping winding down I'm looking at changing my marketing strategy for our ornaments. I'll be spending some time researching for photo shoots and and working on a change in item descriptions.

Some where in there I'll be putting the Peanut on gingerbread man duty. Since I'm not really supposed to be eating all those yummy cookies that I usually like to bake this time of year I've narrowed my baking list down to one type of cookie ant gingerbread men it is. Also on the list is filling out our holiday/ new year cards.

And of course there will also be laundry (because I have to do at least one load) What do you have on your list today?

Work in Progress Wednesday

We have a busy day today. I'm getting ready for January in the shop, going through and making some changes in my tags to reflect the merchandising themes that suit PeanutButterPie and planning what I can add to the mix as well.

That means a little fun for me, since I'll get to carve a few new blocks and start some paintings again. The image to the right is a block I'm working on right now. I'm a little excited about the texture in the block and already planning how make sure it stays a part of the image once I transfer it onto glass. It's going to have to come down to a mix of timing and pigment/paint mix. If you can't tell I'm rubbing my hands together in mad scientist like glee.

Also on the agenda? Laundry of course. I don't think I've posted a single work in progress that hasn't included laundry. It's a never ending job. A trip to the bank and then the mall for the Peanut to play and and early dinner out before we hit the hospital for the Prenatal tour. We're taking the Peanut so that when it's time for her sister to come out and join us the whole experience will be a little less scary for her. If she knows where it is that Momma's going to be and where she'll be coming to meet the Bean perhaps she'll feel a little less stress about all of the big changes that come with becoming the big sister.

What's on your list for today? Are you already looking ahead for the new year? Any big plans?

Lots to do

today. I'm in the midst of laundry the folding and the washing kind. Beds need to be changed and chocolate needs to be acquired for the advent calendar which needs to be hung.

Other than that today I am focusing on setting up a listing for personalizing options for the ornaments which means that I'll be personalizing some ornaments and photographing so I've got fingers crossed for good light today. On my mind will be the next steps to take in the holiday push. This weekend was a good start but I want to keep it going.

Also on the to do list; a 5 question feature post for the Friday. I received my second Etsy Baby Shower gift the other day and I'll be photographing that as well for the feature.

What are you doing today?

It's all in the learing curve

OK, so I've written and rewritten this post a few times. The first drafts were all very "woe is me" "everything sucks", you know, the I'm not happy kind of posts.

To be honest I felt a little despondent about the lack of sales at PeanutButterPie this weekend and to be very honest I just wanted to sulk a little bit. Fortunately for you, sulking isn't an activity that I indulge in for very long at any given time and once I was able to type out the "Oh Woes" and the "Alack a days" I got over it. Then I decided to focus on what I did to get ready for my sales event, what was successful and what wasn't. I also want to look at why and what I can do next time around.

Going into this sale weekend I did some groundwork for promoting by writing about the sale in my blog, on my facebook and facebook fanpage and adding my shop link to a few sites that were linking to sales over the weekend. I made use of Etsy on Sale and Etsy Coupons to put my sale on and to promote it as well. During the sale I tweeted*, I facebooked and participated in the Etsy forums and I visited and commented on my own blog lists in the hopes of bringing some more traffic to my shop. (*keep in mind that when I say tweeted I did not blast spam continuously over the course of the weekend but retweeted other artist's sales, carried on tweetversations, posted links to items of interest and posted about my families tradition of giving a new ornament to put on the tree every year in between linking to items in my shop)

To look at GA it all worked to one degree or another. This weekend I had a record number of page views and unique visits. If I compare this month with last months views in PeanutButterPie, my traffic was more than doubled with the bulk of visits made over last weekend. Looking at this last weekend compared to the weekend before, visits were up 80%. That's a big jump in visitors. Enormous, really. Monstrous. When you look at it that way it's something to be proud of.

So out of all the promotion steps I took what worked the best? According to GA the bulk of my page views were made from referring sites. These would be the visits that were made by clicking on the links to my sale on the Blogs that I mentioned above, twitter, facebook, my blog and the Etsy Apps Etsy on Sale and Etsy Coupons. The rest of of the traffic sources were made via what GA classifies as direct traffic which on Etsy could come from visitors clicking on their favourites, visiting treasuries or from the Etsy forums. Overall, the least productive steps I took involved my own blog posts. Traffic sources from this blog and others made up only 1% of all visits. Of course I still need to go into GA and look at the traffic on my blog and the number of clicks the links to the sale received. They could have been lumped into the direct traffic numbers on my shops analytics in which case they may not be as concerning as I think.

What I want to focus on for next time is focusing my promoting on my target market. The question is who is that?

Did you do a promotion this weekend? How did it go? What did you learn. Please feel free to share, if we pool our information and thoughts our next event can be even better right?

Boxes

I'm making boxes and boxes and boxes. I created my own template based on one that I found on Mirkwood Designs. Because I want to package our ornaments into special boxes I used the template for the playing card box as a reference and then created my own template in InDesign. Last night I cut out a few and other than not realizing that my printer cut off a small section of one of the ends making the three boxes I made last night a little useless (until I attach prosthetic lids that is) they look fantastic.

I'll be wrapping our ornaments into tissue and sliding them into their boxes for mailing when they find homes. And the best part? The boxes are small enough that they'll fit into cushioned envelopes which means that I'll be able to keep shipping costs down. The other best part? I get to personalize the boxes with one of my hand carved stamps making them easily give-able as they are; instant gift wrapping! I have a few things to do to finish them off, stickers for sealing the one end for one and care inserts for the ornaments for inside. It's been a pretty good weekend so far.

I'll share pictures of the boxes tomorrow along with news of the Black Friday Pre-sale offer that I'm offering to my facebook fanpage followers click the link to favourite my page and get in on some early bird action; or you can wait until Black Friday when I put our ornament sets on sale, or Cyber Monday when the rest of the shop follows suit.

Just so I'm not posting without a pretty picture, here's one from my early morning walk yesterday. It would have made a great accompaniment with the word picture I posted yesterday but since a word picture is just that I'll share it here instead.

Work in progress

There's been lots of stuff going on over here. Yesterday was a little on the crap-tastic side and I'm hoping that today makes up for it.

On my to do list today:

Ornaments, we'll be soldering some of the newest tonight. Yesterday (before things got all wahoonie shaped) I used my newest hand carved stamp on a new batch of ornaments. As with all creative projects the brain starts working overtime and new project ideas have popped into my head. I've talked to the husband about one or two and we'll be working on some prototypes soonish. We've also been in contact with one of our favourite gift shops about possibly carrying our ornaments during the holiday season. It's a wholesale deal and I'll be working on packaging and display for that over the weekend; something that has the shop name attached...

Attacking the mess that is the Peanuts' arts and crafts corner; or you know, leaving it for another day. It's an avalanche waiting to happen and is in dire dire dire need of purging.

Laundry, or rewashing some of the laundry. One of our sheets blew up over the clothes line and collected a little extra dirt the other day.

What are you working in today?

no pain no gain

Yesterday I sweated in the heat of our living room window while bending and squatting and kneeling in all sorts of non-pregnant friendly poses in order to photograph the next batch of ornaments for PeanutButterPie. I'll be honest. I was not comfortable in the very least. In fact I'm sure that the Peanut was starting to get a little worried about her Mama with all the moaning and gasping and grunting I was doing. It seems I'm going to have to find a new set up for my product shots or I'll be making a whine filled post each time I set up the tree and lights.

On the plus side I'm fairly pleased with the shots I got and I've started listing the new ornaments already.



In other news I was up bright and early at 4:30 this morning after sleeping fairly soundly most of the night with a seriously full bladder and a dancing bean. I'll be headed for a mid morning nap soon to head off the grumpies and make sure I'm rested and refreshed for the foiling and soldering marathon the Husband has planned for tonight; which means there's another photo shoot in my future

Work in Progress

While I'm waiting for the next batch of soldering and cleaned ornaments I'm also keeping busy making more to add to the queue. Today's batch are Solsticey in theme but will also look beautiful on any tree.

I used deep amethyst and sapphire colours today with the addition of interference gold and macro pearl pigments. I like the gold because of the richness it and the pearl has a feel of snowfall.

in the line up waiting for their turn for taping and soldering are now some Frosty Snowflake, Oak Leaf and Acorns, Hearts and now the Yule Suns. Over the weekend I did a little playing with some other ideas but I'm not sure that they worked the way I wanted them to. I'm setting them aside to revisit when I have a fresh eye.

What are you working on today?

Back to Business

Thankfully it's the kind of business that I love to do. I spent part of yesterday cleaning off the latest ornaments to come of the husband's soldering bench. The good news is that they look fantastic. The not so good news is that the cleaning solution we are using to clean off the rosin flux isn't as strong as we'd like, and cleaning takes a long long long long time. Since our other option is a little too toxic for me to handle with the Bean in her major brain growing stage, this part of the cleaning process will fall to the Husband. I'll be dong the polishing and getting ready for documenting and listing.

We've had a huge wave of views to the shop with the introduction of the line, and even had one of the ornaments included in a snowflake themed treasury! For my part, I've been tweeting about the ornaments and spreading the word about them through some Project Wonderful advertising and facebook. The next step is to get them out into the world; because as beautiful as they look in the listing photographs, they really knock your socks off in person.

It's the iridescent and interference pigments that do it, showing off those effects in a photograph is tricky in the best circumstances and almost impossible in others; especially for some of the lighter coloured ornaments. I'm summoning up the courage to approach a few brick and mortar stores with some of our treasures to see if they would like to carry some of them for the holiday season.

Things come together in stages

So, some back story to our project seems to be in order.

The original idea was to incorporate the hand sewn embellished art that I was using for greeting cards. The plan was to create 1" x 3" hand sewn water colours sandwiched between glass microscope slides and soldered.

As with most ideas, this one expanded in the brainstorming process into something that could be personalized, something that was more elaborate and on and on and on. Of course the brainstorming ideas became more and more fantastic so there was some reigning in. Then came the part where I started to put some of my ideas to work. Well, I tried to put them to work but with one thing or another the ideas didn't quite mesh with the physical objects. What we had originally planned was put on the back burner while I put my old noggin towards figuring out a solution.

One day while I was re-organizing my supplies (something I do a few times a year to get my workspace cleaned off and to help jump start my desire to make things) I came across the stash of glass paints that I'd used to decorate wine glasses for gifts one year. I had glass slides and I had glass paint, I could do something with them both (once again making the whole having to clean my workspace up worth while).

tIn the early stages of a new project I like to play around with materials to see what works, what works best and what isn't really working at all. In this case I started painting directly onto the glass slides that make up the ornaments. I used an applicator bottle and drew trees, and snowflakes onto the slides and squished them together creating some interesting bubbles and shrinkage. I waited for the paint to dry and then sandwiched them giving me a more predictable finish. Then I smeared paint onto the slides and drew into the tacky finish before sandwiching; interesting but not a graphic as I wanted.

Then I got the idea to try stamping into the glass paint. Being a closet print maker; the idea to carve my own relief blocks for use in this project (as well as for greeting cards and possibly for gift wrapping our holiday gifts or making gift tags) was naturally the next step. Also having a stash of safety-cut print making blocks was a great incentive.

I decided to use stamps that I had carved myself to keep my designs as unique as possible. I do have a few bought stamps that I have used on some of the pieces along with my own designs but the bulk of the designs are mine. I've added some photos of the stamps I've carved and used for you to look at.

The launch date for the new line is right round the corner. I've been busy getting listing descriptions, materials and shipping info ready to upload on Monday. I'll be starting with a about 5 ornaments and then listing a few more every other day or so. In addition, we'll be looking for brick and mortar selling opportunities as well.

This stage of the process is daunting, it's like taking that giant leap into the unknown, the only thing to do is to take a deep breath and dive.

Not as easy as I thought it would be

spending the morning setting up and shooting product shots that is.

It seems that the bulge in the belly area isn't as flexible and easy to maneuver around as I expected. Also getting up and down off the floor to get nice close ups that show off the iridescent qualities and the details of each ornament was more of a chore than I'd considered it would be. Have I mentioned that pregnancy is uncomfortable?

So anyway, what you're seeing are some of the final finished pieces from the collaborative work I'm doing with the husband; holiday ornaments to adorn your tree. I'll be giving you all a sneak peak of some of the individual pieces from today's photo shoot over the rest of the week.

Up next on the to do list, other than editing all the photographs I took today is writing copy so I can start listing for next week. Oh and hitting up the library for some Peanut time.

on my To Do List

This week is going to be heavy, on the getting things ready for the big launch side of things. The plan is to get some stylish photography, I have some props that I'll be pulling out for that. Also on the list is packaging so that I can include those in the photo shoot.

I'll also be working on product descriptions and shipping details. Our goal is to start listing our new line next week; Canadian Thanksgiving which is when we'll be picking names for our holiday gifting. That means holiday gift shopping will be on my mind.

Also up this week is more production. The husband has a stack of soldering to do and I'll be adding the copper foil so he can do his part.

In the midst of all this we've started our Halloween decorating and I'm hoping to show you a little of what we've done around here; including the latest addition; our disco glitter skeleton. The goal is to post every day up until Saturday when we'll be visiting the Doctor to check in on the Bean and heading out to my niece's place to enjoy some thanksgiving yumminess; well as much as I can with the limited amounts of stuffing, potatoes and dessert that I'm allowed to eat with the GD. What's on your list for the week?

A thousand Words

Work in progress edition

Tickety -Boo

The Husband and I have set up a release date for our co-operative project. We have a handful of tree ornament/sun catchers in near completion and on the to do list is packaging, photographing and shipping research. Not to mention description writing, tagging and pricing that will cover all the photographing, packaging and shipping. On top of all that, I have the Peanut to occupy; unfortunately she's spending an obscene amount of time sitting in front of the TV. So wish me luck in the balancing act.

I'd like to say that things are going tickety-boo but I'll maybe save that phrase for once the release is all done and I'm adding things to the shop. I don't want to jinx myself.

Today I'm researching boxes for shipping. On my mind? buying boxes vs making my own. I've come across some excellent templates that I can adjust to make the size of box that would be perfect for shipping the ornaments, my fears are that they won't be sturdy enough and that making my own boxes will be too time consuming and expensive. If I buy boxes that takes a lot of work of my plate but the boxes will be slightly too big for the ornaments (not really a bad thing packing wise as the ornaments will have added cushion to keep them safe) and won't fit into the dreaded slot of doom at Canada Post (not such a good thing because that will raise shipping prices considerably which is something that I've wrestled with since day one on Etsy)

I'm also feeling a little guilty about all these photographless posts. I promise some images soon.