Holiday Chainmaille Kits - these Christmas Trees are fast and fun gifts!

I have listed some chainmaille kits in my supply shop. Each kit can be assembled into 1 Christmas Tree pendant, with either multicolored "ornaments" or red ones:

An example of one of the multicolored kits is on the left, and the assembled pendant on the right. These pendants are almost 2 inches tall (1-7/8").

In addition to the enameled copper jumprings (which I cut and polished), each kit contains pictorial instructions for assembly - anyone familiar with Japanese maille will have no problem creating this pendant. (The instructions aren't intended to teach chainmaille techniques - just the pattern for this particular J-maille tree).

These can be assembled quickly, and make terrific teacher gifts, hostess gifts; just hang them from some ribbon, chain, leather - whatever! Anyone who appreciates festive holiday jewelry will love these!

The kits are available here.

New Picasso Glass Items Listed

I've been busily listing items over in my Etsy Supply Shop, including these pieces of Picasso-style dichroic glass:

 Picasso-style dichroic glass cabochon

I used a cabochon from this same glass slab to create this copper bracelet:

Picasso-style glass, Swarovski crystal, and copper bracelet - available on Etsy

and this pendant:

Picasso-style teardrop-shaped pendant

This one has a very generous bail attached, so it's ready to hang from ribbon, leather, chain, etc. - these pieces are so vibrant and colorful that they easily stand alone!

I'll be posting more glass cabs and pendants soon; in the meantime, anyone have any tips on how to take better pics of dichroic glass? It's so pretty, but hard to photograph because the colors shift as the light changes and moves - I can never capture its true beauty! Open to suggestions, here - thanks in advance!

New Enamel Components

Yesterday I finished a set of 10 matching pink and purple square enamel components, with copper embellishments:

pink and purple enamel components

These components/connectors are 3/4 inch square, with holes in each corner. They have been fired multiple times, and for the last firing, I embedded little scraps of copper wire from my workbench in the last layer of enamel. Since these are all handmade, my embellishing and color patterns differ a little from piece to piece, but they all look like a set, right? They remind me of confetti and party favors!

even the backs are pretty!

A few years ago, I made a set of these in blue and green, and then assembled them into a bracelet (and matching earrings:

These purple and pink connectors/components are available individually on Etsy!

I'm having a sad day

After the big storm last night, I was worried about my emerging butterflies.

I rushed out this morning to check on them, still in my pajamas.

This one was the closest to the back door; he's the one that was not quite as far along in the emergence:

He looks a little damp and weather-beaten, but intact.

Unfortunately, the other one didn't fare as well:

His attachment to the siding was all that remained intact - so I started to hunt for the rest of his chrysalis.

I found this after a little searching, a few feet away from the attachment.

Then I found a piece of wing and some more chrysalis

A few more feet away, I found the rest of the butterfly.

I flipped it over to take another photo.

So, I'm already sad, but then I arrive at the bead shop, and as I'm taking Bailey for his first walk of the day, I find this, a few doors down from my shop:

Someone stepped on my grasshopper nymph.

Now I'm going to be sad all day.

Shop updates

I'm still busy, stocking my Etsy supply shop with handmade supplies. It takes a long time from start to finish, including the photography and listing process!

Right now, my supply shop has 65 listings, which represent well over 200 items, now that the "listings variations" option allows us to create one listing with multiple variations (such as size, quantity, color, # of holes, etc.)

Here's an example of one of my listings for enameled beads:

These are some antiqued hammered copper washers:

And here are some etched sand dollars:

I also got all my enamels out, got my enameling station set up to go on Saturday - did everything except actually fire up the torch. That will happen tomorrow! So look for more enameled beads, headpins, and other components in my shop in the days and weeks to come.

I hope if you're looking for handmade components for your designs, you'll take a look at my supply shop!

And as far as my jewelry shops go, I haven't had much time for jewelry design, what with trying to get supplies made, and teaching classes at the shop, but, after a blog post by (and subsequent private convo with) my friend Christine, I decided to revisit the issue of "pendant vs. necklace". I enjoy making pendants, and figured that designers would want to buy them "as is," so that they would have all their creative options wide open when working with the pendant. In the bead shop, my pendants sell well, but on Etsy, not so much. I have heard this discussion so many times before - pendants don't sell well, you need to turn them into necklaces, folks don't know what to do with them, yada yada yada. But I held firm, and left them as pendants.

On Saturday, I decided to take 3 of them, and turn them into necklaces, list them, and just see what happens.

Here are my finished necklaces:

Cobalt Blue & Copper Necklace, available on Etsy

Mixed Metals Woven Pendant on Sterling Chain, available on Etsy

Azurite and Malachite on Copper and Vintaj Natural Brass, available on Zibbet

So that's the status of my online shops.

Looking forward to some torch work tomorrow; I also have a full run ready for the kiln as soon as I walk in the door, so that's my first order of business, then the torch. I'm a little nervous about the torch; it's been about a year since I did any torch work, and I dread starting the learning curve over again! I just want to get in there and be perfect! No Mistakes! Is that asking too much???

Back to Nature

It's been a couple of weeks since I wrote about the butterfly chrysalises that are covering the back of my house.

At the time, I speculated about how long the chrysalis stage lasts; I could have looked it up, but I didn't.

A trip out on the deck this weekend proved my speculation wrong. Seems like after several weeks in the chrysalis, the butterfly starts to slowly emerge:

Emerging Gulf Fritillary butterfly, October 3, 2013

I discovered this one on October 2 in the evening; I rushed home from work with the camera on October 3, figuring it would be long gone, but it essentially looked the same. Every so often, it wiggled its antennae at me. 

Here's the same chrysalis from another angle:

Emerging Gulf Fritillary butterfly, October 3, 2013

At first, I thought this emergence must happen fairly quickly, because the butterfly seems so vulnerable like this, and must be hungry, right? So I'd race out to check it in the morning, then race home to check in the evening. But the process must take way longer than I thought, because here is the same chrysalis this morning:

Emerging Gulf Fritillary butterfly, October 7, 2013

Here is another emerging butterfly:

Emerging Gulf Fritillary butterfly, October 7, 2013

This one isn't quite as far along; it's antennae aren't out yet, and only a small amount of wing is visible.

Here is an empty chrysalis, showing the split down the middle where the butterfly emerged:

Empty Gulf Frittilary Chrysalis

Here is a chrysalis that hasn't started to open yet:

 Chrysalis ready for emergence

And here are some caterpillars that I think died sometime during pupation; I can see where the chrysalis just started to form, but then the process stopped, and now, several weeks later, the caterpillars are just hanging there, dessicating:

And this is a mystery visitor that surprised me when I opened the back door this morning:

This is about 6 inches above my head, right as I open my back door - that's the outside on the left of the door frame, and the kitchen on the right.


This big black and white butterfly really startled me; he was slowly flapping his wings, and just hanging onto that chrysalis. At first, my brain processed it as a freshly emerged butterfly; his wings were even wet! But then I realized that a) he's not orange. Not a gulf fritillary at all. And b) the chrysalis he's hanging onto is still maturing, and not ready to open yet.

This pretty visitor ignored me and Bailey as we went in and out, opening and closing the door, and flew away after about an hour.

This is a weed that randomly decided to grow in a pot of ivy on my deck:

 Pretty deck weed

It has 2 different colors of flowers - pink and purple, and they remind me of Gloxinia, although that is certainly not what this is:

Purple deck weed flower

Pink deck weed flower

more purple deck weed flowers

And here is a visitor outside the bead shop last week:

All 3 pics are the same guy - he's at least 3 inches long, and a beautiful grass green (as in the first photo), and some sort of grasshopper. My best guess is that he's actually a grasshopper nymph, the immature form that develops from the egg, before multiple molts occur, resulting in the mature adult grasshopper. But I'm just guessing, based on the smoothness of the body and the lack of features I normally associate with adult forms.

He hung around for a couple of days. During the first day, I actually caught him and carried him down to the hedges, away from all the stores and people, because I know how some folks like to squash bugs. But he was back the next day, so I decided to leave him alone.

It's still in the upper 80s here, but the weathermen (at least on our local ABC station) are calling the forecast for tomorrow "Cold", as it will only be in the 60's. Yay! Can't wait. Tired of the hot and muggies! I know you guys north of here are really feeling us, with our "cold snap" heading in tomorrow. The weather dude even suggested we take a jacket with us tomorrow. Yeah, that'll happen. Thanks, weather dude!

edited 8:40 PM, 10/7/13
The cold front is moving through, and it is absolutely pouring buckets and buckets of rain. So hard. With loud booming thunder, which is freaking Bailey out. I am worried that all this hard rain, sluicing down the aides of the house, will damage all my butterfly chrysalises! Though I imagine eons of evolution has made them able to withstand storms. But I'm still worried, and can't wait to check on them in the morning.

The Emperor's New Clothes

Yesterday, Etsy announced that it is changing their definition of "handmade."

They aren't changing THE definition of handmade, because they can't. But they have decided that as far as they are concerned, it doesn't mean what most of think it does.

According to Etsy, handmade products no longer have to be made by hand.

?

Here are the new guidelines:

• Etsy sellers can now hire people and collaborate from different locations.
• Etsy sellers can now use shipping or fulfillment services, but the seller is responsible for the customer experience. (i.e. drop shipping is now allowed)
• With approval,  Etsy sellers can work with outside manufacturers to help produce their designs
• If  Etsy sellers work with other people or manufacturers to create their items, they need to share that information on their About page.
• Re-selling — purchasing a new, finished product you had no role in creating and selling it to someone else unchanged — is still not allowed. 

Sellers took to the forums yesterday to discuss what this all means, and the upshot is, Time will Tell.

But "Single Makers", as we are now known, are probably a dying breed on Etsy.

If an artisan starts subbing out work, and employing manufacturing processes, the products are really no longer handmade, are they?

And "transparency" is the new buzzword at Etsy - with an apparently Pollyanna sort of vision that resellers and others who sub out their work will step forward and self-identify, so that buyers can locate truly handmade items if they wish.

Ignoring the fact that truly handmade items canNOT compete financially in the marketplace with manufactured items, information about the process behind a seller's production will be buried on their "About" page, which hardly anyone reads. I learned 20 years ago that when a corporation starts talking about "transparency," it means they have something to hide.

Unlike the Emperor, whose loyal subjects believe the edicts about his new clothes, Etsy sellers, if the forums are representative, don't see this as the positive step that Etsy does, and aren't falling for any of this.

Etsy can redefine handmade, but that doesn't make it so. You can call "steam" "water" if you like, but if you're dying of thirst in the desert, try drinking a big, tall glass of steam, and let me know how your thirst is.

Steam is water, right?

One of the major issues presented by this new "definition" of handmade, aside from the financial one (who can compete with products manufactured where material and labor costs are much, much lower than the US?), is the Search issue.

Etsy switched from a recency-based Search algorithm to a relevancy-based one awhile back. What does this mean? Whereas the old Etsy search favored whatever item had most recently been listed, the new search supposedly favors the item that has the most relevant keywords in its title and tags. Problem? This is easily gamed, since sellers pick their own keywords, and when the search term queried returns 250,000 or 25,000 items with the same relevant keywords, you know what happens? The search algorithm reverts from relevancy back to recency. So if a factory-manufactured product's seller uses the same keywords for, say, a "statement necklace" that I do, I am never going to be found in search, because I can only afford to renew an item every so often with my limited listing budget, but factory concerns (may I please call them what they are: "resellers"?) can afford to list and renew endlessly, to stay at the front of the search queue, burying everyone else. Plus, they often have bots to do this renewal for them. Me? No bots. Wish I had a bot!

It looks to many of us that the "single maker" is being pushed aside in favor of bigger operations, which represent more income for Etsy. Nothing wrong with that business plan, for Etsy, anyway.

What does this change mean for me? I'm not sure.

Sales in my Etsy jewelry shop are better than ever this year, and I have been busting my butt to stock my Etsy supply shop, in an effort to reach a larger marker. Etsy has such good traffic, it's hard to think about rebuilding somewhere smaller. But if that traffic no longer can find me on Etsy, it becomes a moot point.

So I opened a Zibbet shop yesterday. Along with a lot of fellow Etsy members, apparently (Zibbet tweeted last night about the huge influx of sellers from Etsy opening Zibbet shops following Etsy's announcement yesterday.)

It's always hard learning something new, but Zibbet is surprisingly easy to figure out, and has so many features that we have been asking for on Etsy for years (without success.) They have an Etsy importer, so you can actually basically import your listings from Etsy straight into your Zibbet shop. Only a few tweaks needed to get the imported listed live. They have no listing fees and no sales commission. You heard me. Unlimited number of shop sections. Up to 8 product photos per listing. And more. Plus, no resellers. Ever.

Zibbet is a fast-growing online marketplace, and they have pledged to their growing number of handmade sellers to NEVER open their doors to resellers and factory-made items. But even as Zibbet grows, we cannot prosper without buyers, so I hope my lovely customers will follow me to Zibbet!

I've decided to migrate my current Etsy listings over to Zibbet as they expire. So far, I have one item listed. It looks lonely, and I want to retake the photos, but it's a start. I have a couple of listings expiring tomorrow, so I'll put them up over at Zibbet, and see what happens. The buyer base is much smaller, so I'm not sure what to expect in the way of views and sales.

I'm going to leave my supply shop on Etsy for now. See what happens. Supplies have always done well on Etsy, so I hope that continues.

If you sell on Etsy, what did you think of yesterday's announcement (all sellers received an e-mail outlining the changes.) What is your plan, moving forward?