Pendants,chains and family

We hit an Etsy milestone this past week when we made our 1000th sale! It was a goal we hoped to reach by the end of the year and it came in mid October. We were put over the top with a huge sale to a lovely woman in California that really made our week.
I've been refocusing on pendants. It is a common discussion amongst jewelers as to whether to sell a pendant alone or on a chain. So I decided to sell some pendants that are just on the simple black cord that adds just about nothing to the cost of the pendant and have a sterling silver chain with our handmade clasp available in our shop as well that you can purchase if you want a chain too. Surprisingly the chain has been selling quite well on it's own and the pendants have been selling well without the chain. I haven't had a customer yet purchase a chain to go with one of our pendants too.



This is our Sterling Silver Celtic Heart and Spirals Pendant .

This is the Sterling Silver Flat Cable Chain with Handmade Clasp.

The Steaming Cup o Joe with Garnet Pendant...

and the Dragonfly Wirework with Saphire Blue Sterling Silver Pendant.


We have been having lots of family visit us the past two weeks. It's been a lot of fun.Here are cousins Peter, Victoria and baby Harry. Peter appears to be contemplating his empty beverage and Nick is trying to scare Harry.

SupermessyMax

Cousins hugging (Max and Harry)

Upside down swinging Henry who insisted that I take his picture.

More Harry and M.ax at the park

Grandma June and the boys

Nick the elder,crazyface Nick and cousin Peter

A slow haggard morning still in my Spongebob jammies with all the boys.

Max picking a winner, Henry picking his toes, and Harry wondering how he ended up in this crazy place.

We had Henry take this picture. He was sitting on the couch which increased the already skewed childsize angle and managed to emphasize all our middle aged double chins except for Nick's cleverly concealed by his beard.

Aunt Betsy in the middle of couch mayhem.

Max delighted over his pumkin "no man" (snowman)

Around the dinner table admiring Henry's large dirty feet.

Pliers and plants

After destroying 2 pairs of pliers ,Nick, my tool obsessed and loving husband gave me a stronger pair. But those left a nasty burred edge on all the wire. So he went off into his shop the other day and emerged with these newly modified heavy duty pliers that now give me the almost perfect cut. I say "almost" only because it still leaves the tiniest of raised lines but it is really a huge improvement and a pleasure to work with. I love that guy!

Here it is in action.

The results! Notice the clean edge.

What the old pliers used to do. See the pointy angled edge. Well good bye jagged ugly edge.

More hot plier action

A clean finish.

And now for some fall photos from around the homestead...

Sweet Max

Henry emerging from the barn where he goes to escape from his brother and play with the big boy trains.

Happy Max

A typical bramble of honeysuckle berries,poison oak,blackberry brambles,roses and other assorted weeds. Yummy goat food.

This beautiful bright red and shiny plant is the evil poison oak which flourishes on our land.But it's so pretty.

One of the flowers that continues to return each year despite my neglect. A carnation of some sort I believe.

Fidel relaxing

Fame and fun

So I think I'll just shut the heck up and the next time I am whining about lack of sales y'all can come kick my butt. Really.
Things slowly picked up in online sales through Etsy after that last weekend and then we had a record breaking weekend at the Church Fair at the Fall Festival.
One of the best things that happened was when dear friend Amy brought over her out of town visitors to say hello. Her friend (whose name I sadly can't remember) said " Do you sell on Etsy? I recognize your jewelry."
I felt so famous! Someone actually shops and browses on Etsy and recognized our jewelry! My ego has been sufficiently stroked once again.
It was fun selling in our hometown ( the biggest town we live close to) and seeing all the friends and acquaintances we've acquired. The park in the middle of the festival was overcrowded with kids including mine and it was quite the challenge keeping an eye on both my tasmanian devils spinning off in opposite directions at all times while Nick was selling in the booth (or the "tent" as Henry calls it.) At one point Max had yakisoba noodles hanging out of his mouth and was swinging them from side to side slapping his big chubby cheeks while coming towards customers and telling them he was eating "noonoos" . He later rolled around in the sand at the park using the noodle slime as an adhesive.

These are my latest creation-Tangle Dangle Vining Spirals Earrings. Another design that came to me as I was laying in bed waiting for Henry to fall asleep.(Yep, I'm one of those crazy lunatic parents that still lays with her kid in his bed until he falls asleep. I won't reveal any of our other coddling parenting techniques that will damage our children forever.)
I sold the first pair I listed this morning on Etsy.
I didn't go to the Saturday Market today. I started coming down with a cold on Thursday night which is still draining all my vital energy. I knew it would be cold and miserable and probably kill my feeble old body if I did the market today. Also there was some sort of big deal football game in Eugene today that involved the entire ESPN network setting up camp at the stadium and broadcasting all day from there. That meant the entire town would be either at the game or watching it all day long making sales likely to be poor at the hippy craft market. It was very liberating to not go and sleep in. I put a lot of energy into Etsy and we made a significant amount of sales today anyway- so there!
All is well.... until the next hormonal fluctuation.

Doubt and stuff

This weekend has been a reminder not to get too cocky and expect success. The weather was perfect, the football game had a perfect late kickoff time of 4pm and it seemed like it would be a good weekend at the market. Wrong wrong wrong.
I've done better in the rain. Then to top it off and push the self doubt to completion we sold absolutely nothing online for two days all weekend. nada, zilch,big fat zero. Big losers. The self employment and self esteem roller coaster took the downhill plunge. That's like a "self" sandwich between employment and esteem all rolled into one tasteless bitter disappointing snack. Perhaps I'm being a bit dramatic.
So I am holding off on the giant glass supplies order I was about to make until I feel confident again that I will indeed be selling lots of stuff soon.
This upcoming weekend is the Corvallis Fall Festival. We will once again be selling in our regular pretty good spot across from the "real" Fall Festival at the First Christian Church Craft Fair that cleverly takes place on the same weekend and much to the ire of the "real" Fall Festival is almost impossible to discern from the "real" Fall Festival where the participants pay significantly more in fees for the privilege of being juried "artists". (The word "artist" said in snooty, self righteous tone.) My expectations are now properly lowered for the weekend sales.

We added the Aluminum Widget Pendant and these Black Stone and Fresh Water Pearl Swirl Earrings to our Etsy shop .

And now on to the real purpose in living and the reason we try to sell all this stuff so we can have money to buy our little imps more crap.

Torturing your brother!

Yikes!

Loving your brother!


The girls are back!The brown one is Grover who is actually a boy.

Mama Llama ,their serious protector.

The amazing path that our neighbor Chris made through our jungle. The goats are doing an impressive job destroying all the blackberries,poison oak,and general overgrowth of our poorly maintained property.They are like little tractors tearing it all down and we love them for it.

Henry the grape picker. The only fruit he will eat and only if it is from our vines.

This is what happens when you let a pumpkin grow throw the chicken wire fencing that we put around the bed to stop the deer from eating it.

The end of blackberry season. I was wrong. Actually henry will eat blackberries too if he picks them or demands I pick them for him.

"Tight" Jewelry

This past weekend was the Eugene Celebration. Sales vary greatly from year to year on this wekend. Many regular market vendors take the weekend off because they feel there is just too much competition with all the other stuff going on in town. Not to mention you have to set up an hour earlier than normal to get out of the way for the big annual parade that goes right past the market. But this year they wisely planned it on a weekend that there were no football games. (The 12:30 kickoff Ducks football games are usually the death of fall sales at the market. ) I did suprisingly well and sold more than the usual amount of these lovely Swirly Girly Princess Mirrors.
I was also reminded again of what an old fart I am. Apparently our jewelry is "tight". This phrase has been repeated quite a few times by the young hip kids who have come by the booth lately. I assume that they mean it is "cool", "sweet", "da kind","chronic" or very nice. When did "tight" become the new cool word? And is it like a tight joint? A tight music jam?A well formed buttocks? Or something from a scene in "High School Musical"?
I was also reminded of my old age when looking through a music magazine a few months ago. It had a photo of a rock show and all the people in the audience were holding up their glowing cell phones in the dark facing the band at the end of the show. In my day we held up our bic lighters to declare our delight and desire for an encore. (And we damn well liked it sonny.)

I digress...
Etsy continues to please us with constant regular sales and what appears to be the beginning of Christmas shopping. We sold a lot of these Cobalt Iridescent Blue Glass earrings.

and the matching Cobalt Blue Big Iridescent Pendant

and more of these Sterling Silver Celtic Budding Spiral Earrings which have become my favorite everyday earring lately.

This pendant has been selling really well too. The Celtic Budding Spiral Large Light Weight Aluminum Pendant. Do you see the matching earrings and pendant theme here?

In the meantime I have been trying to order supplies and keep up with all the maddness while stepping over the filthy debris scattered throughout my home and of course being a perfect mother to my little angels. My favorite new jewelry box supplier is http://www.fetpak.com/. Their prices are comprable to all the others but they have free shipping which really makes them a great deal. With the holidays coming up I felt like I need to have boxes for the more expensive items we well since so many of our things are gifts. My favorite bubble mailer supplier is http://www.royalmailers.com/ which also has totally free shipping with reasonable prices which makes their prices even better. Now to find a place to store all this stuff.

Speaking of being a perfect parent , I have been reading a book for the first time in a long time-

I Was a Really Good Mom Before I Had Kids: Reinventing Modern Motherhood

It's written in a large print easy to read ,short sections with large funny quotes perfect for 2 minutes in the bathroom at a time reading sessions. It's always nice to know that I am not the only insecure mentally ill woman out there who judges herself and others harshly. Of course I knew that already but still it's great to get that reinforcement. One of my favorite quotes came as I was having a little glass of wine and read -

"My girlfriends and I decided that 4pm is the "new 5" when it comes to pouring that first glass of wine everyday."

Nothing new and mindblowing. The typical Oprah/Dr. Phil/Rachel Ray type stuff, (in fact I remember seeing the women who wrote the book on Oprah)-take time for yourself, don't overschedule, learn to say no, communicate your needs, lighten up, be realistic blah blah blah.

I already knew all that. I'm perfect after all. And so are you.

widgets and grandparents

We've had a busy few weeks. I keep thinking I can't possibly come up with new jewelry designs and then as I am trying to fall asleep at night I start thinking about spirals and swirls and designs we already have and new versions start forming in my sleepy mind. This is a take on our celtic spirals and swirls with some iolite dangling. It kind of looks like an angel if you are in the mood.

We call these Aluminum Widget Earrings. I was climbing through our carport full of Nick's crap- I mean really important things he's found and bought throughout the years that we are storing until they find their proper home - and I noticed a bin of aluminum scrap that yelled to me- Hey idiot, look here! Earring parts!

So I dug through and cleaned them up ,stuck an earwire on them and wa la.

The dreary overcast weather was perfect for photographing jewelry and I got this ideal shot. I listed the earrings and they sold in a few hours on Etsy. But don't worry. We have lots more.

Here is Henry our almost 5 year old drilling the lego pieces with Nick. Hey pay attention to the drill!

Now he's focusing on the handle that he pulls down to drill the holes. Those earrings have been astoundingly successful at the Saturday Market.

My parents came to visit this week from Albuquerque. It was a relaxing visit filled with lots of reading and sitting and mayhem.

Max and Grandpa Joe in a quiet moment.

Grandma Fran in a not so peaceful moment

Henry goofing around with Grandpa.

More reading. Notice Grandma Fran's Lego earrings and the book is Lego book too. Such synchronicity!

Brothers

Attempting to get a good group picture. This was the best one out of about 20. (And frankly, not so flattering. )

Tomorrow I go to the Saturday Market. Hopefully I shall return home with a pile of money and interesting stories to share with the boys.

Designer,inventor,human mop and more

We have been having a full yet simple summer. Lot's of playdates, a birthday party, the annual adoptive families picnic held by the nicest people, the annual Brooks Steam Up that Nick blogged about and more swimming classes involving me getting both kids and myself dressed ,then undressed ,then dressed with swimdiaper, then briefly showered ,then swim for half hour, then showered ,then undressed,then dressed then repeat the next day for two week intervals.
Henry has been very busy creating and showing off his designing skills in all areas. His Lego earrings sold last saturday at the market and one of the pendants I made based on his design sold as well. I made about 4 pendants that I hung on our pendant display next to each other. Throughout the day I would have to detach them from each other. I guess it is just irresistable for random customers to not stick lego's together.
A couple of nights ago when I was really hoping we would be getting ready for bed he insisted that he wanted me to help him make a "sweet little jacket". Not being one to stifle my son's creativity and because I am the most lenient and lame parent when it comes to enforcing bed time I became his "factory" worker (his words, not mine). He told me to cut off the cuffs and neckline of his camoflage longsleeve T-shirt. He then instructed me to cut down the front of it to make a jacket. Then he picked out specific buttons and placed them where I was to sew them on. I did a quick simple job of it and then cut little button holes on the other side to match up.

Here is the serious model and designer:

A jubilant designer in his sweet little jacket.


And this is the tag that he insisted that I cut off the collar and sew a button to and then sew to the back bottom of the jacket. He has always been fascinated by the spare button that often comes with new sweaters , coats and shirts that is sewed on the inside and out of view. This is his hommage to the spare button.

Here he is unbuttoning his coat. I think the moose T shirt underneath works really pulls the whole outfit together with the camo jacket.

As long as I'm going on about the creative impulses of my child ...

He insisted that I tie sponges to his feet to make sponge shoes so that he could clean the floor for me.

And these are the towel shoes I came up with so that he could dry the floor. Frankly, that was the cleanest my kitchen floor has been in years.

And so this isn't just one of those annoying "Look How Smart and Cute My Kid Is " blogs-

Here is one of my latest listings on Etsy. It is the Light Weight Big Aluminum Celtic Budding Spiral Pendant . It is a simple easy inexpensive item that has been selling really well at the market and I sold two of this week.

We discovered an amusing Cheeto this week. We think it looks like Squidward from Spongebob. Right after I took the picture Henry devoured it.