What A Week

Boy, the Internet is a strange place to live sometimes. Like so many others, I spent a big chunk of time glued to twitter yesterday whilst dramas real and imagined played out at the speed of sound. I did manage to get a few more pendant listings up, which means today I'll list just four more from the fair batch and then I'm all done. I've also spent a lot more time knitting than tatting the last few days. I guess I just can't seem to get back into my normal routine with all the extraneous events. Speaking of which, my husbands birthday is tomorrow, so if you know him, wish him a good one.

I know I'm rambling a bit today, I've got no cohesive thoughts to share, just an amalgamation of stuff, like this next story. Yesterday I asked the twitterverse why they were following me as I have had a bout of followers that I don't understand, they aren't friends of a friend or etsy sellers and I didn't get why or how they found me. This morning I saw a response from one of them, then they unfollowed me. I went to their twitter stream and I saw that they called someone so damn cocky at about the same time. Now, I have no ides if that was directed at me, but I got all defensive over it. I obsessed about it really for a good half hour. I wasn't even on the twitter when the response came in, so I couldn't react to it...yeah I know I shouldn't worry about it, but I live in the internet and I do like it when people like me.

What else...yes, I have found the perfect collaborator for the wunderkammers redesign and thanks so much to all of you who offered your kind help. I'm gonna keep it all on the down low until it's closer to fruition, but suffice it to say, it should look amazing. The project wonderful ad spot is also up and running and has made me a whole 3 cents so far. No, I didn't think it was going to make me rich, but it is amazing how well it just seems to run itself. I might even throw one up here one day. I do kind of like the idea of giving people really affordable advertising for their etsy or other micro businesses.

I do have another question to ask you all. I know some of you have used places like cafe press to sell merchandise. Do you have an opinion of any of the other similar companies, good or bad? I do still want to set something like that up for the wunderkammer and thought I'd cull your vast knowledge for information before I make a false step. Again, I'm not in any rush to get started on it, just doing a little groundwork first. I almost said legwork, but that seems ridiculous as I am clearly sitting down and don't plan on moving any time soon. So that's it for this week. Here's hoping no more icons die, Iran finds a little peace and the Transformers movie I'm seeing tomorrow doesn't suck.

It'll Be Great... If It Works

Over the last week, I've tried a few new things to increase my exposure. I can be quite a lazy person and I have two extremely demanding kids, so I was looking for things that would require little effort on my part. First, I signed up on Timothy Adams' newest endeavor, Buried Treasury. All I had to do was look around, make a few comments and then sign up for a few bucks. Now I have my own little section where my etsy mini lives for more folk to find. It's a neat little site and Tim promises to send out site statistics so we can see how many visitors the site gets.

Then, when hanging out in the forums, I saw a post about Celebrate with Style, a new website that has a boutique section that artists and designers can sign up for. The boutique offers a place to post photos of your pieces along with a link to your own online store. The hitch was, it is by invitation only. So, throwing myself to the wolves yet again I signed up to be reviewed for an invitation. I've done this sort of thing before, I tried Trunkt, Nifty, Indieshopping and quite a few others, all to no avail. Apparently I don't "fit" in a lot of places, but this time I was pleasantly surprised to receive not only the invitation, but quite a flattering email describing my tatting as "distinctive" and "unusually creative and fashionable".

I have now signed up with them as well and my page is up here. I have no idea whether either of these endeavors with result in any additional attention, but neither required too much effort and they need almost no upkeep, so they meet my strict requirements. I guess we'll see if they helped over the next few months. I guess I just felt I needed to do something outside the forums and since I'm seriously burnt out on networking, these seem like good ideas.

Here's hoping!