Pin it and win it!

Just when you're feeling like nothing is going your way. BAM! Something good comes along! Life's funny that way. My artfire studio  has been just languishing in January, I've been working hard on promoting, spending way to much time on Facebook, but I haven't been able to shake the January doldrums. Maybe it's the weather, or economy. Anyway, I haven't worried about it too much. I figure time has a way of evening out things-just like in life. At least I been busy taking some new soldering classes and being able to create a lot of new items!

Well Artfire started a new promotion-Pin it and win it.  What's Pin it? Well If you haven't heard about Pinterest yet you will soon. Think of it as a virtual scrapbook-anything you can see online you can pin, recipes, inspirations, pets, people, places, things, flowers, wedding ideas, cookies, holidays, Valentines, Christmas ,New Years, Easter, ......Oh it does get crazy and addictive! See how easy it is to get side-tracked...Well Artfire has jumped on to the Pinterest bandwagon to. To get Artfire members using Pintrest, that came up with a promotion, first Artfire members would tweet or post on facebook an item from their studio that they would like Artfire to promote, then Artfire would randomly select one of those items  and put it on the Artfire pin board. Members of Pinterest would (hopefully) repin the item and at the end of the week Artfire would buy it for one of the repinners. So have I confused and lost you? The details can be seen in this forum posting. "Pin it and win it!".

For the first item in this promotion my Sea Glass Bracelet was chosen! Not too bad, considering I only tweeted it and posted about it once. It is my lucky day!



So if you are on Pinterest here's the link to the Artfire board.  Maybe you'll be the lucky person that wins this! Anyway, be sure to check out Pinterest. it's fun, and oh yeah...it gives you another excuse to stay up to 3 in morning!

This is what I learned this week

I learned a new wire wrapping technique this week. This is the first wire wrapped pendant I've made. I think it came out pretty well! The stone is a faceted smoky topaz. I think it looks pretty good with the copper wire. I was happy to take a class locally at Armstrong Tool and Supply. If you need jeweler's tools or supplies you might want to check them out. Don and his staff are the greatest to work with. They specialize in all sorts of tools and in addition to jewelers' bench tool and supplies they carry casting equipment, mold materials, sheet metals, boxes, display items, silver chain, silver findings, and Sterling Silver sheet and wire in a variety of sizes.

I can't wait to get my order of wire in hand. I'm thinking about using some mixed metals in my next few pendants! I originally took this class so that I could wrap some of my sea glass pieces that I have. I can't wait to get started!

Complimentary Colors

Complimentary col...

Curated By: BlueShedCrafts

ArtFire.com

Fine Art Paintings



My sea glass earrings have been featured in this collection today. Actually I've been having my items show up quite a few times this week in collections on Artfire. That makes me very happy! I hope you will take a look at some of the artisans that have been featured. BE sure to look for the sea urchins!

I've been busy making earrings!

I thought I'd get busy and add a  few new pairs of earrings to my studio, so I sat down the other day and started making earrings. And when I stopped I had over 24 pairs of earrings! I really like this style of pearl earring. It's simple and elegant. I was lucky to find a great bunch of pearls at one of my favorite local jewelry suppliers. If you're in the Berkley, Michigan area you have to stop into Munro's  I just love to pick out my materials in person. Sometimes you find new shades of pearls, or great new stones. I find all sorts of new and exciting items. I know that after the big gem shows in Tuscon, I'll be able to see lots of new things.

How often do you get to sit down and just create?  I treasure the time when I'm all alone at home-and that's not often and can just sit down and make new pieces. Sometimes it hard to carve out time in our lives. But, all things in balance.

How do you create time for yourself?

How to remove tarnish from silver naturally

Have you ever wondered how to remove tarnish from silver without using chemicals? I don't have anything horrible against commercial tarnish removers, I just try to subscribe to a philosophy of living a simpler, more natural life.

You can easily remove tarnish from silver using a few ordinary items that can be found in your kitchen.  All you need to remove tarnish from sterling silver are: aluminum foil, baking soda and some hot water. That's it!  Take a look at this tarnished sterling silver that I had in my studio:

Pretty ugly-right?

Here's the same sterling silver beads and ear wires afterwards :

Amazing isn't it? What a difference. In less than a minute the sterling silver went from unusable to bright and shiny as new! Here's the steps to remove the tarnish.

1. Place a piece of aluminum foil in a shallow dish. I used a glass cake dish, but a shallow bowl or plastic container would work just fine. Just line it with the foil.
2. Put in your tarnished silver. Add about 2-3 teaspoons of baking soda.
3. Cover with very hot water.

The water will foam up a little -it's the action of the baking soda. I shake around the container a few times. If all the tarnish doesn't come off right away, you can repeat this a couple of times. I use a fresh piece of foil each time I repeat the process.

Finally just rinse and dry. Your sterling will be bright and shiny. This works just as great on your tarnished jewelry too! The only caution is using this on dyed pearls and stones-you might want to test this first to be sure you don't lose any color. I have used this on my dyed stones and pearls without any trouble, I just use warm water and don't let the pearls and stones soak to long, and dry them promptly.

Please let me know if you have tried to clean your silver with this method. I'd love to hear about your results.

If you share this natural method of cleaning your silver, please cite my blog. I hope you will share my tipsand leave me a comment!

Thanks Friends!
Felicia

It's time for a beach getaway

Its time for a be...

Curated By: FishPrincessD...

ArtFire.com

Handmade Gifts

I hope you will check out some great ideas for a beach get away on my ArtFire Collection.

Exploring Handmade Holiday Shopping Event-Day 6 Jewelry Designers

Today is the day that I'm part of the Holiday Shopping Event!

I hope you will have a chance to check out all the artisans in this Holiday Shopping Event. To celebrate my addition today I'm offering a special offer: Free Shipping to the US and Canada. It's for today only and all you have to do is enter the coupon code FREESHIPPING when you checking out and paying for your items!
So be sure to check out my studio.

Happy shopping everyone!

Is there such a thing as work life balance?

I've had my shop active on Artfire for a while. Admittedly, I really haven't put much effort into it in the last few months. It got to be a bit overwhelming. I really enjoy creating my jewelry, but I'm not good at marketing it. Do you really expect people to be beating down door with sales if you don't try to get some exposure? Yes, I've had sales. Mostly I think I've been found through searches. So I decided it was time to figure out what I wanted to do for my business and how much time and energy I wanted to put into this. Since I have a full time career outside of Artfire, work life balance is something I really struggle with. Do you feel this way too? Life seems to tug at me in all directions at once!

After laying "dormant" for a a while-was my last post really in July?I decided it was time to try to figure out how I could fit in my jewelry business in with the rest of my life. One of the first things I came to realize is that when we try to allocate X amount of time to everything we do, life gets in the way! Work life balance needs to be just that. It doesn't mean that I have to have a rigid schedule everyday. Life happens.

I decided to sit down and figure out what it is I REALLY want to do. And I came to the conclusion that I really do enjoy making jewelry. In fact, I want to further my craft. I took a beginning solder class and I want to pursue that further. As far as business is concerned, I've decide that it is something I like to do. I'm going to work a bit harder to promote my studio, and to get onto a schedule and habit of posting new items and blogging and promoting.

Do you have have any suggestions on how you balance your time? I'd love to hear about your challenges.

In the mean time,  have a wonderful day!

Working my way through the 45 Day Success Guide-Week Three

Well it's been a bit over a month that I've had my Artfire Studio up and running. I'm still working at my own pace on the Artfire 45 Day Success guide. I've been taking my time to set-up my shop, join some guilds and do a bit more in the way of promotion. Here's some of what I've been working on:

• Day 15-Setting up your SEO testing. SEO? anything like REO? What the heck is SEO and how do test it? SEO means search engine optimization. In other words, it's how people find you in search engines such as Google, Bing, Yahoo, and other search engines. Each search engine has it's own way of ranking your listings. It's usually a combination of your product title and description. By testing different ways to write your descriptions you can help determine what descriptions work best for you. I try to vary my titles-especially when I list similar items. Today I listed 13 pairs of sea glass earrings. In some of the listings I started off with the words "sea glass" in others "beach glass" in others I started out with other descriptions. This way I hope to capture the attention of people searching  using different terms.
• Day 16-Has you listing some of your prior work. I listed some things I've listed when I was on Etsy, but that I haven't listed yet on Artfire. Many times people will list things from their art or craft shows or prior sold items.
• Day 17-Meet the staff. The staff often posts in the forums-hey it's nice to know that frittering away some of their day hanging out with us too! Tony, one of the co-founders is usually checking in daily. If you have a problem just ask. I had an issue come up this week with my studio announcement and they we right on top of it. Good work!
• Day 18-It's a work day. Hey it's fly fishing season for me around here. I think I'm heading to the stream. Work can wait. The trout won't.
• Day 19-Setting up your Rapid Cart and Facebook Kiosk. If you look to the right side of my blog you'll see a Rapid Cart feature. I've got it set up to view 6 random items from my studio. The cool thing about it is, that instead of just linking to my studio, you can actually purchase something without navigating away! I haven't had any on try it yet. But for my type of blog, which brings in a lot of people looking for things likes recipes or tutorials, I'm hoping it will be a nice feature. The same thing goes for the Facebook Kiosk-it's a check-out application on your  business page.
• Day 20-More SEO-by now you should be starting to get more comfortable with writing titles and descriptions. The one thing to remember is that your not really writing nice flowery titles naming your products. Think of them as you would try to "Google" an item.I suggest searching on a couple of different search engines on how your titles show up. Here's a good example. If you search "strawberry jello pretzel desert" in exactly that order you'll find my recipe number 1 in Google-and I might as it's been in number 1 (or very close to it) since 2009! I even beat out places like cooks.com and allrecipes.com! On Bing and Yahoo it doesn't come up until page 3. It also places on the first page on Ask.com.. So you can see I'm happy most people use Google and I try to optimize my titles for Google searches. One of the things you'll notice in my posts are links. Click on my titles and the highlighted words and you 'll be taken to something I've mentioned. Did you know that having these links in your posts actually improve your credibility? I didn't. But having links in your posts increase the likelihood that you will increase your ranking in the search engines. But, don't over do it. You want to be credible without selling every word to an add or link! Don't you just hate it when you get to a post and just about every word in the post is an ad!

I hope you're finding my journey interesting and helpful. I'd love to hear how some of you are doing setting up your shops and studios. If you have been around for a while, I'd love to hear your suggestions.

Nobody trips over mountains.  It is the small pebble that causes you to stumble.  Pass all the pebbles in your path and you will find you have crossed the mountain.  ~Author Unknown

Working my way through the 45 Day Success Guide-Week Two

Well, I'm working my way through the Artfire 45 Day Success Guide, albeit it's going a lot more slowly than the 45 days. Like many others, my Artfire Studio isn't my only job. I have to fit it into my schedule as time permits. I check in daily-I'm hoping to see that first sale on Artfire-I usually post in the forums, check out facebook when I can and even sneak in a couple of tweets. When do I have time to create? So here's the second weeks goals:

• Day 8-Listing and Starting your blog. One of the features of Artfire is that your studio has it's own blog tab. I find this a bit redundant for those of us who already have outside blogs such as this one. I have posted a couple of articles, but I'll stick with this as my main blog. The upside is that Google seems to like blogs when it crawls for content. The goal is to post 10 more items and 3 posts in the forums.
• Day 9-Studio Clean-Up-silly me-I thought this meant the cleaning genie was going to appear at my house and clean up my studio-A prayer answered! funny thing, that's not what Artfire had in mind. Their idea of studio clean-up is to add categories to your studio. Lucky for me I had them already in place. Oh yeah list another 10 items. Well, I'm still working on that.
• Day 10-Work Day! Yeah a day off to create....or just catch a few extra zzzz's. This is the kind of a day I can enjoy!
• Day 11-Social Media Set-up Day. Now I know why they gave me that day off yesterday-Artfire want to lull me into believing I was sailing right along. Yea, more like a moth drawn to a flame. Here's todays goals: Set-up a Twitter and Facebook Fan Page. But if that wasn't enough How about 3 tweets and 2 Facebook posts, 3 Forum posts and just for good measure post 5  more items. Hey these people aren't fooling around! Well I may not be the most Social Media savvy person on my block, but I do manage a tweet now and then, and Facebook-I don't like to be too spammy. In fact, The fastest way to have me "unfollow" you is when I see dozens of posts from your shop. 
• Day 12-Social Media Day Two-What there's more? Actually Artfire recommends an outside blog...like here on Blogger. Well at least I've got that covered.  Maybe I should tweet about it...
• Day 13-Listing and Interacting-Hey isn't this Social Media Day 3? List 5 more items-Tweet one and feature another on Facebook. Didn't I say something about not being spammed with all those look at this item I listed today posts. Really people, I don't mind looking at all your things, but not all in one day. And make it a bit interesting for me.
• Day 14-Work Day! thank goodness. I need to take a nap.

Actually, following the 45 Day Success Guide  has done a few good things for me, it keeps me off the streets, out of the bar, neglecting my family, shot my diet all to Hell...no really, I find myself at least trying to maintain a bit of a schedule of working on my studio daily. I just need a bit more time to create and photograph my items-it isn't easy to get natural daylight at 9 pm in Michigan this time of year!

So if you're new to Artfire...How goes your Week? For the rest of you lucky souls, why don't you go check out some of my latest designs. And how about leaving me a link to your Facebook Fan Page or your Twitter Link. I promise-I won't spam you! And for all you lurkers-Hey leave me a comment!

Opportunity is missed by most people because it is dressed in overalls and looks like work.  ~Thomas Edison

It's A Handmade World: A Glimpse of Spring

It's A Handmade World: A Glimpse of Spring

If your looking for some spring gifts, or just some inspiration, how about going over to the blog It's a Handmade World. She put together a blog post where artisans with handmade goods can post there items. This weeks theme is spring. It's quite a collection.

No matter how long the winter, spring is sure to follow.  ~Proverb

Week one on Artfire-working my way through the 45 day Success Guide

So I've survived my first week! Moving and setting up a new studio is a lot of work. There is so much to learn-almost like moving to another country and learning about their customs and language!

One of the helpful guides Artfire has is the 45 day Success Guide.  It's no holds bared, fast paced introduction to getting you studio up and running. I'm trying my best to keep up with m daily tasks.

• Day 1-Getting rid of your progress bar. when you first register on Artfire, you see a progress bar on top of your screen. You need to set up the basics of your studio. Your bio,policies,payment methods and your avatar and banner-now that's a full day one!
• Day 2-Time to read up. You've got a lot of guides here-You'll find answers to a lot of questions. Don't be lazy or frustrated. get reading!
• Day 3-Getting your studio ready. Time to figure out layouts, color schemes and shipping policies. Start listing 5 items.
• Day 4-Getting the feel. Artfire actually has a "test" buying area. Sometime sellers have have not purchased items-this test area actually has you checkout an item-without having to pay for it. You also list an additional 5 items bringing you studio up to 10 items.
• Day 5-Getting your front page filled. Since your first page holds 20 items. It's time to fill up your shop. Listing 10 more items is a bit of work-but at leat your first page will be full.
• Day 6-It's a work day You've been so busy listing and setting up your shop-don't forget to keep reading those guides!- That you probably haven't had the energy or time to be creative! So take a day off-get those creative juices flowing again.
• Day 7-Introduce yourself. Time to check out the chatterbox forums. You'll find a lot of information and helpful people hanging out here. I like to visit the forums on a regular basis. you'll meet all sorts of people-and soon you'll be chatting away like old friends. Don't forget to check out the promotions area and games when you need a break.

Phew! so much for the first week. No wonder I'm tired.Tomorrow I hope to get a lot more pictures taken. I usually do my photography on the weekends when I can photograph my items in daylight. I've got a lot of items to photograph-that going to take some time.

Hope you're enjoying the "behind the scenes" look at what it takes to set up an online shop. It's more work and more fun that you think it is!

Be sure to leave some comments if you have visited. I'd like to know what's interested you the most.

Until later,

"Just living is not enough. One must have sunshine, freedom, and a little flower".
Hans Christian Andersen

Seafoam is Serious Business

My seafoam sea glass bracelet has been featured in a collection on Artfire!

Seafoam is Serious Business!

Curated By: byapryl

ArtFire.com

Handmade Jewelry

Hope you'll take a look at the collection and leave your comments!

Here's what I've been working on

I've decided to concentrate on my sea glass jewelry in my new studio on Artfire. Here's a peek at a few of my latest creations:

What do you think? I'd really like for some of you to pop over to the new studio and let me know what else you would like to see. I've been concentrating on  taking better pictures and I really think it's been paying off. I'll be sharing some photography tips in my upcoming blogs, so check back again.! How many of you are also on Artfire? Let me know and I'll be sure to pop and and visit your studio.

I've moved to Artfire!

It seems like a long time since I last posted, and looking back it has been! So many things have been happening in my life, some good, some sad, I really didn't take the time to share them with you.

In December, my best friend passed away. She had been suffering the effects of diabetes for many years, having undergone multiple amputations and dialysis for many years just to keep her alive. I just really miss her. You can not know how many times I pick up the phone to give her a call...and then realize that I won't here her voice again. We had been friends for over 30 years-all of my adult life. I have been so lucky to have known and had a friend like her. I know It is rare in this day and age to keep friends for so long. We been through husbands and loves, good times and bad times, we've shared all the secrets you only tell your best friend. Through it all we could always count on having each other.

I hope that you have that someone special in your life...that being said, I've looked at a lot of things in my life. I realized just how important jewelry designing is in my life. It truly is a passion that I enjoy. So looking forward to promoting my business in new way, I looked at the venues I have been using. I decided to move my studio to Artfire I hope you will check out my new studio. I'm going to be concentrating on my sea glass jewelry. I look forward to sharing much more with you in the future. I hope you'll stop by and see all the good things to come.

Peace to all of you!
Felicia