Going to MOO!

Many years ago I was stopped in the street and asked if I’d like to help product test some cakes and biscuits. Cake! I understand cake, and I like cake (although not ones with those crunchy sugar crystals on the top, cake should be soft and gooey and is sweet enough already without adding crunchy bits!) So I spend a couple of hours scoffing cake – cool!

So last week I answered a request from Moo, who make the lovely little mini-cards I send out with orders, give to people, hide in restaurant menus, use as a portable slide show and my other half uses to show people what I do when they say ‘uh, marbles? Why?’ followed (hopefully) by ‘oooo, I see!’ They wanted people to come and test a new product. I was a little surprised to be picked as I couldn’t bring a laptop, however they arranged a loan one, all I needed was to bring a usb with images.

I really didn’t know what I was going to be seeing when I got there, I guess I expected it to be a new printed product, but I was told I was going to be one of the first people in the world to see it! Despite having to use a mac-book for the first time, it all seemed to go quite smoothly. I’m not sure of the best way to describe what I was testing, it’s sort of a mini-display for images, like the sort of thing you see on windows vista where all the pictures flip through like a pack of cards standing up (very Alice in Wonderland!) Like their products it was quite slick, I’ve seen and used web-based services like this that have been less clear and thought out – not bad considering this was the testing phase. I’m not breaking any confidentiality clauses, they said it was ok to blog about it, and they are looking to launch it initially for business card makers first. My verdict, it was ok.

Oh dear, not ‘cool’ or ‘wow’ but ‘ok.’ It generates a like to a nice little animated gallery, which can be viewed from the Moo site only, but personally I can’t see it’s something that’s going to rock my world. I have a Flickr gallery already, which viewers can interact with and comment on, plus galleries on my website and even Facebook page. Maybe it will be the next big thing, time will tell. I was going to post the link here for you to see, but it seems not to work, so you’ll have to wait until it comes live! In the meantime here’s a non-moving picture of one of the new stoppers which I’ve popped into my Misi shop which I am going to try and list more in this year.

Why I think too many craft sites is a good thing

There is a great deal of choice of online stores for people who sell their crafts at the moment. I am concentrating on Folksy and Etsy at the moment, but I also have a small store at MISI as well. Ontop of that there is also Artfire, Corindr, Dawanda, Zibbet, and probably more that I don’t know about. The one thing they have in common is they are all trying to be the next big ONE coping the success of another well know auction site….. You know the one…….

I so hope this doesn’t happen!

If you are trying to sell you’re old slippers or box of onions, or whatever else that is cluttering up your house, it seems there is only one internet auction site worth using. It’s a shame no other competitors from the early dotcom days survived, it could do with competition to keep it on it’s toes, and to give sellers and buyers more choice. I hear from so many sellers bemoaning the sudden rule changes, increases in fees, delisting of auctions for the strangest of reasons. I was speaking to one crafter a few months ago who said she was working from the moment she got up till midnight on her shop, and daren’t take a holiday else she would loose her powerseller status. To me it seems she had stopped working for herself, and was now working for them! Surely this should be working as a partnership between them and us, not a dictatorship telling us how we should run our affairs for their benefit.

I have been selling a few spare plants on ‘a well know auction site,’ and I’d thought they’d got it all sorted until this weekend when I ran into their craziness! Despite already having done half a dozen sales without any queries I was blocked by their automated system because they didn’t like one of my email addresses! It took over an hour to sort out, not helped by constantly having to re-log in on virtually every page change, and in the meantime has ‘frozen’ a sale that’s gone into my paypal account!!! GRRRR!!!!!!!

So please continue to support these smaller sites, even though some will always be small, some will be glitchy, some won’t do enough PR, at least they are helping to keep big sites like Etsy on their toes. Yes, it would be easier if we all sold in one place, but if we loose this healthy competition then I think we will all be poorer for it.

Accidental Glass

Sometime it’s the accidents that help me do things better, these are the ‘happy’ accidents, although they don’t always seem happy at the time!
I have spend days working on a new type of necklace with leaves made of glass, and I’m not talking about those little mould stamped green leaves you see in the bead shops, these are monsters! Most are about 2-3inches long, twisted, with colours layered into them using borosilicate glass. After I made the first batch I found the choker I put them on was too thick for the holes I made. Drat! So next glass session I make some more, and since they are organically made but going with the flow of the glass, not all of them were useable on the necklace I had in mind (although I am sure I will find a use for them eventually, even if it’s selling them in a de-stash sometime!). I threaded some on, and realised it needed so spacer beads, but once again the wire was too thick for my stash. This is where being a lampworker comes in handy, I was back to the torch for third time to make some customer green spacer beads!

So after a lot of to and fro-ing, I finally got the necklace done. Something bothered me about it, maybe it was because it didn’t just ‘happen’ as my best stuff does when some magic brings it all together. Regardless I went to take some snaps of it, and was trying to set up some pictures when the whole thing slid off onto the floor, meeting up with various objects that were rather ‘too solid’ for such a delicate crop of leaves. I think you can guess the result!

I don’t know if I’ve become more ‘Zen’ since I’ve started lampworking, or just because I was so tired, but I wasn’t as upset as I probably should have been about this, but when I looked at the ‘remain’ an hour later, it suddenly clicked. Only three of the leaves had survived, and it looked so much better like this! Less is more, I reminded myself! I made some slight adjustments, and it looks good, although I think I can still make some much better leaves for the next and final version.

I’ve been quite busy lately, and I’ve recently opened another shop outlet on MISI, where I’ve been transferring some of my stock from the old Etsy Shop. I am still in two minds about Etsy, but until things pick up or I have time to make 200 things to list there to make it worthwhile I will be putting stuff onto Folksy and MISI for the time being. They are all priced in £££’s rather than suffering exchange rate yo-yoing, and are just really nice places to be at the moment with a lot of friendly folk there. www.folksy.com/shops/SteamPunkGlass or my new MISI shop atwww.misi.co.uk/steampunkglass Hope to see you there!