I'm ALIVE!

When I'm not working or making rosaries/jewelry, I'm taking MBA classes. Yes, I am slightly insane ;) The past week or so has been consumed with my Economics class. Luckily, my final was Monday night (not good AT ALL), and, after sleeping it off last night, I'm ready to take full advantage of the 2 month break before my next class (another blasted economics class!).

April has been a good month for me, sales wise. I also had several firsts:

- first repeat customer
- first private Alchemy request
- first customer who said they found me on Flickr
- first customer who said they were refered by a past customer

I'm hoping May will be a good month as well. I will have time to make and list new items more regularly, and one of my chaplets will be in the Etsy cooperative ad in the May issue of CRAFT magazine. I've also stocked up on rosary and chaplet components; I'm going to try to use up a lot of the beads I have on hand before I buy more.

Hmm, looks like May could be just as busy as April after all :)

A busy week behind...a busy week ahead

This has been a great week, shop-wise. I sold the Saint Peregrine chaplet (in the picture above) and a custom order. I've also got about a week's worth of new items to list. I've tried to either list or relist once a day, although I may stop listing on Friday or Saturday, because the traffic is not very high.

IRL, I'm a web developer, and, in a former life, I did desktop publishing. Today, I've been working on new business cards for my husband's company (he's a one man computer consulting dynamo). My next task: designing a promotional postcard.

In addition to my day job and my Etsy shop, I'm pursuing my MBA (or perusing, as our newspaper wedding announcement said). I'm taking Economics this semester, and it's not my favorite class ever. I'm supposed to be doing online quizzes this weekend. I'd rather design postcards.

Trying to figure out the photography thing

Sometimes I take pictures and they turn out like this. Sometimes...well, not so good. I can't seem to figure out the secret to taking consistently good pictures.

My main problem is that most of my items contain metal (base metal mostly, but sometimes sterling silver) crucifixes, centerpieces, and medals. If I have the lighting so that the color of the beads are more true-to-life, I get a mad glare on the medal components. If I have the lighting so that there isn't a glare and the detail of the metal components is clear, the picture is too darn dark. ARGH!

I read an article that suggested setting the camera's f stop to 8 and the ISO to 80-100. I've figured out how to set the ISO, but not so much the f stop (although the camera loves to tell me what it's currently set to).

The worst glare, however, is on my pinback buttons. The buttons look so much better IRL than they do in the pictures.

Photography...the bane of an Etsy seller's existence ;)

I (heart) my button machine

It took a while, but I finally got my new 1" button machine. (BTW, thank you Keith @ American Button Machines for being SO helpful!) I am absolutely amazed at how easy making the button is! What is not easy: creating the graphic.

I found a public domain photograph of St. Therese and a Photoshop button template. I knew that Paint Shop Pro would open the Photoshop file, but what I apparently forgot was how to use Paint Shop Pro. It took me FOREVER to get the words on a curve the way I wanted. But I finally did...at 2AM this morning *yawn*

The rose was a little easier. My brother and I cut some photos out of magazines and catalogs, and I found the rose in a magazine ad. My brother made buttons using a picture from a telescope catalog and a page from an old map.

I could make buttons all night...I'm such a geek :)