Featured Shop: Bead Origami

Since I came across this very awesome shop, BeadOrigami, I can't stop looking at all of her awesome beaded creations! I can see why she calls it bead origami, because each one certainly reminds me of all the varying types of kusudama there are in the origami world.



You cannot tell me these aren't amazing.



Earrings are, of course, not the only thing she makes, either. You can find plenty of matching necklaces in her shop as well. I cannot imagine how many beads are used to make each individiual piece! I have enough problems keeping seed beads out of my carpet - how many more would land under my desk if I attempted this, LOL? I love how the pendant on the necklace below is double-stacked. The variant sizes really give it depth.




The next necklace is entirely beaded. Look at the amazing detail in the 4th photo of her listing! (And this necklace has 5 total beaded beads!)



If you're feeling extra crafty (or if you have experience with weaving), you can also try your hand at making these yourself. BeadOrigami offers tutorials as well as the finished product. I'm not sure if I am quite that gutsy, but maybe you are!



Her tutorial about the Disco Ball Beaded Bead is one of her advanced tutorials. 26 pages long, 65 steps, and over 80 full color photos are included. I don't have to tell you that the resulting product is a stunning work of art - you can see her examples for yourself!



Happy gawking!

A Creative Weekend

Aside from a lot of baseball (a lot of baseball, I repeat), my brain got to thinking about a few ideas this weekend. I thought about some new boxes, some new kusudama, and some smaller projects. Then, last night I got such a random and odd idea that I had to jump around and try it. Not only were my attempts successful, I realized I cannot find another person doing anything remotely like this on the web. Not to say this hasn't ever been done, it very well might have been. But it's so good I have to do my best to keep it a secret until I get a technique down that works well enough to list. (They are so cute, it's hard not to just come out and show the samples I made!)

I tweeted a really really awesome item I found on Etsy the other day, but it's just so great that I'd like to share it here as well. (Tweets can get lost easily!) Check these out!



I could see myself wearing them to a show, using them to draw attention and to get some conversations going with customers. Never have I seen a cooler pair of pantyhose in my life (I'm usually a fishnets type of girl)! If I get accepted to the show I applied at in December, I am highly considering picking up a pair of these to wear there.

I've also been doing a lot of browsing for scarves. I am a scarfaholic. I LOVE scarves. How can I possibly pick just one? My budget doesn't allow for me to splurge on my weaknesses too often, but I've come up with a few favorites:


   
   

I think the last one is my *most* favorite so far because it's so long - I love long scarves. Did I also mention I'm sort of addicted to the color green? It's so hard to pick - there are so many beautiful scarves on Etsy right now and they make me crazy!

Still Always Learning

I attended another v-lab today on Etsy. This one was about tags, titles, and descriptions. There's another lab tonight covering shop critiques that I also hope to get into. They really are about 30 times more fun and enjoyable than the forums (which are far too negative lately to draw much of my attention). I learned a few things in the lab. Most importantly, it is allowed to have the same types of items in multiple categories. So for me, I've been experimenting with putting my gift boxes in paper goods and in supplies, to see what draws more attention. I didn't know if that was allowed, but Danielle let us know that you can.

Some other things were covered that had been confusing me. Unless you are listing in supplies, you don't need a handmade tag on your items, because it's already going to fall under handmade anyway. I am still debating whether or not to include handmade in my titles though, for SEO purposes. Title space is limited as to what you can work with before being truncated, however, and it's not as important as my other keywords like "Origami Crane Ornament" for example. Though SEO is related to all of this, we didn't cover anything that wasn't directly relevant to titles and descriptions.

However! If you are having trouble understanding the lengthy 25-page SEO guide that Etsy released (found here), Sheryl Westleigh (aka noadi on Etsy) wrote a very, very basic helper guide on her blog. You can find the mini-breakdown here. I suggest that if you are having a hard time getting through the guide that you start with her cheat sheet, but then I would definitely go back to the guide (I know, it's long) because it has a ton of information in it. Sheryl's post should help you understand the very basics of what SEO is about, which will help you when going through that huge guide once you know what to look for.

Is all this shop editing time consuming? Absolutely. Is it worth it? Well, I don't have stats to prove one way or the other, but I know my GoogleAnalytics is showing searches that are a lot more relevant. Whether it's a coincidence or not, I believe my SEO work has had something to do with it. I'm nowhere near done, either. I know that I am very much looking forward to Etsy being able to automatically upload our item listings into Google Base, but as Danielle told us in the lab today, she is not sure when they will have that project finished. It will, I assume, change the entire listing process, and so I will sit here and be patient as long as I know they actually are working on it.

Sleipnir's Blog has Moved!

Well, it was getting confusing for me to post on my other blog, since I originally signed up for it with an email other than my business email, which is the one I check most often. Having to bounce in and out of Google accounts while checking on different sites is sort of a pain in my...

So, to make things less confusing for me AND my readers (since the name now matches), I've decided to move the blog. And on top of that, I finally figured out how to put the Etsy mini and Flickr stream into it. I'm usually pretty good with editing html and javascript, but the way you have to add widgets onto your blogger definitely confuses me. Maybe it's just the way that it's laid out - I'm much more used to editing coding in the raw, without all the little pretty boxes everywhere.

Well, aside from that, I've started to put up those little pyramid gift boxes that I had WIP photos of almost a month ago. My camera didn't want to cooperate with me for a few weeks, but after much groveling and begging on my part, I got some photos that are - at best - good enough for temporary use in my listings. I hate having all this inventory (at least 100 new items) lying around and not being able to list it. So I'll get the hard part out of the way, and worry about editing the photos that need it. Surprisingly, some actually don't.

Here's a few I listed today: