Whoo-hoo! I Made Another Sale on Etsy!

That's right, I sold another pair of earrings on in my Etsy shop! That's two pairs of the Rawhide earrings this year! I'm almost up to my goal of five items that I made as a New Year's Crafty Resolution. Still no sales of the Very Cherry Earrings. I'm thinking of making them with sterling ear wires and re-listing them with a slightly higher price, see if I get any bites. But I'm happy with just the two Etsy sales, I'm not expecting much out of my first year on there.

And I've started a third blog, one that's for all my other adventures in crafting. I've decided to call it Crafting Under a Cactus. You can also link to it through my profile or the links over on the right hand side of the screen. I wanted to keep this blog about beadwork but I still wanted to talk about my other crafty projects. Figured it was time to start a second blog. So check over there a couple times a month if you're interested in seeing what other creative things I'm working on. I'll also be removing some of the non-bead crafty links I have here and giving them a new home over on the other blog.

Over the weekend, my husband and I decided to undertake the huge task of rearranging the front bedroom (basically, my craft and book storage room) and the living room. We wanted to turn that front bedroom into a study and craft workroom. So we moved the desk into there (it just fit around the corners of the hall, quite the adventure at two in the morning), moved the bookshelves out, moved my craft table to another wall, and re-organized the closet (so all my Stash bins and boxes could now be stored out of sight). We love it. I can actually work at my work table now while my hubby works on his computer at night, and we can still be together in the same room. What a concept! I'll have to take some pictures of the new arrangement and post them here.

And I mentioned a post or two ago that I hosted an earring swap on Swap-Bot. Here are pictures of the earrings I made for my two partners:

The partner I made these for indicated that her favorite colors were blues, green and yellows. I scored the perfect Czech glass rounds a few months back, so I just had to use them. I love them because they're slightly faceted and are the crackled glass. The smaller cube bead and the blue-green round were salvaged from costume/vintage jewelry I found on ShopGoodwill.com.

And the partner I made this pair for had indicated in her profile that most of her clothing was black. I thought these animal print beads would look sharp with black, and at the same time be subtle yet fun.

That about wraps things up for now. Thanks for reading and happy beading!

Week of August 5th-11th, 2007: What Have I Been Up To?

Well, I've been slacking again on posting. I was pretty busy last month with work and RESCUE and really didn't do much jewelry making. Therefore, I had nothing of real interest to post about here. I suppose I could have bored you with something, but I decided to spare you.

Anywho, I'm getting back into the beading swing of things, and I have a few pictures to share.

I've been participating in a number of crafty swaps over at Swap-Bot, and a few have actually been jewelry and bead related. One was to make your partner jewerly using hemp, so I made these for my partner:



(I didn't have a model handy, so I had a bowl stand in for one ;D)





It was fun to dig out the hemp spools and do some knot work again, even if it was just really basic.



I'm coordinating a handmade earring swap. Its closed now, I meant to post here while it was still open, but alas, I've been in La-La land. But I'm planning to coordinate some more on there, we have a number of beady gals, and I'll be sure to post the links here. I'm still working on the earrings for my partners for that swap, but I'll post those when I've completed them.



And I joined one more earring swap. This one had a specific theme to it, the color brown. I had recently learned to make leafy fringe using all seed beads (for both the vines and the leaves). But I wasn't overly thrilled with how the leaves looked. So I decided "Hey, why couldn't I replace the beaded leaves with leaf beads?" (Say that three times fast....) And here is what I came up with, I call it Autumn Foliage:









Hope you enjoyed. Look for more pictures and updates in the coming weeks (no really, I mean it).



Thanks for reading and happy beading!