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Friday, November 29, 2013

Thursday, November 21, 2013

Perler Beads-Im addicted!






I used to hate these little things. The art was never very interesting, and the boards always got bumped on the way to the iron.
Then one random day I saw a student wearing a hair bow made from this things and my brain started zooming around like crazy!
8-bit art, its just 8-bit art!

I decided I needed to see what could be done with 8-bit art.

A bigger peg board really can help make a difference at looking at this as "kids crafts" into a craftable art form

I went a bit crazy on Pintrest, started pinning a few ideas, next thing you know I have an entire perler board:
 http://www.pinterest.com/zoeowyn/pearler-beads/


(Yes perler is mis-spelled, but if I correct it all those who already link to it will have broken links, tried it, so its gonna be misspelled, sorry about that.)

I also have a lot of cross stitch on there  because its sort of the same thing.

Ive even gotten my kids into it, and they will be making goodies as x-mas gifts this year.

I ended up purchasing a bucket of 6,000 beads, heres kiddo sorting them into color families

I used this as the activity at my kid's sleep over and its pretty much the only 2 hours they were relatively behaved as a group--the kids loved it, and even got up in the morning and made more!


Tuesday, November 19, 2013

desperate plea....



do a girl a favor huh?
go buy something!
https://www.etsy.com/shop/zoeowyn

newly listed on Etsy:
fairy doors
dragon eggs
juju charms
this gorgeous ammonite and cuddle fish design

And lets not forget, I am continuing the pre-listing sale on my facebook page
www.facebook.com/pages/Laura-Medeiros-Art-stuff/147377941945717




Thursday, November 14, 2013

Balloons!


This is the most amazing balloon animal I have ever seen!
That is all.

Thursday, November 7, 2013

Business Books

Crafting isn't all about making stuff. Of course thats the fun part!
However, there is the business side of things. And a successful craft business is my goal!

Since I did not major in business in school, and frankly my personal selling skills leave much to be desired, I do try to learn as much as I can.

I do this by reading books.

This week I had the opportunity to preview Finding Your Inner Etsy-preneur.


http://www.amazon.com/Finding-Your-Inner-Etsy-preneur-Encouragement-ebook/dp/B00GBQ4IWI/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1383784335&sr=8-1&keywords=finding+your+inner+etsy-preneur

Its interesting. Through a series of personality test, it helps you to determine how you can best approach mastering your sales for your Etsy shop. I know right now there are a lot of discussions going on out there regarding Etsy and the nature of handmade, thats not the issue here or discussed in this book. This book is all about how to leverage your personality type and tendencies to maximize your Etsy experience.

I had fun with the personality type testing, and I think it was pretty spot on for me. I do  plan on actively applying some techniques from this.

The other book I finally finished this week was (ok forced to finish it as I had to return it to the library) completely unmemorable. Seriously, it was one of those cool looking books, with lots of nice crafty-art pictures. At first glance it had lots of useful forms, but unfortunately it was pretty much a repeat of many other books out there. How to pick an art fair (man the books make this sound so easy--its not), how to set up teaching, how to make yourself presentable with business cards and logos. The book was from a few years ago, so I know its not on the shelves any longer, and I couldn't even find it on Amazon to provide you with a link.

The one thing that stood out the most in the book for me was the section on how to shoot quality images of your art. The examples, booth good and bad, were printed in such a way that what ever quality they were trying to show off didn't show up. For example, two photos discussing how the shadows in the back ground were distracting and how to fix that, when BOTH images printed with solid black backgrounds.

All in all it was a pretty but useless book, so I guess its ok I forgot the title.

Wednesday, November 6, 2013

Sale on my Facebook page



Are you a "fan" of mine on Facebook?

If not please come follow me over there too! You can click the QR code to the right and it will take you to my page, or this link will too:

https://www.facebook.com/pages/Laura-Medeiros-Art-stuff/147377941945717?ref=hl

Until November 15, Im having a pre-Etsy sale. Im posting items on my Facebook page at a discount before I list them on Etsy. I would love it if you came and took a look!

 

Im listing all kinds of items from jewelry to decorations: pendants, hair accessories, fairy doors, and dragon eggs have been listed so far.