Winter

One advantage of living in the country is the beauty of winter, especially from inside!

Though there are days when the sun shines and the winds don't howl when we do get out and enjoy it.

Here are few winter sites from this season so far here on 'the farm'.

 As the ponds start to freeze over we get these interesting looking patterns on the ice. 

 At sunset the clouds take on a pink hue and the clear sky becomes mauve and azure blue.

Looking out our kitchen window on a brilliantly sunny day. Can you see the deer tracks on the lawn? 

I love waking up to see what tracks have been left in the snow from the nighttime visitors, it's like seeing the footprints of ghosts!

Using thread but not sewing

One television programme that we watch every week is CBS News Sunday Morning. It’s an hour and a half of short episodes about all sorts of topics such as art, food, entertainment, politics, history, humour and more.

We always record it and watch it later so we can buzz through the commercials (it has a ton!). We just watched the November 6 episode and one of the stories was about a new art gallery that has just opened in Bentonville, Arkansas called Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art. Designed by architect Moshe Safdie and funded by Alice Walton of the famous Walmart family.

As they were interviewing Ms. Walton and showing some of the pieces she has included in the permanent collection, I saw one piece that caught my eye not only because of its scale but the very unusual medium used to produce it. We wrote down the artist’s name and Googled her.

Devorah Sperber creates works of art using spools of thread. The installation at Crystal Bridges is called ‘After The Last Supper’ and it measures 85” high and 29’ long, but the remarkable ting about it is that it is made up of 20,736 spools of thread! You don’t just view it as you would a normal work of art because it is created upside-down and backwards. To see the piece the right way round you view it through a clear acrylic viewing sphere.

Ms. Sperber has been creating the 'Thread Spool Works' work since 1999. Her largest installation consists of 60,000 spools of thread. She has also produced other works using chenille stems, Letraset marker caps and map tacks all following the pixel theme.

Fascinating stuff and I now have a reason to visit Arkansas!

Happy Halloween!

I love these felted bowls by thefuzzymonkey on Etsy!

A BIG thank you!

My shop has been featured on many blogs over the past few years and I've paid for advertising on others but I have to say, the feature given to my Birch Trees Necklace by Rebecca at Soap Deli News Blog has been the best response in terms of views I have ever seen!

Her Stocking Stuffer Extravaganza was posted October 20th, according to my Etsy shop stats, this post has generated 589 views in 9 days. That may not seem to be a lot to some but to me that's an impressive number when I compare it to other features my shop has gotten or ads I've run.

So I'm giving a BIG thank you to Rebecca!

Ghosts of the forest

I love white birch trees. Now that most of the leaves have fallen from the deciduous trees in the forest straddling the edge of our property the birch trees stand out against the dark background like ghosts in the forest. The chalky white color of their bark makes them instantly recognizable and if you get closer you also see the familiar black markings that is their second most discernible feature.

I decided to try and interpret this look with my silk ribbon embroidery. The first item I made was a pendant. I used three different widths of white silk ribbon and stitched them with dark brown embroidery floss onto natural coloured burlap. I like the rustic look the burlap has.

Some of my teammates on the Etsy Oh Canada Team commented that they thought this would also be a lovely design for a pillow cover. I would have made it out of the burlap but there's an odd chemical scent to a large amount of burlap that I don't like plus it's not the greatest material to snuggle up to. So instead I used my favourite pillow cover fabric, dupioni silk, in a beautiful muted yellow colour.
To make a more 'country style' pillow cover I will seek out something similar to burlap but with a softer less scratchy feel to it such as linen or a cotton hemp blend fabric.

Fall

I took this shot while we were visiting Letchworth State Park in NY state last week.
Love the contrast of the leaves and the asphalt.

How's it going? Well, I'll tell you.......

A reader asked recently about the results of my opening a web page at Big Cartel and being featured in the Poppytalk Marketplace. Here are the results so far and my thoughts and opinions on the subject.

Big Cartel:

Opened the website June 18^th.

The weekly visitor stats:

6 weeks ago – 155

5 weeks ago – 151

4 weeks ago – 135

2 weeks ago – 129

Last week – 172

No sales through the site.

I find that having a stand-alone website like this one is a pretty lonely existence especially when you can’t really interact with potential buyers. If it were a site where you could treat it like a blog and write about your latest projects, triumphs and tragedies I think it would be more engaging. That being said, you still have to put the effort into the site and update it constantly to keep people engaged. 

Another stumbling block for me, whether it’s a blog or a website, is that I’m not sure where to go to advertise and get people to come and look at the site. I’m a guest author on a silk ribbon supplier’s blog so I had them link my avatar to the website. There’s facebook (I do) and twitter (I don’t) but how much time is one supposed to dedicate to the social media stuff and when is there time to actually create? I know part of my problem is that I’m not the chatty ‘guess what I’m up to now’ kind of gal so I guess that makes me a bad candidate as a salesperson.

According to my Google Analytics numbers for June 18^th to Sept 26^th, most of my visitors (150) were from the silk ribbon blog. Second was tied between direct traffic and Poppytalk Handmade both at 135. Next was the Poppytalk blog at 96, goggle.com/referral at 77 and my own blog at 60.

The Poppytalk Marketplace:

Inclusion is still ongoing. It runs from June until November. I haven’t had an Etsy buyer mention specifically that they saw my items on Poppytalk.

Again, if I check my GA for my Etsy shop for the June to present time, Poppytalk Handmade ranks 26^th for traffic with 52 visits.

Etsy shop:

Sales Stats:

Apr – 19

May – 6

June – 2

July and Aug – 6

Sept - 4

As you can see, my sales on Etsy have not been the greatest since May so that’s really frustrating especially since a month and a half later I started the Poppytalk marketplace and Big Cartel website and haven’t really seen any significant changes. When I read the discussions in the Etsy forums I see lots of sellers in the same boat with low sales. I have been on the Front Page at least once each month and one of my necklaces was in an Etsy Finds daily feature and yet sales continue to be practically non-existent.

Is it the economy, the tweaks to the way the search is run on the site, summer? Who knows?!!

I do like the social aspect of Etsy where you can join different teams, read their blog for updates and insights and glean info and opinions good and bad in the forums. It’s a ready made social network, unfortunately, it’s mostly other sellers that you’re interacting with and granted some of them do turn into buyers but not that many.

I would like Etsy to advertise to buyers in magazines that don’t cater specifically to crafters to try and get their name out there. It seems right now that most of their efforts go towards recruiting more new sellers. They make their money both ways from sellers listing and selling but if sellers aren’t selling a lot of them are just going to give up or move to another site and Etsy will lose out on listing fees.

Featured on Etsy Finds!

I was over the moon to see that my product photo for my Bee Necklace was used as a feature photo in the September 14th Etsy Finds! After experiencing a drought in sales for September I garnered 2 sales and over 5000 shop views that day and 1 sale and over 2000 shop views on Thursday!

I hope that some of  those people that 'hearted' my shop and individual items will come back at some point and buy from me and that I don't get buried in their pages and pages of new favourites! My wish to improve Etsy would be to give us the option to sort our favourite shops and items into manageable categories!

Shrek ears

I found this mushroom growing through the remains of an elm tree we had cut down (it had died). I've never seen one like it before and it reminded me of Shrek's ears.

Fall colours

Fall is creeping in. There's a chill in the morning air, back to school buzz everywhere and hints of colour in the leaves around here! I'm introducing some luscious autumn colours in my ring collection.

Blog feature

As I was checking the new shop stats feature on Etsy I noticed I had gotten lot of traffic from mintdesignblog.com. My Yellow Gradient Ring was featured in one of their posts. Thank you Ellie!

New kids on the block

Baby redwing blackbirds, a photo by bstudio18 on Flickr.

We found this nest recently with three newly hatched redwing blackbirds. The nest was made of field grasses and cleverly attached to several goldenrod rod stalks so it was suspended off the ground.