Halloween Jack and Spook Cat

$24.95 + shipping

How to Round Up

Challenge yourself in 2011 with a new craft! You'll find ten of the finest How-Tuesday posts of the year in this round up blog post. 


Read on
http://www.etsy.com/storque/events/craft-nights-near-and-far-and-a-2010-how-to-round-up-11476/?utm_source=bronto&utm_medium=email&utm_term=Read+on...&utm_content=etsy_success_010610&utm_campaign=etsy_success_010610

Top Tips for Smart Holiday Shopping

Shop after 6:00 p.m. the evening before a sale is advertised to begin. Many retailers program the registers the night before, so the sale may already come up in the register even if they have not changed out signs on the selling floor yet. Ask the associate in advance for any possible upcoming sales, especially on big ticket items.

Prepare a list to use while you are shopping. Make sure to include alternative selections in case you are unable to find some of the items on your list.

Avoid crowds by shopping during stores’ early and late extended hours.

If you are looking for specific advertised items, take the complete ad with you so that you don’t end up in the wrong store looking for a specific price.

Staple a gift receipt to the merchandise tag in case it needs to be returned or exchanged. Keep your original receipts with any warranty paperwork for the life of the warranty.

Remember when gift shopping you are buying for someone else’s wants and needs, not your own.  But don’t be afraid to take full advantage holiday promotions treat yourself to something nice!

Shop safely! Watch your personal belongings at all times including handbags and purchases. The stores are not responsible for any lost items so be careful, especially at the register when you can get easily distracted by the transaction itself.

Save yourself the headache: let the charity group at the mall wrap your gifts for you.  This will save you a lot of time and free you up to do other things on your holiday to-do lists.

When shopping online, have your credit cards and address book handy.  Many websites have timed windows to complete a transaction, so you need to have shipping information at your fingertips.

When walking through the mall or down Main Street, wear comfortable shoes! You’ll be walking on a lot of marble, concrete and tile.

Only buy gift cards from reputable retailers, not through online auction sites. Gift cards sold through online auction sites may be counterfeit or have been obtained illegally. 

Make sure you have personal credit card information available at home in the event you lose a credit card while shopping. Important back up information includes customer service phone numbers, PIN numbers and account numbers.

Be vigilant. Make sure to stash your cash in a safe place within a wallet while shopping. When paying with cash at the register, only pull out of your wallet what the amount totals, not the entire stash. This also applies to personal items you carry through the stores, including shopping bags and purses. 

When parking in a large parking lot, make sure to keep all items in the trunk of the car and out of sight. It also helps to park near a light if you know you it will be dark by the time you are done. Mentally locate the nearest security office or officers in case an emergency occurs you can easily track down appropriate personnel.

Boo To You

'Boo To You!' by Rabbithollowprims

Magical Holiday Artists Style

Witch Hats - mini OOAK Sculp... bywayofsalem $11.00	Chenille Black Cat Ornaments oldworldprimit... $6.75	Published Original Halloween... BucksCountyDes... $30.00	CREEPY Gourd Chenille Hallow... Hauntedswampde... $15.00
OOAK Halloween folk art vict... WitchHollowPri... $9.99	Halloween Black Glitter Skul... RavenFaesCreat... $34.00	Halloween Set of Two Pumpkin... seasonsart1031 $28.00	Folk Art Halloween Witch Dra... Cottagegarden $40.00
Primitive Halloween Sugar Sk... Rabbithollowpr... $24.95	Witches Boots - Earrings - M... JewelrybySimin $12.99	Primitive Devilish Gingerbre... BentWhimsStudi... $30.00	Happy Halloween Candelabra H... shesbattydesig... $5.00
Shabby Hallowen Paper Orname... sleepyhollowfo... $10.00	Polymer Clay Tile Halloween ... handmademom $14.99	FOGGY Fairy Forrest Morning ... mermaidfairy $45.00	OOAK Sculpted Paper Mache Bl... pearlavenuestu... $22.00

Generated using Treasury HTML code generator by Whale Shark Websites.

Etsy Code Contest

the geek (khaki green) MESSENGER / LAPTOP BAG | by: CraftieRobot

Etsy announced today they are holding a handmade code contest and they need the help of the Etsy community to give ideas for programmers for new Etsy applications. Etsy sellers and buyers can leave their ideas over on the Etsy Storque HERE, and developers can check out more details about the contest HERE.
Etsy Says:

Do you wish Etsy had an iPad application? Do you dream about a gift registry, or long for a set of tools to help you better manage your shop? Well, here’s your chance to speak directly to a group of people who can make it happen: independent software developers.
If this sounds like a bunch of tech mumbo-jumbo to you, then think about it like this: if you have an iPhone and you’ve installed something from the App Store or you’ve played Farmville on Facebook, you’re using something that an independent developer built via an API provided by Apple and Facebook, respectively.  (Vanessa also gave great explanation early last year.)

Halloween in School Disrespectful to Real Witches?

A Washington state school district is canceling its annual Halloween celebration, and the explanation has some parents baffled.

"Let them have their 30 minutes of dressing goofy and having candy," Silas Macon, a father of two school-age girls, said Wednesday outside Maplewood Elementary School after learning that the grade-school tradition of a party and parade in costume during the last half-hour of class before Halloween night won't happen this year in the district.

A letter sent home to parents Wednesday said there will be no observance of Halloween in any of the district's schools.

"We really want to make sure we're using all of our time in the best interest of our students," Puyallup School District spokeswoman Karen Hansen said.

The superintendent made the decision for three primary reasons, Hansen said. First, Halloween parties and parades waste valuable classroom time. Second, some families can't afford costumes and the celebrations thus can create embarrassment for children.

Both of those reasons seemed sensible to the parents who spoke to ABC News affiliate KOMO-TV in Seattle. But the district's third reason left some Puyallup parents shaking their heads.

The district said Halloween celebrations and children dressed in Halloween costumes might be offensive to real witches.

"Witches with pointy noses and things like that are not respective symbols of the Wiccan religion and so we want to be respectful of that," Hansen said.

The Wiccan, or Pagan, religion is said to be growing in the United States and there are Wiccan groups in Puyallup.

On the district's list of guidelines related to holidays and celebrations is an item that reads: "Use of derogatory stereotypes is prohibited, such as the traditional image of a witch, which is offensive to members of the Wiccan religion."

"I do lots of things that are not revolving around wearing a black outfit and stirring a cauldron," Wiccan priestess Cheryl Sulyma-Masson said in an interview with ABC News in which she explained that Wiccans, or Pagan Clergy, celebrate nature.

I love Large Dolls!

I love to receive and make large dollies, the bigger the better.  My favorite holiday is Halloween so I decided to make a grim reaper type dollie and called him Mr. Midnight.

Look at that face.  AWESOME! That is all I can say about this guy. He is huge! Roughly measures 35-38 inches tall depending on if you measure his cape. Hand-painted, extreme prim hand-embroidered face, great black washed wool cloak, jute string tie with skeleton bodies of the dead collected, and handmade wire staff. Pattern by Soft in the Head.....

Here is where you can find Mr. Midnight ...he is in my  Handmade Spark Mini Site Shoppe


http://www.handmadespark.com/myspark/RabbitHollowPrims/51195780/primitive-mr-midnight

The Art of Pricing Your Handmades

Story by daniellexo  Published on April 16, 2009 in How-To	Photo by  sisterbutterfly

How do you know if you're pricing your handmade work correctly?  There's a lot of info out there, including right here in our Art of Pricing series.  The trick is to keep learning and evolving, not only in your craft, but in your pricing strategies, too.  I've put together three exercises to bring focus to your bottom line.  These exercises are here to make you think about your pricing, hopefully they can help you create a formula that works for you.  I hope they help you as you continue to work on pinning a value to your items.

Exercise 1: What's It Worth to You?

Imagine if you will, a complete stranger asks you to create an item (something you currently sell in your shop). That's not all, they want you to photograph, list and promote this item as well. Whew! "Is that all?" you ask. No, they have one more request: package that item, print a shipping label and drop it off at the post office. Now imagine they want you to do all this for the price you currently have this item listed for in your Etsy shop. Would you do it happily? Would you grumble? Would you deny this task altogether? Reality check: It's up to you to determine the value of your time and efforts. Make sure you take a step back from your work and your prices and look at it from all angles.

Exercise 2: Get to Know Your Customer

Close your eyes and think about the ideal person you would like shopping in your Etsy shop. How old are they? How do they dress? How much disposable income do they have? Do they shop online? What type of handmade items do they love? Now that you have a clear image of this shopper, ask yourself, "How much would this person spend on a unique item?" How do the prices in your shop compare? If this is a hard exercise for you to imagine, get a clipboard and hit the streets! Find someone who pops out to you as your ideal customer and ask them a few questions. Yes, I am instructing you to talk to strangers. Feeling shy? Get your local Etsy Team together to survey as a group.

P.S. If you are brave enough to do this, leave a comment below and let us know what happens!

Exercise 3: Number Cruncher

1. Decide what you would love your yearly gross sales to be.
2. Figure out how many items you make per week, and how many for an entire year.
3. Divide your gross sales goal by the number of items you can create. (For example, perhaps you work on your shop part time and you'd like to sell $12,000 worth of goods. If you make five items a week, your yearly total will be 240 items. Dividing $12,000 by 240 items would give you a $50 price point.)

This equation will give you a suggestive price. Keep in mind this is just an exercise, some items may be more and some less, depending on time and materials. Also, you (most likely) won't sell every item you make, but with this average amount as an indicator, you'll know if you're on your way to your yearly goal!

Source:

http://www.etsy.com/storque/how-to/the-art-of-pricing-three-helpful-pricing-exercises-3788/

Craft Cult Etsy Tool

Story by juln, kutty, magicjelly, TechUpdates, Vanessa  Published on May 29, 2009 in Spotlight	Photo by  Craft Cult

As part of our Handmade Code series, we're bringing you news and how-to's about the innovations emerging from the Etsy Developer Community. Located atdeveloper.etsy.com, the Etsy Developer Community serves as a hub for third-party software developers who are making neat and helpful programs for Etsy shoppers and sellers. In this edition, magicjelly presents her and juln's site, Craft Cult, which includes the incredibly useful apps The Heartomatic for sellers and The Vault for shoppers.

The Heartomatic was first developed by Julian, a.k.a. juln, back in 2007.  He really only intended it for his own use, but told a few of his Etsy friends about it, too.  One of them posted about The Heartomatic on the forums and word spread fast — soon there were thousands of people using it!  In November 2008, Julian and I launched Craft Cult, a collaborative project. Julian is the programmer, I’m the designer, and we have lots of plans for new features.  I think one of the reasons for Craft Cult’s success is that we are artists and Etsy sellers (and buyers) ourselves.  I think that experience has really helped us develop tools that Etsians find useful. 

What's the basic idea of the application? What need does it fill?
The idea behind Craft Cult is to enhance the Etsy experience for both sellers and buyers.  Utilizing Etsy’s public API, The Heartomaticprovides sellers with statistics relating to their shop hearts, item hearts and views in a time-saving, user-friendly format, as well as providing information that isn’t readily available via their Etsy shops. The Featured page also shows sellers when they’ve been picked for Etsy’s home page, Gift Guides or in The Storque so they never need miss the excitement.  We often hear people comment that Craft Cult is totally addictive!  

Our utilities are a lot of fun and very easy to use, but from a more serious business perspective, they also provide shop owners with invaluable information about their shop activity that can really help when it comes to product development and market research.

We haven’t forgotten about buyers. We recently implemented The Vault, which is an archive of all the home page featured lists.  The Vault is pure eye candy, very inspirational, and a great place for window shopping.

Our newest addition to The Vault is a “Share This List” button that takes you to a page where you can create an animated widget featuring items from Etsy’s home page, which you can embed on your blog.  It’s a fantastic way to add some visual appeal to your blog while spreading the word about Etsy, and it’s a way for Treasury curators and sellers to preserve their moment of home page glory and show it off to the world.

Where do we go to find it? What's the URL, etc?
You can find us right here… http://craftcult.com

Who is it for? How many people are using it right now?
Craft Cult is for Etsy addicts and people who love handmade and vintage. There are a LOT of them using our site, about 45,000 unique visitors and 2 million views a month, and growing steadily.  Since installing Google Analytics a couple of months ago, we’ve had over 90,000 unique visitors using Craft Cult!
 
How do you use it?
The Heartomatic is really easy to use, just input your Etsy username or id number and hit “Enter.”  

There are tabbed sections to the Heartomatic where you can check your hearts and views, as well as check to see if you’ve been on the home page or featured elsewhere. 

One of The Heartomatic’s benefits is that you can see at a glance who has hearted you, what time they hearted you, whether they’re sellers or have buyer accounts, and you can see all of your item hearts listed without having to view each of your listings.  We also show you how many new hearts you have, “new” being hearts accrued in the last 24 hours. The Heartomaticalso calculates a views per heart ratio for your items — that is, how many views it takes on average before someone hearts you.  This information can give you great insight into the popularity of your products.

The Vault is just as easy to use.  You can search the archive by member (list curators and featured sellers) or by date.

Are there any costs or further opportunities/ways to get involved?
Anyone can use our site and it’s totally free. Craft Cult serves a dual purpose because, in addition to the Etsy-related utilities, we also offer sellers the opportunity to benefit from our high site traffic and promote their shops and products. Our advertising space helps fund the site so we can devote time to customer service and developing new features, and it’s also really gratifying to know that it’s providing independent artists and crafters, who usually have a modest marketing budget, with good quality, affordable advertising.  Each of our advertisers receives in excess of 10,000 impressions per day, and we hear lots of good feedback from them about the results they get from their ads.  If you’d like to take a look at our advertising info, you’ll find it right here.

What should one do if there's a bug or a problem? Who should one contact?
Julian is the brains behind the technical side of the site, and he’s very helpful and obliging when it comes to customer service, so please don’t hesitate to email him at julian@craftcult.com with any tech issues. He’d really appreciate the heads up if you run into any difficulties.  We’re also on Twitterand post news and updates there.  Come and say hi!  

What's one surprising/fun/amazing story you've heard about someone using your app? Or what is your favorite part about the app?
Every time I hear back from our advertisers that their ads are working for them, it makes me really happy.  One of our regular advertisers recently emailed us to say she’s been able to quit her day job and run her Etsy shop full time, thanks in part to her Craft Cult ads.  The idea that we may play a part in people’s success is so amazing!

Anything else you'd like to add?
Thank you for the opportunity to tell Storque readers all about Craft Cult!

source:

http://www.etsy.com/storque/spotlight/handmade-code-craft-cult-4087/