Oooohh, Ahhhhh, TURQUOISE!!

Just have to share a wonderful essay on Deerwoman Designs blog about turquoise! You see, I'm ready to admit that one of my great loves in my life is southwest turquoise and Native American made jewelry. I'm always on the lookout for artist pieces using natural, beautiful turquoise stones, and silver work. I often study the designs and draw inspiration from it.

Buying turquoise isn't as easy as you think it is, as I found out. There are many, many, many fake stones or plastic being passed off as turquoise on the market. Learning to buy quailty turquoise pieces takes some homework and developing a good eye. It's something people have devoted their lifetime too!

This essay about turquoise on Deerwoman Designs blog really covers the basics and is a good start to help about learning how to distinguish what is natural gem quality turquoise stones to plastic fakes with little to no actual turquoise stone involved. If you love turquoise you will thoroughly enjoy the effort she took to compile the info and pictures!

I'm not one to believe in emotional attributes or tailsman qualites attached to stones, but if you do, turquoise is believed to have healing properties and was also believed to make arrows fly straight by some Native American cultures. Another belief I personally found interesting is that it's susposed to help a horseback rider stay on and prevent falls! Boy, too bad I didn't know about that all these years I've been riding, I would have been saved a lot of bumps, bruises, broken bones, etc.....!!! LOL!!!!

Promote! Promote! Promote!

I started something I've never done before last week, creating promotional items of my Etsy art shop! Making my Etsy shop a success (ie producing a steady monthly income and showcasing my art) has become really important to me. So, I've been reading through all the forums for days on the site to glean ideas about how to do this, especially in the economy today! I gathered some great ideas and one of those was to join an Etsy Team. I joined the Etsy Texas Crafters last month and one of the events is a participating booth at the Maker Faire in Austin Oct. 18th. And, one of the members is cordinating "goodie bags" to give out to promote Etsy and the Texas Etsy members. And all I, or any member, need to do was simply send their shop promo items and the kind Etsy member will distrubute them out!!

I thought, wow, this is a great and affordable opportunity for me, so why not participate and take advantage! Now, what in the world do I send as a promotional item? The obivious is business cards, however, I asked myself, would just a business card be motivation enough to get someone to come to my shop? While I have some very nice business cards, they do not really promote my Etsy site (it mostly highlights some other websites I use, but I'm in the process of changing my mind about those sites as I'm not getting ANY sales there!). I racked my brain and thought back on my experience from working in a doctor's office and when I was a veterinary pharmaucetical distributor salesperson. At those jobs I was innuadated with promotional items from all sorts of drug companies. The ones that I handled the most, therefore in my eyesight more often, was nice, cute USEABLE, items........

So, there you go...... (as Texans say)....

I tossed around a few ideas and decided on two products that would get some good attention and say "Pick me" "Look at Me"! Or at least I think so! A small handmade notepad (4" x 2.5") and a bookmark/business card combo. The notepad will have my store info, a copy of one of my paintings and a beaded accent and backed with some handmade paper. My bookmark with be printed on some cotton linen type handmade paper with a ribbon and bead accent. And here's a sample of what I came up with:

The first notepad shows how I did the back of each pad, bound with real leather cord and assorted handmade paper. Then two of the examples of the pads showing the beaded binding and a painting example. Each pad has five pages of off white resume paper. I'm thinking people can use this pad as a mini sketch pad too. I'm having to practically hand cut all the pages so it's a lot of work. The front of the pad is printed on some great cotton rag paper (Lenox 100) that has a nice stiffness and thickness. I used glass beads with gold beading wire and just wrapped it around the leather cording (these supplies, beads & leather cord, came from WalMart so I didn't have to spend much). I'm making around 30 or so of these!

And these are the business card/bookmarks:

I'm making around 30-40 of these and hand tying each ribbon and bead. The paper used has more of a cotton linen feel to it, I really like it a lot.

I'm trying to be very disciplined and keep working on making all of these and then get them mailed off. This being the first time I've ever hand made promo items I'm getting a good idea of what it takes timewise and cost wise. I'm learning a lot, it will be very interesting to see what kind of response I get after they are handed out in October.

Now, after this project is done, it's time to really build art projects for my shop in time for October. Lots and lots of ideas........Stay tuned!!!