When I wasn't looking, Phoenix's Moneygami Koi popped over 200 views. I've learned at this point that views do not equal sales, but there is still egoboo in knowing that 200 people have looked at something you've done.

Annoyed at moo.com. Their site is very...misleading about delivery times. I probably won't have them before Capricon.

OTOH, Amazon.com, which everyone loves to bash, is exceeding expectations of delivery times. Barring some failure on the part of UPS, it looks like I will have my new ink 2 days early.

I am sooo tired of sitting in front of the computer and I have sooo much left to do, so I took a break. I cut and ground glass for a new bacon shaped suncatcher. Why bacon? I dunno. Just felt like making bacon in stained glass.

I have to decide how much re-arrange I want to try to get done on the vinyl banners. Unfortunately, it's almost an insane amount or nothing. If nothing, then none of the new pieces are shown. If I do it, I'm almost doing a complete remake of the banners. Rrrrrr.

Printing at Paul's didn't go as planned, he's out of ink. He went out to get more and will print what he can. If necessary I'm going back over there on Sun. to help.

We will be showing 21 pieces of stained glass, 9 of which are new designs since WindyCon. 4 are so new they haven't yet been posted in our Etsy shop, and won't be until after Capricon.

A quick glance over at Phoenix's work area looks like he has about 7 new origami pieces for Capricon, one is an absolutely stunning moneygami eagle. If we include the 7 pieces in the Etsy shop, he will probably have about 14 pieces for the art show.

I have all the paperwork done for the stained glass, but we had to stop before we could get to the origami because our printer ran out of toner. We have more on order, hopefully it will come in before we have to leave. If not, we'll just have to fill out the paperwork by hand.

We placed our order for business cards from moo.com, they should arrive on Wed. Fingers crossed.

He's on 2 panels, plus opening and closing ceremonies. I'm on one about favorite web comics, the rest of the time you can find me in the dealer's room with my vinyl stickers.

Stop on by to say hi!

Still getting ready for Capricon. Of course that will be SOP until I arrive on property.

I found the list of sticker suggestions I wrote down at Windy and drew up the first one last night. It's a little ladybug. I have until the end of this next weekend to get them all drawn up.

The Colorform Capricii are just about done and I've been sending them on. I seem to be giving Peter and Helen the giggles.

Paul is cranking away at his new painting so he can have it done in time for Capricon. I'm heading over to his place on Friday so we can get prints printed and bagged.

And I managed to get this gem onto Etsy. Go have a look.

This time it's my stained glass purple corset. The treasury is called Cleavage. As always, treasury's are short lived and this one will be going away on Feb 1, 12:24p.

In other news, I haven't been posting much because I'm getting ready for Capricon's Art Show. I have one more piece of glass to finish and then I will need to shift gears and work on vinyl for my table in the dealer's room.

Soooo much to do, soooo little time.

Who cares about the twig! The snow is gone! I'm gonna run around in circles as fast as I can! Oh wait! Pine Cone!

He came running off the porch like a race horse out of the gate. Runrunrunrunrun! Circles! Figure 8s! Random wild turns! And came to a dead stop to sniff a pine cone. Then he does this thing where he'll toss the pine cone in the air and then chase it. He also kicks it around like a soccer ball, while dancing around it. Almost like a cat playing with a toy.

What kind of card stock do you use as backer cards for your prints and where do you get them?

Much better than tea number one, it's a rich dark tea, which is more to my taste. But the hint of chocolate hits me as odd each time I take a sip. So it too is being offered up. It's called My Morning Mate "an invigorating blend of Mate, Yunnan black tea, chocolate, nuts and a touch of spice."

Same deal as before. 

I debated whether to post this one now, or sit on it for Capricon. But it truly is a Valentine's Day piece so it needed to go on Etsy.   If it sells, I may be able to get another done before Cap, but that deadline is coming up really fast.

Celtic Heart Suncatcher

Now that I've completed that task, getting Paul's painting photos ready for prints is next on my list.

I stopped in Teavana last night looking for something anise/fennel/liquorice. Didn't find anything. One of the teas I did buy was Tiki Twilight "a vibrant, tropical medley of fruits and sweet root vegetables".

You know when you look at a piece of art, and you can appreciate what the artist was trying to do. You can tell a lot of skill went into the piece. It's really good art, it's just not something you'd personally would hang in your house.

This tea is like that.

I can tell it's a really good tea. Light, fruity, slightly floral. A lovely blend of delicate flavors.

I prefer tea that is so black you have to chew it. This is not the tea for me, and I'm not going to finish it.

Who wants it? You need to be local-ish, I'm not going to ship it anywhere. I'll bring it to Capricon if that's the next time I'm likely to see you.

Montana Gold spray paint http://bit.ly/89ul5I smells amazingly like Super Elastic Bubble Plastic http://bit.ly/6bUhKC

At least not at any convention hotel please!

Box of wine in a microwave

Two more Valentine themed suncatchers cut and ground. Hoping to get them foiled while watching some Miss Marple with darkwing830 tonight. He's almost done with the lettering for the comic shop sign, and hopefully we can start cutting that tonight too. Maybe even some weeding....

After I'm done with these suncatchers, that will be all for V-day items and I will need to switch gears and start making stained glass pieces for Capricon, which is in about 3 weeks. I also need to get the photos of Paul's art ready for printing so he can have pieces in the print shop at Cap. Also need to make a few Goat Droppings Caprici. And get the new vinyl pieces laid out on a banner for my table in the dealer's room. And get images sent out to moo.com so I will have cool business cards at Cap.

Ooof. I need to make a Gantt chart, or else it's not all going to get done.

After Cap, I will need to start making St.Pat's day pieces for Etsy. And, cooler than cool, I have a few requests for custom pieces that I will need to start on...after Cap.

I did it. I unfollowed someone on twitter. It was the stained glass person. Today she tweeted "I just found this great handmade item!" I thought, I'll try her links this one last time, maybe this time it'll be different. Sure enough, it was a link to her own piece. Bah.

OTOH, the broken plate chick I mentioned in an earlier post found the post and tweeted a link to it. I got a bunch of new twitter friends from it. I'm looking forward to what they have to say.

The more I do research into the subject, the more I'm learning that twitter has changed a lot since it's beginnings. It was once all "I just got to work" "I'm in a boring meeting" "I'm in the toilet doing number two". But now that it's matured there are whole conversations going on. While I didn't use it for a long time, I'm glad I grabbed the username bigblued back at the dawn of time.

Checking the stats on our Etsy store before going to bed. Yes it's addicting. Got someone who wandered in today by way of Bing. Keywords were "hand spun buffalo". I'm beginning to wonder if I'll ever understand search engines.

Shaenon is having a moving sale and if you buy a copy of Skin-Horse vol 1 you get a free random original strip. I got the one on the bottom of this page! It was like the prize in the cereal, only cooler. "Yeah, yeah, books, but what strip did I get?"   Oh, and she drew the captain of the silverfish on the envelope!  It's going with all of the envelopes she sent with Artie drawn on them.

If you haven't been reading Skin-Horse, by the awesome chanlemur  and shaenon stop whatever you are doing and go read it now.

I finally managed to post another piece up to our Etsy shop. It's a Valentine's Cthulhu. No, don't look! Your eyes will burn with teh cute!

There was a lot longer gap than I had intended between listings. Primarily because I had been working on the staff t-shirt art for Capricon and needed to focus on that. But also because it's kind of hard coming up with "good" descriptions for the pieces. Believe it or not, there is a whole science behind making sure your descriptions are loaded up with enough of the right key words, but in such a way that it doesn't look like you've loaded it up with a bunch of keywords. Before I started reading about this sort of thing I just wrote whatever came into my head. Now that I "know better" it's a lot harder.

I did list a UFO suncatcher but I didn't post about it. It's not a new design, I had sold one at Windycon, and I didn't want to spam everyone's LJ/FB with stuff that isn't new.

A couple weeks ago, I started using my twitter account more often. Partially because I have more things I feel I can post about right now and partially because I now have a phone that makes social networking a lot easier than it used to be. This also started about the time I got our Etsy store up so our listings were another thing I could post about. Since I was doing a lot of Etsy related research, I friended (followed?) two people who's art I liked and looked like interesting successful Etsy sellers. This way I could observe how the successful people were using twitter.

One was a person selling pendants made from broken plates, the other was another stained glass artist. The first I chose because I liked her web site and she had a lot of information on the crafting communities. The glass artist I chose because she had good sales numbers, her work was reasonably priced (not under-priced like most of it) and the quality of her work was high. I've been following their tweets for a couple weeks now and here are my observations.

The broken plate chick tweets about everything. Everything. I'm not sure how she gets anything done, but I'm positive her phone is welded to her hand. Kid does something cute? Tweet pic. Found something cool on the internet? Tweeted link. Lunch with friends? Tweet! There is a lot of chaff to wade through, but she does post quite a few gems. She is connected and active in the crafting community and there are a lot of good links. And, of course, she tweets when she has new listings on Etsy.

The stained glass chick only tweets when she has new listings. For her, it's not a social tool that happens to work for marketing, it's a marketing only tool. I have learned nothing about her, her life, her crafting process, nothing. Why would I want to buy something from you when I know nothing about you? And she tweets deceptively. Instead of saying "I have a new item up, go look!" she'll tweet "I want this!" or "look at what I found!" But instead of things that she wants, or links to something new that she found, the links all go to her own pieces. I've stopped reading her tweets, they only made me angry.

The lessons learned so far are that I know I need to tweet more, but I don't think I'll ever get up to the broken plate chick's level. I know I will tweet when we have a new piece on Etsy, but I'll be clear that I'm linking to our pieces. Right now, the hard part is that I don't think in "tweets" yet, so a lot of tweetable moments go untweeted.

Next time I have a chunk of time to mess with social networking some more, I will probably un-friend the glass chick and go looking for some other people to follow for a while. If you want to follow my infrequent tweets, I'm bigblued. Let me know who you are on twitter so I can follow you too.

There is a tree I can see outside the window behind my monitor. As I was sitting here I saw a squirrel run up it in an awkward way. Not the usual smooth bounces. It had something large in it's mouth. It got up to the wires where it crossed over to another tree. While on the wire, I had a clear profile shot of the squirrel and the struggling mouse it was carrying. Mouse? Squirrels eat meat? Wikipedia says they will eat smaller rodents when hungry. Who knew?

The first of the next batch of items to go up on Etsy. Starting in on the Valentine's Day pieces. It's a simple heart suncatcher. A small part of me wishes we could have Arctic Cold Freezing but Super Sunny days all year because I was able to take the *best* photos of the stained glass. Then the rest of me says that's a stupid idea. If it's sunny again next weekend I might go out and get new pics of the older stuff cause the lighting is just that good.