Daily Archives: July 11, 2010

On Patterns I See in Myself on Etsy

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As I spend more and more time on Etsy (especially since I am considering becoming a seller), I begin to see just how targeted my tastes are and what they run to. I find myself favouriting the same kinds of shops over and over. Part of the problem is that I am spoiled for choice– there are hundreds of people who make lovely soy candles, for example– and so I find I can’t choose to favourite just one. (This is not a problem with buying, by the way. When in doubt, I go for the seller with the lowest shipping price :D ). But anyway, it’s interesting to see my Etsy habits from the outside once in awhile. That being said, here are the items I tend to favourite stores on the basis of:

1. Soy candles
2. Arm warmers
3. Shirts/hoodies with interesting/cool/tech/statement-making prints
4. Collage/unique art prints
5. Dichroic glass pendants
6. Amazing handmade clothing (this runs the gamut from underwear to winter coats to hoodies to dresses to…)
7. Chokers
8. Handmade paper
9. Steampunk jewelry and accesories
10. Asian-inspired clothing/paperworks
11. Hats and scarves
12. Cool shoulder bags/messenger bags/purses (and I don’t even normally carry one!)

And based on this criteria, I have favourited about 55 shops! (Let’s not even talk about individual items…). Conclusion? Etsy is amazing, addicting, terrible (to your wallet), utterly inspiring, and weirdly personality-illuminating. Huh.

On What This Blog is to Become

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Hi all (who still read this):

Yes, I am still going to keep this blog. However, it will be re-designed (it might even be part of an ongoing design experiment between me and an unspecified Wordpress framework…), and the format of the posts will change. I feel like I was constraining myself before, always trying to make long posts, and getting discouraged when they weren’t long. Also, when posts are long, the pressure to keep them interesting is pretty hard to deal with on an ongoing basis. So… this means shorter posts.

Shorter posts will also mean less rambling. They’ll be more to the point, and mostly just about one or two topics. This (or these) topic(s) will be specified in the title of the post, like in this post– and it will usually begin with “On…” I’m calling these the ‘On…” posts, for obvious reasons :D . Making a title like this first forces me to keep on track and on topic.

So by all means, keep leaving comments and suggestions, and I am much more likely to actually SEE them now that I am not buried under 233 spam comments anymore (averaging around 3 a day, yikes!).

EDIT: Forgot to mention: the shorter, more specific posts might mean more than one post a day!  Yay! If you have an RSS reader, subscribe to keep up… if you don’t, just keep comin’ back :)

Enjoy! :)
Tamara

On Decluttering Old Cupboards Full of Craft Supplies (Junk)

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It is time-consuming, and you regularly find yourself saying, “why the **** did I keep this?!” But well worth it. I ended up with two boxes and a bag of recycling, one big garbage bag of, well, garbage, and a huge load of stuff to give away/sell. Here are some pictures, because I can’t resist bragging:

Conclusion: If you need a fairly simple picker-upper (which doesn’t involve caffeine… necessarily), declutter. Even better if 80% of it is junk anyway.