yay!money!

Remember when a while ago I won 250$ in the apartment therapy tutorial competition?!that was about a month ago and the money stayed in my paypal account till now, I already had one nightmare about not spending it fast enough. There were just too many choices and wonderful things on Etsy that I want and I just couldn't decide.

And so, though the reasonable thing to do would be to spend it on some heirloom piece that would service me for a long time, like a leather bag or spend it all on 25 pounds of fudge, this money kept making me think of the first sale I ever had on Etsy. It was on late November, when I decided to pick up my long abandon store and make and list at least one thing every month to see what happens. Now, making one thing and listing it a day look like an easy work day, but then it looked like quite a challange. I've been doing it for 2 weeks, trying to promote and getting pretty discouraged, and then I sold a sock puppet I made to the awesome Queancy Pearson. It suddenly made all this making-money-of-art thing looks possible and that though it was a bit of a rude awakening to list things that I loveingly made for pretty small change and still not having people rush to buy everything, a little reality worth so much more then a hige fantasy.

And so I thought that the best thing I can do with a 250$ in Etsy money would be to give this awesome experience to other sellers and make them realise that they to, can make some money from making stuff.

So, for the next couple of weeks i'm going on a shopping spree in stores who never had a sale (I might bend the rules if I see something I really want and the store had very few sales so far), I'm going to try not to spend more then 25$ in each store, and try ot give this cool experience to 10 people. Also, I'm going to review the stores I'm buying from and hope that the blog feature will get them some more exposure.

I'm going to try one more thing in my search of stores that didn't get any sales yet - If I come across any that don't make sales for a reason that look obvious to me, I'm going ot critique them, again hoping the exposure would get them some attention.

If you are or you know any cool shops with no sales yet that you would like me ot critique or buy something from, please comment here. I can't promis to buy or critique any of those, but I will take a look at what they make, so at least they'll get some views out of it.

News News News!

Well, the cool and big news in that I'm going to take part at the fact and fancy Holiday meet

the artist trunk show! Everyday, for a week there are going to host a different artist in the gallery and have more room for their stuff and I'm going to be one of those lucky people! Horay!

The Gallery in at 75 Hoyt st. in Brooklyn, and I'm going to be there on Saturday December 20th, I'm really happy and excited and now going into work frenzy to make enough stuff for this show. I'm making some hand painter ceramics and there's going to be some new art kits and reader kits as well as some original art and prints.

I really love their space and every time I'm there, I want to buy the entire store, get confused and buy nothing, but this time, I've decided that I got to leave the space with one gift for myself, so you can all come and help me pick what I'm getting.

Making New Things

Sometimes it's really nice to invent new items. It's not that I'm tried from glasses cases and cards, but it's just nice to be challenged with something new and feel what a new material feels in my hands.

I found this awesome vest in the Salvation Army store - my favorite shopping destination ever! it cost, I'm almost embarrassed to say, 3.99, and it's really beautifully made and just feels great. I spend 3 days embroidering it with a lilac elk and a shooting star. It was so much fun to make, even though it took ages...

This heavy wool like fabric is the best embroidery surface I found so far, it was a pleasure to work with.

Also, after our oven was finally fixed, I finally discovered the awesomeness of Phabeo porcelain paints. And used them to make 3 small vases. One was already sold this morning!

Salvation Army

The Salvation Army on Bedford avenue and N7th street is one of my favorite shops in the world! really, it's so awesome.

First of all, they have great cloths in really cheap prices, which I like!

Second of all, they have really cheap cloths that though I might not be able to wear, like an extra extra extra large red sweater from Moreno wool for 3.99$, I can still buy and use as material to work with and make stuff from.

Third, I really love wearing second hand cloths, not only someone else did all the work and wore and washed them till they got all soft and nice and not too clean and crisp to wear, it's also better for the environment cause cloths gets to go around and last longer in the world.

Forth and probably the nicest thing - I love the way that this is contributing to the community, people who wants to get rid of cloths, have an easy way of doing it, people who wants to buy cloths have a good place to do just that. Stuff get reused and people with no money get to have great stuff if they want to.
Also, for some of the people that work there this is an opportunity to have a real serious job for the first time in their life and gain confidence and work abilities on the way of rejoining to working community. I love to see the same faces there every time and how much better they become in working there.

So today, with an idea about a pink fox in mind I went shopping, I intended to just get a pink sweater and get back to the house, but then some other stuff caught my eyes and this is a result:


1) a pink sweater size Large, as planned....

2) An Ann Taylor Loft Stripy skirt, probably to wear, it's really nice and I can't wait till it's warm enough to actually wear skirts.

3) Another skirt with a brown and pink Paisley motif. I thought of using the fabric as material, but now I think I like it too much as a skirt and don't want to destroy it.

4) A Gap sweater. This was on their posters last fall, and I saw a lot of people wearing it for a while so I'm not sure I'll be able to bring myself to wear something so recognizable, however, it'll make a cute elephant or something if I decide to cut it up.

5) a Red and blue star Tshirt, bought mostly for the stars and for the fact it was 0.99$

So, good day of shopping, 16$ spend on 5 items and spending time in my favorite business in the neighborhood...

Above you can see Henzel the Fox which is made of a half of a salvation Army sweater I got last week at half price of a 3.99$.

What does one do in a day of no crafting?

I didn't make anything today, usually I don't make stuff in a day before a shoot. Ned's shooting a beautiful model tomorrow and we are trying to get over the mass in the studio and turn it from an artist studio, a very messy place indeed, to a photography studio, which is basically a lot of free space. So what did I do today?


Well, Ned when into the city for a meeting and I came as well, we agreed to meet back at coffee shop in an hour and a half. I'm almost out of cool fabrics for the lining of the tarot decks, so I walked to PurlSoHo to get some new ones. The store was really crowded and it's tiny, but found some good stuff. It was cool to listen to all the conversation and how people are dealing with crafting problems and what they are making.



It was very cold and i was getting tired walking out, so I stopped in some tea shop and had some tea. I didn't have my MP3 players and for the first time in a while I got to sit on my own and listen to people's conversation that were very strange, There was 2 women in some meeting on one side, one of them were a voice coach or an English teacher and this was their first class, she made the other girl read out a poem lout loud in the middle of the cafe and they went over the difficult words.

On the other side, a girl was telling her friend about her trip to Pushkar, India. one of them watched a TV show about Pushkar and they were comparing notes and talking about guys.

While I was having tea and listening to conversations, I was finishing a painting I was working on for a while.



We went back home and Ned fell asleep while I was trying to clear the mess in the apartment so that we can shoot tomorrow. After a while I stopped, we didn't do the image research we usually do before shoots and I didn't know if Ned's going to wake up in time to do it, so I made one myself, after an hour of finding and downloading pictures, I went back to trying to clear the mess.

Ned woke up and we went out for a late late dinner in Kellogg's coming out, we saw the most beautiful snow falling. It looked like tiny shards of glass or the small tinsels in a snow glob, all tiny and shiny. It was very cold and the snow was staying on the ground, all dry and stiff, like powdered sugar.



In Kellogg's it was warm and crowded, and we had some sandwiches and talked over the photos I downloaded before, thinking about different ideas for tomorrow.

Weekly Summery

Sales This week: 11 (!)

Hearts: 358

Treasuries: Curated 2 (the art of war and Original sin)

Main source of inspiration: A fabric shopping spree in PurlSoho and a paper shopping spree in NY central art supply gave me a beautiful new thoughts about colors.

Best thing to eat: Not an amazing food week, but I just had some amazing chocolate.

Shopping: Oh my god! so many cool things were bought this week - about 20$ in Purl for 2 pieces of linen and 4 pieces of cotton, then about 10% in dickblick for 3 sheets of paper, and then about 30$ for 11 sheets of paper, all for the back of tarot cards. Expensive - but so beautiful!

Greatest achievement: 11 Sales! the most I've had it a week so far.

Disappointments: Still not brave enough to list any pine art pieces.

OK, so lets see how I did with this weeks goals...

1.List something each and every day I think that aside of one day, I have indeed list something everyday. On top of that I'm learning to use the Etsy listing exel document so I'll be able to follow my listings better.

2. And make a fox! - Nop! I was too busy making Tarot cards.

3. finish the cups set production and list it, and make at least one tarot deck of the major arcana this week - I made much more then that! one of my nicest buyers wrote about "the cups" deck in a collectors forum which got some cool people seeing them (and buying them!) I made 8 of them this week - and sold 6 of the ones I made.

4. get one treasury, at least, and be in one (hopefully) - I got 2 treasuries, but were not featured in any - sadly.

5. list a fine art item - Nop, I'm still not brave enough for that. I'm going to try that next week.

6. write a store review about someone else's store - Didn't do that either.

7. see the Irving Pen exhibition in the Morgan library and also the Horst exhibition in the Forbes gallery - And no exhibitions!

I guess I didn't do so well on the tasks for this week, however, it doesn't matter so much cause I was really busy making tarot deck and taking care of orders. I'm so happy and excited about people's reaction to the new cards and all the sales. I just hope it keeps going like that.

So, most of the goals move to next week and this is what I plan to do:

1. There were already 14 sales this month, I'm very happy about that. My target was 20 sales this month, so I hope to have to revise that, If I can make those 6 sales this week, I'll be happy.

2. Get my hands on one more treasury at least and if possible, be in one.

3. I got a very nice e-mail from the woman who wrote the Etsy article in Ynet. I want to answer it and write her about my favorite Etsy store.

4. List a fine art piece.

5. Odin the wolf sold, so I want to make another wolf. And possible another fox.

6. Make another cups deck and another major deck.

7. I want to write a blog entry \ article about my experience in Tarot and the history of them in my life. Possibly the first of a series of articles about my personal view of Tarot card. This would be a perpetration to a fuller instruction manual I intend to make about cards.

8. Go see those exhibitions!