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.

Realcycle

Ever since my tutorial was published in apartment therapy I've been spending a lot more time on this site. It usually start with me checking to see if I'm on the lead and then pressing some beautiful images to see what that's all about.

The site is really cool on a whole, and have a lot of beautiful photos of all stuff related to home in different categories (apartments, children, kitchen, home-office and green) the photos are always beautiful and it's a nice calm way to pass some time in the morning or evening when my brain just needs a break.

However, I just completed one of those tours and feel like screaming at someone. I know what I'm going to say isn't new or original, but I'm a little pissed off, so I'm going to say it here.

When the green trend started, a lot of advertisers and people in marketing felt baffled by it, how can you make money of a trend that calls for shopping less, and not replacing everything you own every 6 month?! There were a lot of different approaches to this, most of which basically preach to maintaining the same wasteful lifestyle but having a green marker or stamp on everything so you can feel benevolent and hip while still not changing or damaging your life style. I feel that the re-nest part of Apartment therapy is very much in this spirit. There are a lot of seemingly cool stuff that looks beautiful but that is portrayed as ecological while in fact, not only isn't but probably damaging to the environment more then just keeping to your regular life style.

From this morning, 2 entries really bummed me out, one was a review of a designer that uses other object such as a shopping cart, a bathtub and a washing machine drum to make really awesome looking furniture, good design?! for sure. Ecological?! not at all! cause first of all, the shopping cart and bathtub and washing machine drum are new and so what's the difference between making a chair our of wood then out of a brand new shopping cart?! and second of all, he ship those things across the world from England, in a special delivery.
If you like this design so much you have to have it, go for it, if you are trying to be more ecological, just stick to the chair you have for the next 10 years or so, and when it breaks beyond repair, go on craigslist in your area, or a thrift shop to buy a second hand chair, or find a manufacturare in your area, or damn - even Ikea which sends 10,000 chairs at once. All those options are more ecologically valid then having a special sofa made out of a bathtub and send across the glob!

The second thing that grated my nerves was a 10 things to do with a pillow case article. Again, getting something new and modifing it might be great fun and yeild great results, but isn't ecological at all. The notion of putting handles or cutting holes in a pillow case to preduce a shopping bag or a grament bag is to me, very silly. Also, if you are so incline as to make your own bags, a trip to a fabric store will yild more materialst for bags without all the special packaging material that comes with buying one pillow case.
How about this for an idea?! buy a pillow case and use it... as a pillow case, use it for as long as it last, own just one of those per person in the family instead of hording them in a bulking cabinet.
If you want to be extra green about it, you can take the shopping bag the case came in and re-use that as a shopping bag or a garbage bag.

Yes, it's a lot less attractive and would not take beautiful pictures to put on cool design website, but if you do want to go green, and make that a priority in your life, it means, sometime, not living in a magazine but in reality.

Apartment therapy competition

Yay! my apartment therapy tutorial got in the competition, I'm so excited! there are still 2 weeks left so I'm sure by then there are going to be a lot more competitors, but right now there are only me and one other person in the re-nest category. I'm trying to raise my hopes too high, but I'm really excited about this.

If you don't mind signing up, please vote for me! I would love to win this!