I'm back!!

Oh dear, where did the summer go?
Well it's actually amazingly warm and sunny today, so feeling very summery although it's almost October - how strange!
During the actual summer, we spent a week in Italy staying in Lido di Jesolo and one day visiting Venice and the islands Murano and Burano, and another day at Verona and Sirmione on Lake Garda. Then a weekend at home followed by three nights in Paris - fabulous!

September has been a bit of a strange month.

 It started out in confusion as Folksy announced their new "clarification" to what is in fact "handmade". Unfortunately they didn't make it at all clear and caused great upset and sadly a bit of nastiness on the Folksy Forums. I've been trying to stay out of it as I haven't decided whether to continue there or not. Basically Folksy want to become a little more upmarket and concentrate on their definition of handmade. However, they have handled it quite badly and many sellers are left very confused, as some of the rules are a bit ambiguous or contradictory advice has been given to different people. I understand Folksy's wish to move away from the hundreds of "bung it on a chain" charm necklaces on sale, but what constitutes "original design" has been interpreted differently and inconsistently. Unfortunately my best sellers were what is now classed as "unacceptable" to Folksy - I sold six pairs of owl charm earrings in the run up to last Christmas, but won't be able to do that this year as they use mass-produced charms.

However, the super-cool Shirley-Ann from http://www.diddybears.com/ has cheered us up by devoting some of her webspace and a huge amount of time and effort to put together a page  Supporting Handmade However it's Made - click the link or the badge on the right to take you there, where you can see all the lovely shops selling jewellery, crochet, teacup candles, cards etc. You can also keep up to date with these designers on Twitter with the hashtag #shhim. I'm intending to do a Folksy Friday style treasury of SHHIM, but you know I'm a bit rubbish at blogging!

I've been busy doing lots of boring SEO work on my Pirate Treasures Jewellery website, tweaking meta tags, keywords and descriptions etc. It's ongoing, so I'll be doing that for the forseeable future!

Though I've also added another category to the site, the Emporium of Curiosities, which will stock cards, gift tags, art and textiles from my Folksy shop, which may be closing due to the aforementioned hoohah!

I've been adding new jewellery, a whole load of flower earrings, which I have previously had in my Pirate Treasures Folksy shop, on my old Facebook shop and at local events. There are a couple of glasses chains, in bronze and silver with glass pearl beads.

So, until next time, keep Supporting Handmade - However it's Made! Don't forget you can follow me on Twitter here, where I have tweeted more often in the last month than in the entire time I've been on Twitter!