Christmas Showcase!

Good afternoon,

Well it appears to be November already, I hope you're more prepared for Christmas than me! I can't believe how quickly this year has gone, I'm sure some months were missed out!

Anyway, to get us in the Christmas mood, why not take a look at this brilliant Christmas Showcase from the wonderwoman who brought us Support Handmade, However it's Made.

****SHHIM Christmas Showcase****

I'm sure you'll agree it's a great selection of British designer-makers (did I mention Pirate Treasures is included?!), the design of the showcase is pretty awesome - you can click on the gift tag photos to be taken straight to the seller's shop, or browse by category or view the designer's own page. You'd better get a mug of tea and some biscuits as there's so much to see!

I've made the decision to stop selling on Folksy once the last of my items delists at the end of the month. If you've read the previous posts or the Folksy forums over the last couple of months you'll know why. I'm going to try something new, but need to wait for a sunnier day than we've had recently to take some new photos! I'll blog about that when it actually happens...

So I've spent a few days moving the things from my Folksy shop over to my website http://www.pirate-treasures.com/ - there's some new jewellery in most departments plus the Emporium of Curiosities section where you can find cards, gift tags and ACEO art cards. To read more about the Emporium, have a quick look at my other blog here.

Well, I'm off to do a bit of stocktaking - not long until my first Christmas Fair of the year!

~Jane

What's new?

Hmm, well I haven't appeared to have done a showing-off of the other SHHIM shops yet, but the official Supporting Handmade - However it's Made Christmas showcase will be online soon, so I'll remember to link to that if I don't do anything myself first. Anyway, int he meantime you can click the link above to go to the page and see the increasing amount of crafters/artisans involved!

I've still been hard at work on the website SEO,  gosh it's driving me round the bend, but interesting to see how it changes the search results on Google.

So what's new for Pirate Treasures? I have three events booked - 26th November at Oasis Academy Coulsdon's Christmas Fair, 3rd December at Keston Primary School (Old Coulsdon) for their Christmas fair and Sunday 4th December at the Christmas Concrete Market at the Green Dragon pub on Croydon High Street - more about that here. 

On the Pirate Treasures website this month I have added several new designs to the vintage inspired range - a cool new octopus charm bracelet and matching necklace. A sweet little birdcage charm necklace, vintage style chrysanthemum necklace and brass owl earrings.

The pirate jewellery range also has some new designs including a cameo charm bracelet, plectrum and charms bracelet and a matching ivory pearl bracelet, necklace and earrings.

 

Phew, well that's kept me busy! Next I'm going to be making Christmas cards and gift tags, so hope to show some of them next time.

Bye for now,

Jane

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! 

Folksy Friday - Pirates!

This Folksy Friday is a little late due to Blogger being offline all day and deleting my draft! So this week I decided to do a Folksy Friday selection based on pirates because I'm a little excited about "Pirates of the Caribbean - On Stranger Tides" coming out next week! As the first Pirates film was my inspiration to make jewellery in the first place I felt I ought to do something to mark the occasion. The first four are from my own Folksy shop Pirate Treasures Jewellery and the rest of the lovely goodies should be clickable photos to take you to their creators' shops. It was very difficult to narrow down the selection of piratical awesomeness, but I hope you like these ones...








Here's where they came from: 1) Gaia Noir 2) Sparrow Primitives 3) Dab and a dash 4) Socklings 5) Aunty Joan 6) Hop To It Craft Shop 7) Honeysuckle Rose Crafts 8) Magpie Accessories ...please go and take a look in their shops to see what else is on offer!

~Jane