White Point mutterings, a Cool Cutter Set and a small Varnish Revelation. . . Oh, and NEW SHOP!

The image is also a link. . .

Well, the exciting news first. . . Vic, from up the road fixed my lawn mower. . .

Yeah, OK, that's not really the exciting news, though it did mean that I could finish my assault on the nettles and knee high grass in the orchard. . .

No, the potentially exciting news is that I have started up a new shop at another selling venue!
My ingratitude for the special gift of invisibility bestowed upon my shop by Etsy knows no bounds. ;-)

The images all link to the relevant page in my new shop. . .

I did a bit of research and found a site that is reasonably cheap per month, has no listing fees or sales fees, has usable themes, has the ability to import Etsy listings and link to them etc, and has good and quick customer support (unlike Etsy).
It has very little traffic of it's own, but I figure that if I am going to get stuck into generating my own traffic, I may as well point it to my own standalone shop rather than the train wreck (imho) that Etsy (especially Etsy Studio) seems to be set on becoming.

Except this one hasn't been listed yet. . .

So I have spent long hours working my way through the 300 or so listings I imported into my new shop, tweaking the seo and taking out any etsy links etc. I am about half way through the process so I think I am ready to share what I have been doing with a hopefully sympathetic audience. The site I chose is called 'Indiemade' and has been set up with sellers of handmade stuff in mind.

https://jbdrusticorganic.indiemade.com/store    is the link to my new shop.

Please feel free to check it out. If you feel moved to let me know what you think, don't let me stop you. Anything that bothers you about it, or that is confusing, please give me the benefit of your opinion. Many thanks x Meanwhile I shall continue the tweaking. BTW, all my newer stuff is on there, and at least most of the pics on this post are all linked to those items in my shop. Efficient or what? Phew. . .

Pic is a link as before. . .

So, on to the mutterings. . .
I've been having trouble getting my photos consistent between my camera and my computer. I am setting the white point manually, so that the different colours of the beads I am photographing don't affect each pic differently, but however close I get the colours on my camera screen, the exposure and white point seem way off on my computer. At least they are fairly consistently way off, so I can bring them back in Pshop to a certain extent, but it is a bit of a pain. The monitor is calibrated and all that so I am not quite sure what I am doing wrong if anything. Never mind, just moaning, I'll sort it, ignore,

And this one. . .

As you may be able to tell from the photos sprinkled lovingly throughout this post, I have bought a set of interesting shaped cutters. They are meant for working with leather, but are great for polymer clay. They come in sets of 26 or so and can be found on the usual big online venues for around ten pounds.

This one too. . .

So far I have just used them to make relatively crisp and clean image transfer charm type things, but I will explore further, texturing and distressing and all that.

And of course, this one. . .

My small Varnish Revelation is only a personal revelation, as most sensible people would have worked it out ages ago. . . I started applying Varathene varnish before baking! gasp! It does brighten up the resulting image a bit and seems to prevent any fading during baking. Obviously, the down side is that any distressing of said beads after baking might be harder. I haven't tested this yet, but I will in due course.

Aye well, it's all a learning curve,

Cheers,
Jon x

Cameras, Lawnmowers and Etsy Trauma. .

I made some shards the other week. Always fun to do

Well, it's been a funny couple of weeks. Not funny as in deeply humorous, but funny as in a bit odd or not like one would expect. Though a bit of humorous crept in too for light relief. Nothing all that exciting really, which is why I haven't blogged about anything for ages. But in the interests of keeping this whole thing going, I can just about scrape together enough mildly riveting things to keep you amused. Probably.

Green abused image transfer disk charms

My trusty, or up 'til now trusty, camera suddenly developed a fault. The on/off switch thingy had been very sticky for a couple of years at least, and I guess the extra strain involved in turning it on and off finally broke something. Just in the middle of a bead photographing session too. So I have a few beads with no photos to show scale, next to a ruler, as per my usual procedure.
Anyway, after ringing up a few camera shops I tracked down somewhere that actually repairs cameras rather than just selling them, and drove the 50 min to get there. It was touch and go as to whether Fuji still sent out the relevant parts needed to fix it, but eventually it transpired that they did, and I will have a large bill to pay. Annoyingly, not quite large enough to warrant me getting a new (to me) camera of the same type instead of paying for the repair. Oh well, I can claim it off tax as I use the camera mostly for product shots these days. . . I'll have it back in 10 days or so.

A collage of four shots of a single 'pot' dread bead type thing.

Mechanical Breakdown 2 - The rusty and trusty sit-on lawnmower that came with the house, as the previous incumbent was moving to a smaller place with no need of such a thing, and we would need it to deal with the big lawn, also developed a fault. The height adjustment was stuck. It was fixed quite easily, but we had to call someone in to do it. As it was such an old beast, we had to get an agricultural machinery guy in to sort it. Modern lawnmower repair men wouldn't know where to start with a 40 year old machine. Hah! It's proper lawn mower, in that particular shade of green that garden machinery and metal playground equipment like slides and roundabouts used to be, you remember. . .

Brown abused image transfer disk charms

Anyway, talking of on/off switches, the forums over at Etsy are in turmoil at the moment. A great many shops are complaining about their views and sales suddenly stopping, as if there was an off switch that had just been thrown.
Sellers moaning about low sales on Etsy forums is certainly nothing new, it's one of those 'death and taxes' type constants, but the scale and intensity of complaints this time does seem to be much higher than usual.

Coupled with the lack of views/sales is the state of the search function. From what I read it is really not fit for purpose, throwing up hundreds of items not really related to the search terms at all. Sellers feel that they are just not being found, through no fault of their own. They feel that there has been too much tinkering behind the scenes by coders and suchlike people.

Also, to add another layer of resentment, it seems that Etsy HQ is one of those kind of corporate hippy places you hear about and roll your eyes. There are Yoga rooms, free organic gourmet food a couple of days a week, a communal loom and something called a 'breathing room'. And that's just for starters. . .
Obviously oodles of money has been spent on such organic fripperies. This metaphorically chafes the collective rear ends of the sellers, including me, who have been paying Etsy listing fees and percentages of sales only to find that the employees have been lounging about in breathing rooms, belching organically while buggering up the search function completely. The money could have been better spent, one feels.

Ridged and textured tube beads

To add yet another layer of resentment to the ferment, as if one was needed, the ousted CEO, before he was ousted, had made a seemingly strange comment that he saw Etsy as a 'Tech Company'.

Eh? . . . Mulling this over, I eventually came to an understanding of what he might have been on about.

You may think that a site that sells things is primarily just that, a site that people sell things on. Well, when you get to the scale of Etsy, (and Amazon and Ebay etc) issues of server size come into play. They have a certain amount of server space in which to accommodate a very large number of things/shops. So what they allegedly do is rotate the visibility of said things/shops as that is much cheaper than paying for more server space. Sellers have been suspicious of this for years but any evidence is circumstantial. . . Etsy says nothing. . . The 'tech company' comment could well have referred to the possibility that Etsy staff might be employed to write algorithms that enable this rotation to happen in supposedly non obvious ways, and the idea that Etsy would then sell on the resulting algorithms to other companies who require such things. So Etsy could perhaps be seen by those of a cynical disposition, as just a sandbox in which coders could test their algorithms. Sellers being relatively unimportant. . .

And some image trans tile squares. Double sided no less. The images are the same beads from different sides

It also turns out, according to said ousted CEO, allegedly, that Etsy makes more money from listing fees from hopeful sellers, than it does from actual percentages of sales. Leading to conspiracy theory number two, that Etsy manipulates shop visibility in order to encourage sellers to keep on listing, and for new sellers to buy into the dream of giving up their day job and successfully selling their work instead. The idea being that the manipulation of sellers visibility allows them to just sell enough to keep going and to keep listing, and not notice the down times as anything other than the ups and downs of retail life. Give 'em just enough to keep 'em sweet. . . All very cynical. Who knows what the truth of it all is, but there are a great many upset sellers on those forums. . . The new CEO may or may not be inclined to address their concerns. Time will tell. But by then half the sellers may have left. . . Including me. . .
Until next time,
cheers,
Jon x

The Art of Invisibility

So, I have discovered that one of the  most sought after super powers in human history is incredibly simple to attain. I have achieved invisibility! . . .

Well, all right, I haven't really, but as far as my bead shop on Etsy goes I might as well have done. . . As the powers that be at Etsy tend to do, they are tinkering and fiddling behind the scenes, but this time it's radical fiddling and it's messing a lot of thing up.

I suspect the tinkering etc is only part of the story, I do understand that retail is not predictable but when your views drop by half suddenly and don't recover over a period of three weeks, and sales dry up for a much longer period than what passes for normal, conspiracy theories start to come into play.

The psychological effect is surprising. If you had asked me how I would take a situation like this, I would have sworn blind that I could suck it up and stay calm, but disconcertingly, I find myself worrying about what I might have done wrong or how I might have lost touch with my audience etc etc. I find myself losing motivation to make stuff, even though I know this is a silly over reaction. So I seem to be more reliant on others reactions to my work than I imagined. I guess that is useful information.

I now know a bit more about myself, and my motivations. And what I should really address in order to have a better relationship with my work. I want to make my work stand on my terms and I have obviously been distracted by the idea of the approval of others. . .
I'm not beating myself up about this you understand, just having a bit of a rant.

And, 'predictably' in the overnight pause between me writing the above and getting round to posting it I have had a large order come in that just about makes up for the lack of sales in the past week or two. . . ;-)

You gotta laugh, innit?

Funny thing is, this morning when I woke up, I just felt better, I felt a bit lighter somehow, as if something had lifted. Then the order came in, and the broody chicken has returned to normal behaviour, and the ducks have had 13 ducklings, along with the five little moorhen chicks on the pond. Must be the full moon. . .