Etsy Treasuries: For Rain Lovers and Chefs

I woke up one morning this weekend and found items from my shop featured in several treasuries!



Let it rain by ModMomME (in the widget above) features a pair of great raindrop earrings, and a vintage vinyl umbrella. I'm not surprised that umbrella has already sold; I guess I'm not the only one who has been on the look out for one.

For even more great rain picks, go over to Etsy to check out Blame it on the Rain by VenBead. Both treasuries feature my raincloud notepad, but the take on the color scheme is different in each!



Another theme that's gotten a double treatment lately is cooking! Secrets of a Restaurant Chef by JSTravelPics is above, I love the artichoke print. While the latter features the greens, Le Grande Chef by PeshtemalShop is more black metals and wood. Both feature my recipe cards.

Thanks to all the Etsy lovers who feature my items. I haven't made many treasuries recently, I'm waiting for inspiration to strike. When it does I hope my treasuries look as good as these do!

Also, only a few more days for the 10% discount in my shop for March. See this post for more details!

Give Handmade Recap/Treasury

I said I was going to post about some of the great stuff at the Give handmade craftshow last Sunday, but I decided it would be easier to go ahead and make a treasury on Etsy featuring some of the artists. But I have to admit I was pretty extra excited about some of the cat prints, the happy cat I mentioned at the end of yesterday's post, and the two cute kitties on a pile of yarn I've included in the treasury. Plus, Jill Bliss was there and Chuck liked her onion, beet and carrot card.

The space for the event, the left bank annex, was also pretty lovely. I wish I had taken a few pictures while we were at the show, but there are some pictures of the space before the show up on the give handmade blog.  The website says that it was "a machine shop for WWII airplane parts" that's been renovated with some very nice details. I hope we get the chance to go to more craft shows in that space!

Etsy Treasuries

I made a new treasury today after noticing a handful of these miniature houses in my favorites. I was trying to decide between a Talking Heads reference (that would be "This is not my Beautiful house") or the Tom Waits one that I went with for the title. I know that at least one of the artist featured has an architecture background:

I've currently got 3 treasuries going on Etsy right now. The new one pictured, Doily Dallies, and Cool for Cats (which I know is my Mom's favorite!) I haven't really been following the Etsy forums and updates as much as I once did, but I am thrilled that we don't have to wait for openings anymore. I haven't spent much time tinkering with the new format however. They last as long as you want them too, so rather than delete these I've been trying to keep the theme going and switching out any items that have been sold. You can see a full list of my treasuries here. It's kind of fun to keep it going and find more items with the same concept in mind. So, for the other Etsy people out there how long do you find you keep your treasuries going? And how many have you accumulated? I am curious to find out!

Stringy Inspiration

Grabbed a new Treasury this morning. Took it as an opportunity to explore some of the embroidery type work on Etsy. And naturally it is blue because I do enjoy that color. And after seeing this amazing architectural embroidery project over on craftster embroidery is a subject that's been on my mind. I've thought once or twice about embroidering floor plans before. Closest I got was once binding a photo album with an abstracted linear map-like binding. That was a lot of work. Anyway, In the process of looking through the work over on Etsy I found this cool shop seapod, full of ameoba and so forth. Fun, reasonably priced brooches that would make cute & unique stocking stuffers. Actually upon making this treasury I realized that embroidery crafts generally seem pretty affordable! And because I'm enamored with my latest find, here are a few more from Seapod:

Pink & Gray Treasury

Notices these subtle colors floating around in my etsy favorites sometime last week and I promptly made up a poster sketch about it. Of course it wasn't until this morning I notices some space freeing up in the treasuries. Nice to get it of my sketch board!

You can view the treasury here: http://www.etsy.com/treasury_list.php?room_id=22642

Juice Colored Treasury

For some reason yesterday I wasn't feeling very into the idea of posting an entry even though there was stuff to post about. I guess that must've been true Sunday as well. Sunday I did manage to nab a treasury west, thanks to noticing an Etsy forum title that said they were becoming avaliable soon. I should've blogged about that Sunday night, treasuries are one of my favorite Sunday night activities. But I didn't so I will blog about it now that I've just found out it was on the Front Page this morning! I completely missed it, but I'm excited to know it was there. It'll be up for this evening before it expires.

Cool for Cats

I woke up this morning with our sweet little cat Lucy sleeping on me and shortly there after nabbed a treasury. So I decided to make it all about one of my favorite subjects, cats. The title was from the Squeeze song "Cool for Cats" one of my favorites when I was just a little cat obsessed kid. I've recently signed up for blip.fm, which I guess is pretty similar to twitter, except for music. I haven't used it a lot so far, but I was able to find that Squeeze song, which made me pretty happy. You can listen to the song by going to my blip profile here. And my blips also show up as tweets. The internet seems to be full of chirping noises lately! Oh, and I almost forgot, you can visit the treasury by going here.

Treasury happy dance

I did it again. This one just kind of happened. I had left my browser window open to the treasury page inadvertently, just browsing through. Then hours later I still had it open and didn't realize it. When I finally did realize it it was about 30 seconds before they were opening up. I very quickly glanced through some of my recent favorites and tried to think up a theme. They seemed to be such nice shades of yellow. Not quite enough for a full treasury though, so I did have to spend a little time & effort searching etsy for yellow stuff and scouring my favorites sellers shops. Which is perfectly fine, it's a task I enjoy! You can view the treasury here:
http://www.etsy.com/treasury_list.php?room_id=18016

I'm noticing there are more illustrations than usual, and sketchbooks. Along with candles, coats, scarfs and coffee cups, I hope this lives up to it's title. Ah. If only I could inhabit this treasury...

Houndstooth Treasury

This is in response to a conversation my Mom and I were having last night about seeing lots of pretty houndstooth scarves and jackets on the streets of Chicago lately.
Update: This one has expired, but not without making it to the front page first, yippee! Sandfibers has a image of that on her blog here, along with a nice post about some lovely treasuries featuring her work!

Doily Dallies

Featuring Doilies
Photostream of: emmakat79

Well, Since it's not looking like the treasury situation on Etsy is going to get completely straightened out until the next round of treasuries are up, I thought I might as well post an image here. My treasury items ended up here while my title is hanging out with pirates! (Note these have now expired.)

Anyway, on a related note, because I was recently thinking about doilies, I was very excited about these Newspaper Doilies I saw featured on Cuteable first thing this morning. What would be really awesome is some kind of waffle press type contraption in which you can press old newspapers to make these. Can you imagine? Wake up, make some waffles, make some newspaper doilies. Okay, I'm just being silly. But these are very neat and I'm really curious as to how they are made!

And on an unrelated note, Craft Magazine's Blog featured a tutorial on making a note pad from The Small Object that is very nicely done. It involves a "life changing compound" to glue the top edge together a la store bought note pads. I am fascinated by the idea because I love lists and forms and nothing I ever buy seems to suit my needs correctly. I will probably have to find out more about this compound! It certainly looks intense!

These also caught my eye last night on Penguin and Fish and showed up this morning on Cuteable! (I've been wondering what "alpaca wire" is ever since. It seems like something I should've heard of before, but I haven't! Anyone know if it actually involves alpacas in any way?)

Well, I started my day pretty early this morning, so I am either expecting to be very productive and/or crash around 5pm or shortly there after. So far I've been productive, I've already been to the gym and blogged. Let's hope it stays that way!

Stats from the Front Page

I just had my second etsy front page experience! (Well second time for one of my items to be on the front page. third experience including the treasury I curated last week!) I think my notebook was up for almost exactly one hour, from about 10:45 to 11:45am. This brought about 17 new hearts for the shop, 18 hearts for the notepad itself and something close to 330 new views of the notepad. Additionally several people added other items from my shop to their favorites, the majority of which were other paper goods.

I'm running through the stats just because I think it's kind of interesting to think about the impact being on the front page has on a shop. I've been making an effort to list a few items a day for the past several days, but that certainly doesn't bring people in at the same rate! This was kind of an interesting experience since I was an alternate choice in the treasury. I saw the little gray star next to this treasury yesterday and it filled me with suspense to know which item had been chosen. I promptly tried searching through the curator's favorites but didn't see any of my items. Having the item show up on the front page was a pretty excellent way to see that mystery resolved!

So far this hasn't resulted in any immediate sales, but it sure made me happy anyway. There's something pretty neat about how Etsy is set up & I am sure to spend a bunch of time looking at the shops and favorites of all my new hearts!

Architect's Treasury

Architect's Treasury
Photostream of:emmakat79

Etsy treasuries are always a nice thing to do on a Sunday afternoon. Well, okay, technically it's not Sunday...which somehow gives the day even more of a Sunday feel. It's Sunday times two. So today I wasn't even trying all that hard, but happened to be looking at treasuries when they were at the magic 333 number. With 5 minuted to go before a treasury became avaliable. (For anyone that doesn't know, etsy treasuries are explained here.)

I stuck around to pursue an idea of collecting architecturally influenced shops. I like the results and I can see coming back to the idea later. It's already spawned a possible gift idea; despite Chuck's lack of interest in having things he's already declared an interest in having a Mies pincushion. He's now an IIT student, you see, and Mies designed most of the buildings on his campus.

Anyway, I'm always checking profiles to find out if designers I suspect are architects are in fact architects, and I'm sure I've come across several more than I've featured. This treasury represents a mix of those influence and those involved in the profession. Perhaps a future treasury will be exclusively filled with those in my profession. But for today I am happy with a mix!

UPDATE: This Treasury made it to Etsy's Front Page! It's the first time for a treasury I picked out! YAY!

blue treasury

Sunday evening seemed like a nice time to grab a treasury. I think I succeeded on treasury west this evening because it was having some trouble earlier in the day & just went back up. Ah, well, I suppose that means it may or may not continue to have problems. But it was fun anyway. I noticed a few pairings in a deep teal showing up in my favorites lately and I'm glad I finally got to throw them into a treasury!
See it here while it lasts: http://www.etsy.com/treasury_list_west.php?room_id=8423