I had trouble sleeping again last night. I was exhausted, but I just couldn't go to sleep. At least I've found a new way to keep myself occupied when I'm awake. I've been doing research surveys at mechanical turk by amazon. They pay you (practically nothing) to waste your life taking surveys and performing stupid tasks that computers wouldn't do as well as a person. Most of the stuff I did is still waiting approval, but I made almost $2. yippee.

My little husband is working from home today. We've been sitting next to each other on the couch with our laptops like dweebs all day.

Put some more pendants in my shop:

Still Chuggin

WOW I had an awful night. I've been having some trouble sleeping lately. About once a week I just won't be able to fall asleep before 4 or 5 in the morning. Last night I drifted off between 4:30 and 5, and then woke up at 8 to jack hammering in the street. They didn't stop until 11. ugh. So I'm running on 3 or 4 hours of sleep.

I've been so sleepy that I didn't think I'd manage to meet my goal of adding 3 things to my Etsy shop. But I did it! Yay! Here's the "new" stuff... but only the first one is brand new. The other two have just been absent because I updated them.



Feels good to fill up the shop. I've still got so much more stuff to list.

Had lunch with my husband today. It was nice to get out of the house.

But I've been keeping myself very busy with my Etsy shop. For the past couple of months I was focusing on making enough stuff for my table at the craft show. Now I have to worry about photographing all of it and putting it on Etsy. I've got a goal of photographing/listing 3 things a day. I've done it the past two days in a row.

Some little thumbnails of new stuff in my shop:

Awesome Weekend

I had such a great weekend!

I've been spending the last few months getting ready for my first show with a full table. I recently sent most of my stuff over to a shop, so I had to pretty much start from scratch. I made a lot of my own displays, and I worked really hard to get a good amount of stock.

I set up on Saturday morning at the Tower Grove Farmers' Market. It was supposed to storm all day. It was a little cloudy in the early morning, but the rain never came. The humidity kind of messed up a few of my handmade earring diplays, but everything else held up pretty well.



The show itself was super fun. There were lots of cute kids and friendly dogs. My husband got us the best potato chips ever. I might have to go back for those sometime. A bunch of my family members came to visit, and my husband convinced some of his research team members to drop by. I also sold more stuff than I had anticipated. Definitely a success.

Later that day we went to the Cardinals game. They broke their losing streak. I've only been to 3 games in my life... but I've still never seen them lose. Took a cute picture of a bug:

Glaze, Artbeads, Spanish

I got some "Diamond Glaze" in the mail today. I bought it on eBay. An eBay gift card was pretty much the best thing ever to put on my wish list... it makes me feel like I can buy all kinds of new craft stuff without the guilt of spending "real" money.

Anyway, Diamond Glaze. They should probably just call it MOST-AWESOME-STUFF-EVER. I took all of my photo pendants out of my store because they got sticky after they sat around for awhile. I needed some kind of coating for them, but everything I tried was either sticky or murky. Things that other artists pointed me to were either too expensive, or too complicated/messy for me to want to try. Diamond Glaze was relatively cheap and has a little applicator. All I did was squeeze the stuff out on my pendants and pop the little bubbles with a safety pin. No waste, no toxic fumes, virtually no mess. I can spread it around with my fingertips if I need to, and it comes right off of my hands. My little pendants aren't sticking to anything anymore. LOVE IT. Kind of want to buy the ridiculously large refill bottle now... but we'll see how long the little bottle lasts me.

If anyone bought one of my old "sticky" pendants and wants a new glazed one, I'll replace it for you. Sorry I didn't detect the problem sooner!

Artbeads.com was nice to me today. I ordered a Swarovski pendant for a necklace I want to put in my craft display. It had a huge crack down the side of it. :( Their web site says you have to return items before they'll send a replacement, so I e-mailed them and asked if I could put it in bubble wrap and mail it in a letter-sized envelope (since it was already damaged anyway). They replied and said that they were just going to send me a new one. Couldn't believe it! Usually when I deal with big jewelry supply sites, they act like huge jerks when I have a problem. Go Artbeads!

I've been practicing my Spanish. I listen to language-learning podcasts when I'm making jewelry, and I've been spending some time at www.lang-8.com. It's pretty cool. It connects you with native speakers of the language you're trying to learn, and the idea is that you help each other learn the other's language. It's nice to feel like I'm doing something intellectually stimulating... haha.

I'm excited. I just got accepted to a craft show at the Missouri History Museum in Forest Park. It will be so cool to be able to do a show so close to my apartment (I live like 6 blocks away from there). It's also nice that it will be in a place everyone can find. The show will happen on December 4th... so I'm hoping everyone will be looking for Christmas gifts for their favorite ladies.

My next show is in a little over two weeks, and I've only got about half of my table done. Eek! Only reason I'm currently allowing myself a break to blog is because I need to let some sealant dry on my batch of clay photo pendants.

I've put a couple new things in my shop.