GIVEAWAY - Of The Fountain Hand Stamped Leather Necklace! CLOSED


AND THE WINNER IS: Janil!

True Random Number Generator (random.org)

Min: 1
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Result:
22

Of the Fountain is the ingenius little leather shop of Mandy in Boston.

After graduating from the Art Institute of Atlanta in 2009, Mandy moved from her hometown of Atlanta (Acworth), GA to the-foreign-country-that-is-Boston.

Mandy loves to be able to make things for others and know that these things have a home waiting for them and says YAY to non-accumulation!!

(don't we love that!)

From her best selling luggage tags to her amazing leather jewelry, her shop has some wonderful personalized gifts for the holidays!


We are so lucky to have a wonderful Of The Fountain piece for this week's giveaway.
WHAT YOU GET:

One lucky winner will receive this beautiful LOVE stamped leather necklace!



HOW TO WIN:

Visit Of The Fountain and check out her amazing work - then come back here and leave a comment letting Mandy know which piece is your favorite!

For additional entries:


(5) Twitter this post
(5) Blog about this contest; linking to this post
(5) Follow my blog

Let me know if you have done these things so I can give you additional entries. This contest is open to everyone.

DRAWING:
Enter by midnight, Sunday, November 7th! Good Luck! CLOSED

secrets of halloween past or where have all the scary kids gone ....

This picture from the Artisan Collective team blog has me thinking that Halloween used to be alot more scary

(and I mean really scary, like Paranormal Activity 2 promos, Miley Cyrus wrapped around a stripper pole, my fondness for reality television and stirrup pants all rolled together scary)

and actually picturing these things all rolled together is kind of grossing me out, but kind of also making me hungry for the leftover spaghetti in my fridge which I will be devouring when I am finished with this post.

(yum yum)

Anyhoo - just look at these kids - would you open your door for these kids?

(yes, even that Little Rascally one in the front who is probably holding a hatchet or a sickel or something equally deadly, but all sweet-little-farmboylike just out of frame)

I don't know where Jen got this picture, but I never see anything this scary on my front steps on Halloween ....

although truthfully I don't see much of anything on my front steps on Halloween anymore.

Last year I gave up on the invisible trick or treaters

and this has nothing to do with my natural inclination to lock myself in the house, peek out from behind closed blinds and ignore the doorbell.

(I don't know what has happened to them, but we get less and less every year - I think because we have a driveway that is longer than 10 feet and the kids are just way too tired to walk all the way to my front door having been driven everywhere in a comfy-cushy Landrover since the day they were born or they've heard that hubby likes to give bags of pretzels, sorry kiddies, I know pretzels suck, but I can't convince him of this
)

I put a bowl on my front porch and went to bed- I counted the bags of pretzels first and there were 20 bags. In the morning there were 17 bags. So we probably had 3 kids who each took 1 bag .... sigh ...

In my day we would have dumped that entire bowl in our pillow case, ran like hell and then come back later to check for refills.

The only thing we didn't like was when people gave us taffy, not sure if this was just a Jersey thing, people would have boxes of saltwater taffy from the boardwalk and give out individual pieces like tootsie roll size for Halloween - yuck - and pennies - we really hated pennies.

Anyhow, am hoping for some really scary costumed invaders this year and I'm thinking its time Olive wore something scary, too and not her usual cutie patootie stuff, and it looks like I have exactly 96 hours to figure it out ...

... stay tuned

Kick Starter - Project Olive Tree with MatchStickGirl

I have been doing Kiva donations for a long time as part of my creative tithing commitment and recently the amazing Estella from StaroftheEast made me aware of a great site called Kickstarter which helps launch creative projects

and a creative project hoping to be launched and looking for funding from the incredible photographer Frances J. Melhop of Matchstickgirl.

You have likely seen and been inspired by her amazing photos on Etsy:
well, Frances has a dream and her dream needs a kickstart:

Frances lives in New Zealand making her amazing photographs and has been dreaming for 10 years of flying to Italy and using the oldest and original photographic techniques and equipment

(a pinhole camera, Kodak box brownie and monorail - head under the darkcloth - she will shoot black and white 5x4 inch sheet film and 120mm roll film)

to photograph the amazing 1000 year old Olive trees of southern Italy.

(they are protected and very fairytale - so gnarled and twisted they appear to have human bodies and faces interwoven inside the trunks)


Her project is looking for Kickstarter funding and Kickstarter is a place where for as little as $1.00 we can make donations to other creatives

and it is another great use for our creative tithing dollars - helping the dreams of other creative professionals come true definitely puts a fire and energy to our own!

Frances has 9 days to reach her dream (Kickstarter projects must get full funding or they are cancelled). Here is a link to Matchstickgirl's dream if you can send a little of that Olive tree fairy magic her way!

Friday Finds - a little weekend inspiration

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1. camera lens cap mug 2. duel savings bank 3. subway cushion 4. vases at room and board 5. woof necklace by La Bottega di Zanzu 6. ruffled laundry bag 8. Southern Bell musical beer bottle packaging
9. news recycler made from left over tennis court materials 10. wearable money by Tine DeRuysser

The Problem With Selling Just One Thing or when the Wednesday Whines post gets deleted somehow

Now, you know I like to whine on Wednesdays even though it has long been my goal to have a positive attitude at least 99% of the time and to be the kind of person who sees the glass as half full, makes lemonade out of lemons, doesn't cry over spilled milk, yadda, yadda, yadda ...

- although this will probably never happen in case you are holding your breath, waiting for this newer, better version of me to appear.

(you're not though, right? please don't - I don't know CPR and Olive is napping)

but this week's post seems to have vanished, so here's something I wrote a while back and for some reason never posted, can't quite remember why.

"If I'd asked my customers what they wanted, they'd have said a faster horse." Henry Ford

Back in the days when Henry Ford was "the man" he learned of a process for turning wood scraps, which he was loaded with from the production of his Model T's, into charcoal briquets.

He built a charcoal plant and Ford Charcoal, later renamed Kingsford Charcoal, was born. Today, Kingsford is the leading manufacturer of charcoal,

not sure how the Ford automobile is doing these days,

but you can see that selling something that the company wasn't originally intending to sell worked out pretty well for them.

(now charcoal has a big carbon footprint and not one any of us want to be stepping into, but the example of repurposing scraps and diversification is a good one)

Both my Etsy shops started out looking like jewelry shops - in that I mean that they were stocked with jewelry.

But in my mind they were never jewelry shops- they were a cork shop and a magnet shop,

so it was easy for me to diversify them a bit into housewears (stuff your house wears). I do not sell alot of housewears and I do not list alot of housewears, but it is a great benefit on Etsy where categories and labels are crucial to getting your work noticed that you diversify into other categories.

When someone buys a locket from me, it could have been that little magnetboard or something totally different that drew them into my shop.

This is also why I list alot of items even though I have certain items that are bestsellers and some things that never sell - because it may be that little item that never sells that drew that customer into my shop in the first place.

(note this "lots of stuff strategy" is an Etsy strategy and not necessarily a good business strategy in general)

They may buy the owl necklace (yes, owls are still hot - sorry), but there are 6486 (yes, I checked) owl necklaces on Etsy.

It may have been the gnome necklace (127) that caught their attention in the first place.


I have heard alot of advice given to new sellers about having no more than 2 pages of items for sale - that customers never get past that point in your Etsy shop and I would agree that most of my sales come from the first 2 pages - but it could be something else entirely that drew that customer in there.

(not that you need to be putting dozens and dozes of items into your shop, but maybe a couple things in another category can help, even a sub-category like earrings when your normally sell necklaces)

The other great example from the Henry Ford story is the idea of using your by-products to diversify. If you are making something you are usually also making something else (the by-product of your making) and what can you do with that?

And even the non tangible things that you have collected in the process of creating your business could have a value to someone else. The knowledge and systems that you have developed may have a value that someone else is willing to pay for.

Making cars and making charcoal seems like a strange fit - there may be some "strange fit" stuff in our creative businesses that we have overlooked.

And speaking of by-products I should add that Olive AKA the pampered pooch is on a new diet - food not made from the usual "not for human consumption" by-products, but one that is producing a new kind of by-product.

Blue Buffalo enhances their dry food with dark brown pellets they call Life Source bits, a scary name that makes me think that Olive is actually eating the souls of other dogs and Olive must think this, too, because she has been eating around these little pellets and depositing little trails of them all over the floor.

She has never been a fussy eater, but more of a canine garbage disposal, so I am wondering just what it is that they actually put in these little bits- other than the "precise blend of vitamins, minerals and antioxidants" that they advertise.

Olive is pretty smart- if she is leaving these bits as a by-product there must be a reason- I have been throwing them out for the squirrels.

(probably another reason for my super-squirrel backyard population explosion)

I did try grinding them up to get some of the "precise blend of vitamins, minerals and antioxidants" into her system that way - but am wondering - can a dog's eating habits really be changed (thinking about letting her go back to the little Caesars- she really loves them) or is it built into her DNA - like the way she likes to roll around in dead things and attempt to impregnate the beach towels ...