Jewelry Making Journal

I have been fortunate enough to have a write-up about my jewelry featured on Jewelry Making Journal's website. You can see the article by clicking here.  Jewelry Making Journal is a combination of online magazine and community journal.   It’s the place where friendly jewelry artists from all over the world are sharing jewelry experiences, creations, ideas and knowledge.  I have enjoyed reading many of the sections and write-ups on JMJ and recommend it to anyone who has an interest in handmade jewelry.

They have just recently decided to add a section called Men Making Jewelry, and my story was the first  in that new section.  While men are definitely in the minority when it comes to making jewelry, we are still a part of that community and this addition gives us an opportunity to share our perspective.  Hopefully other guys will take the opportunity to add a posting in our new forum.

Learning some new lessons.

It has been several days since I posted anything here, and I need to be more faithful about finding the time to keep this blog updated.  My last post concerned the opening of my Vintage shop on ETSY and that has gotten off to a slow start but then that seems to be the way of life.  It just takes time to get things set up and then get all the Titles and Tags working so the traffic gets directed to your shop.  Nothing seems to go as quickly as you would like it to.  Learning to be patient is one of the biggest lessons I am learning as a seller on ETSY.

On my jewelry shop I did get a new item set up and listed.

Tiny Silver Sideways Cross Necklace 

This really is a cute piece and I am very pleased with the way it looks.  The cross is quite small, just under 1/2", but the light weight chain seems to match up with it very nicely.

I am finding that it takes a while to get things standardized, and get all the bugs ironed out.  I ordered some Sterling Silver chain from a supplier that I had not worked with before, and it was just very slightly smaller than the chain I had used before.  The problem popped up when I tried to use my "regular" jump rings.  The "old" rings were just a little bit too large to fit through the new chain links, so I had to order some new smaller gauge rings to work with the new chain.  That delayed making a couple of new necklaces that I have been wanting to put together.  I guess the lesson learned is that you need to find the parts and pieces that work, and then stick with them.  Don't change things without understanding that the changes won't come back to bite you.

New Vintage shop

It's been a few days since I posted anything and that is because my wife came up with a brainstorm.  We are in the process of getting our house ready to sell, because we are going to move closer to the kids and grand kids.  In our book, family is what makes the world go round.  And we are planning to downsize so many things are going to have to go.  So wifey recently said, "Why don't you put this on your ETSY shop" or "You could see if you could sell that on ETSY".

While the concept was good, it didn't seem like listing an Antique Victorian Birdcage right next to a Cross And Infinity Loop Necklace was a good strategy.  So I opened a second ETSY shop to list Vintage merchandise.  Right now I have 15 items listed and have several others to add.  Figuring out how to set up the first shop was the hard part, but setting up a second one was pretty easy.  I read in one of the forums that when you open a second shop, one of them becomes the red-headed-stepchild, meaning you don't pay much attention to it.  But that doesn't seem to be the case with me thus far.  I have also read that some ETSY sellers have 3 or 4 or even 5 different shops.  Not sure I want to go quite that far, but at this point 2 seems to be very manageable.

If you get a chance, stop by my new shop From Years Back and take a look.  Who knows, you may just fall in love with that Antique Victorian Birdcage.