A Winning Design

Wow! I won the Beadfly Fall Design contest! Thank you to the Beadfly folks. I've enjoyed being a member of this new site and its forum. I blogged about the winning design here, too.

So, what is Beadfly? It's a very web 2.0 type of site for beaders. It has an interactive forum, a place to upload and showcase one's work and talk about the inspiration for it, it provides members with opportunities to give and get reviews. It's got a good look, some neat features and I'd love it if you'd join and be my "friend" on the site. I'd also love to get a group going - another fun social networking feature they offer. I was thinking either a regional group (Northern California) or one of folk who do vintage style jewelry would be fun.

Now if I could only find the time to really concentrate on getting my stuff in the public eye and sell some of it! I have a new domain but haven't figured out how to get it on the hosting site account (which is set up under my husband's name with the hosting co.) nor how to build a storefront website.

I've got some good Googlejuice on the search "beaded badge lanyards" since I blog here so often and make sure to tag nearly every post with that phrase, but other than that, I'm still floundering a bit as to how to market my work. I had really hoped to get into LosCon (as I've whined about before) and get a few more sales this year, but absent that opportunity, I'm just not sure what to try next. I tried Google Ads for several months, but tracked no sales from that investment so I stopped it. I love Etsy, but it's a huge site and unless someone knows about me specifically, I doubt if they'll just stumble on my site and make a purchase.

Not going to give up, though! Eventually I'll figure something out, and next year I'll contact some cons much earlier than I did this year.

To cheer myself up, I'm working on a new necklace - turns out these stones and colors I'm using are pretty close to some of the the "Pantone Fall 2008" fashion color report colors. I'm thrilled about purples being 'in' as that's one of my favorite colors to wear.

I'm using 20 gauge copper wire to 'string' and attach squares of hemimorphite, bright, fluted copper beads and antiqued copper bead caps, faceted amethyst colored rondells and oval beads in this one. May not take this pattern all the way around the neck, have some nice antique copper chain I can use, too.