shop update at big cartel

This week's shop update is entirely blizzard-inspired. During my snow days last week, I made two enormous and sparkly bracelets, and one dainty pair of golden teardrop earrings. The bracelets are both one of a kind and cannot be repeated.

here be chaos.

It has long been my plan to have an orderly process wherein I make new things, take photographs in batches, promote through the use of blogging and sneak peeks and then list the new items in my shop(s). This is a perfectly reasonable plan, and would, I feel, work out well. Stuff keeps getting in the way of my reasonable plan, though - namely my actual job that I get paid to do. It's shameless, really, the way this actual job interferes with my reasonable plan.

All of which is to say that once again I have sneak peeks mere hours before my shop update, which is almost pointless. Still, here they are. I've been lucky to find some spectacular rare beads lately, and they'll be turning up in new pieces starting this week. Cotton pearls in shiny green turquoise; glass spiderweb beads in black and red; and carved Lucite treasures I've never used before.

Because my time at the office is so chaotic at the moment, I'm also planning to list things in my new Leaves of Glass shop throughout the week (instead of just on Tuesdays) to lessen the urgency of preparing several listings at once. Updates for urban legend will remain on Tuesday for the time being.

This week is also the launch for a collaborative project that I've been working on with Shana of cookoorikoo (keep an eye on her blog for more details, and spot one of the collaboration pieces below!).

in the sandbox this week

These are some of the beads and colors I'm playing with right now. Look for these in Tuesday's shop update at urban legend!

please stand by...

The shop update experienced some technical difficulties today. First all the photos I took yesterday were too dark and had to be reshot. Then my home computer - dear, ancient home computer - struggled and doddered and resisted all through the editing and listing process. But I have triumphed! There are new plastic delights in urban legend! There's no update for Leaves of Glass this week - I've been concentrating on refreshing urban legend - but there will be new items for Leaves next week.

sneak peek!

I'm not doing so well with the sneak peeks for my shop updates - ideally, they should be spread out over several days leading up to the update, but at the moment it's all I can do to get the update posted at all. I have high hopes for improving my technique once school is out, however. Bear with me...

Tomorrow's update will be for both urban legend and Leaves of Glass. I've finally made some new vintage Lucite pieces for urban legend, and you can see some of them in the picture above. There are several more, including some earrings and an updated version of my long-ago popular Combat Bracelet.

The Leaves of Glass update will be quite a bit smaller: just five pieces this week, including two one-of-a-kind coordinating pieces that showcase some gorgeous rare glass beads in bright eggyolk yellow.

I'm still working on editing photographs, and have a few more that I'm hoping to take this afternoon before it gets dark. I'll do my best to have the update live before 11 a.m. Central Daylight Time on Tuesday, May 25.

sneak peeks and a retraction.

With the gifts of some good light and a few extra hours for work, it turns out I'm able to post this week's shop update almost on time. New pieces will be going up at Leaves of Glass this evening. The part of the process that will suffer from this is sneak peeks ahead of time part. As soon as I've posted this, I'll start writing descriptions for the new items, so there will only be a lag of a couple of hours between peeks and listings.

Several of this week's pieces were inspired by a lilac bush that I saw blooming against a brick building. I loved the combination of creamy purple and rust red, so that's what I'm focusing on for your sneak-peeking pleasure. There will be several other pieces as well, but I'll let those be a surprise. (There's also a bracelet that will have to go live tomorrow, as I seem to have left the pictures on my computer at work - yet another in my small comedy of errors for the week.) The photographs at the top and bottom of this post are closeups of actual pieces I'll be listing, and the rest are some beautiful things I found on flickr that evoke the same feel.

Thanks for bearing with me during my week of crazy!

tease.

Lately I've been trying to do shop updates on Etsy all at once on Tuesday mornings, rather than listing one or two new things a day. It's been working out pretty well - I like having all the photo editing and description-writing done at once, and it means I don't have to worry about anything except relisting for the rest of the week. Which leaves me more time to actually make new things. (Imagine that!)

I thought it would be fun to start doing preview peeks of things that will be appearing in each week's shop updates - either by photographing a handful of beads that I've used in new items, or by showing little slivers of things in teaser photographs. I'm opting for Option B this week. Below are sneak peeks of 5 new things that I'll be listing tomorrow, both in urban legend and Leaves of Glass. Enjoy!