Tonight I had a turn around in my ‘business strategy.’ (If you can call sitting on the man chair in the living room watching The Wire DVDs while endlessly editing images and posting listings on Etsy a ‘strategy’) It’s cool. I’ve spent the last two months really pushing my ‘online presence’ following instructions to leave thoughtful comments on other blogs, ‘favorite’ other sellers on Etsy, etc. etc. But really – the #1 reason I started doing all this bonkers bottle-cap-and-photograph stuff was because it was fun! And when I go to a blog I like to see content! Not to mention my entries with the highest hits are the ones where I tell funny stories that have nothing to do with jewelry. SO! I thought tonight I’d revisit other times I’d fucked up and my forgiving and understanding nature got me right through it with a smile.
This article had advice in it that made me smart again...
#1 – The time I dropped my camera at a wedding. Not only is this horrifying, but the wedding was just teeming with photographers. OK, RIT alum, what the heck are you doing in Blue Hill, ME, anyways?! The bride’s photography I’d seen before the wedding was beautiful. Her friends had super snazzy cameras that put my Mamiya TLR to shame. Then, just as the sun set and the guests made their way to the reception tent, ahh…I dropped my frigging camera on the ground and broke the flash mount! Cool, Audrey, real cool. I spent the next hour trying to figure out a new camera (fail), borrow someone else’s camera (fail) and eventually settled on Macgyver-ing the damn thing and not being able to let go of my flash for the entire night. Here are some pictures from that night:
Melting Cake Topper
Sweet Vintage-y Dancing Shot with my metallic flash thing I made
#2 – I drop things at Craft Fairs. The first time was at the end of the fair, so that was really no big deal. But last summer when Kate and I were rolling our wares to Lincoln Park for PICNIC we lifted this dumb little thing we’d rigged up to carry a bunch of stuff at once, tipped it right, and smash! All my candles that I’d been testing out crashed on to the pavement. Some were spared. Most were dangerous to touch. We just laughed a lot, though, because it was so silly. And besides later on I learned a better way to get the soy wax not to pull away from the vessel. So it’s a good thing I didn’t sell them, anyways.
At this particular fair I DIDN'T drop anything. Phew!
#3 – I’ve probably ruined three huge batches of bottle caps in the last year. Due to impatience and improper measuring. The weird thing about epoxy resin is that if you eyeball it, you’re probably in good shape. But if you eyeball it and haven’t slept much or maybe have been in a small attic with too much paint, epoxy and mod podge fumes for too long then maybe that won’t be so good. Botched epoxy pours are obnoxious because they’re kind of like melted saltwater taffy, in texture. You go to touch one to see if it’s ‘ready’ and then BAM your finger is covered in sticky junk. Then it kind of ends up on everything as you try to get all the bottle caps safely in the rubbish bin. Then you get it on your shirt as you’re trying to wash it off your hands and you think to yourself “God Damn it, that’s the third shirt I’ve gotten epoxy on this month, now I need to go to Goodwill.” (Another silver lining!) In any case I’ve wasted probably 20 hours of my life fucking up something that I should be relatively good at doing by now. Oh well! Just crack open the windows next time…
A lot of man-hours to be screwin' around with, Audrey
That’s all you get for now, this has been embarrassing (but enlightening!) enough. For the record, though, all of my posts up until now have been sincere and well-thought out. But my redirection leads me more to a self-centered place that’s less about telling and more about doing. I’ll leave comments when they matter, ‘tweet’ thoughts that are thoughtful or pertain to the business, and let Facebook be the conduit of these things. Off to bake a pie, take a bubble bath or knit a sweater. Ahh, much better already!
Awwwww…. New and coming soon to our Etsy shop: little baby onesies! Oh, the cuteness is killing us. This design of a harbor seal was hand drawn by me (Audrey) and screen printed in our kitchen. These onesies will be available at our booth at Picnic this weekend (Saturday! Lincoln Park!) for $10 (special Picnic debut price). We’ve also got a pretty substantial ‘discount bin’ that we’ll be toting along. Without kids, it’s hard to know what to do with the mess-ups except sell them for $2 a pop! Learning to screen print is hard… but the adorable factor is totally worth it.
Little Eye Designs 