My New Favorite Tool!

I stopped by JoAnne's on my lunch break earlier and found the best tool ever! It's a Fiskar's 1 inch circle hand punch. This is the PERFECT tool to punch paper images for my bottle cap pendants. And the punch is very smooth and clean, no snags or anything. Yay, no more tracing images around a quarter! I don't usually work with paper or scrapbooking so I didn't know this type of thing existed. There were other shapes and sizes available too. I only paid a little over 5 bucks for it with a 40% off coupon. Great deal!

Preparing for Show

Wow I can't believe it's the middle of November already! These last few months always seem to go by fast. Last blog entry I talked about attending the house party event. It was a nice experience and I learned a few things. I ended up selling 5 items within 2 hours and so did my sister but she made a lot more money than I did because she sold her items in sets. I admit I wasn't prepared and didn't bring my best stuff. I sold mostly my wire wrapped rings and got the most compliments on my bottle cap pendants. There were 4 other sellers there besides us and about 20 to 25 guests showed up. The host got her free coffeemaker but didn't give a presentation on it like I thought she was gonna do. Overall it was a good learning experience and we got to munch on desserts and drink coffee! I would definitely do something like this again in the future. I also highly recommend houseparty.com and think it is an excellent opportunity to get free gifts while throwing a themed party:)

The house party experience has given me the courage to sign up and participate in our local Etsy team Christmas craft show. There will be 2 events but I only signed up for the first one to see how it goes, there are about a dozen of us signed up so far. It will be on Saturday Nov. 27th so I only have 2 weeks to prepare, what was I thinking?! So I probably won't have much time to post new items in my shop and I'm sure it will suffer a little because of it. I'm nervous and excited about participating in the show. I'll be observing other sellers and taking a lot of mental notes because that is how I learn best. And then using what I learn to figure out a way I can incorporate that into what works best for me. Gotta go crank out those items, have a great weekend everyone!:)

Houseparty.com, ever heard of it?

Tomorrow afternoon I am attending one of those themed houseparty events. The host needed a jewelry seller and found me on Etsy through the "shop local" section. I'm not very familiar with these events but I've heard it was a lot of fun so I said yes but asked if I could bring my sister because I don't feel comfortable going by myself and she said yes the more the merrier. So hopefully I will get some exposure tomorrow afternoon. I'll post my experience to let you all know how it went.

The houseparty theme tomorrow is sponsored by Hamilton Beach and the host gets a free coffee maker set in exchange for demonstrating the coffeemaker. What a great incentive to throw a party! If any of you are interested in knowing more about these events the website is http://houseparty.com/