Nina of  Nina Dinoff designs directed a challenge to fellow metal artists to join the Ring a Day Challenge and create one ring a day for an entire year. According to Nina “Starting Jan 1, 2010 jewelers from around the world will be posting a ring a day! This is an exercise in creative exploration. ” No design requirements, other than make something every day out of any materials the artist would like to use.

I’ve been enjoying perusing all the photos from some super talented artists. You can see the member creations at the flickr group created to show them off.

We have an ‘official’ date night tomorrow night. A real date, involving no kiddo and food brought to me by strangers. Oh, and vino.  And possibly adult conversation. OMG I can hardly wait.

Looking forward to date night got me thinking about my significant other. He’s a GREAT guy. Great Dad. Great friend. Is he also a huge pain in the ass sometimes? Oh, yes.  I’m sure he’d say the same about me. LOL  So, as I was thinking about the whole relationship thing, I got to thinking that I’m pretty lucky. More lucky than LOTs of other relationships discussed with my friends and coworkers.

MUCH more lucky than the relationship most cleverly articulated by a couple felines in this video.  FUNNY!! Please clear beverages from your immediate area prior to viewing.

Enjoy!

Looking for a Bead Society, or a Polymer Clay, Metal Arts, or Glassworking Guild near you? Check out this monster of a list on the Rings & Things web site.  Wow!!

Bead Society / Art Guild List

Shiny Spotlight Thursday

Have you ever Googled yourself?  I remember the first time I did and some of the, ahem, less than family friendly links that were returned in my search results.  Having completed the Google experiment, I thought it might be fun to ‘etsy’ myself.  Some of the results are shown below.

Clicking on each image will link you to the seller of each item, if you decide you simply must purchase it.

Enjoy!

Kristy Wallet from 2ndStreet

Sunlit Forest from TreeView

Kristi Lounge Pants from Lemon Drop Dreams

Gorgeous in greens fused glass platter

80 vintage jacket with heavy metal spiderweb

Happy Shopping everyone!

Look for the Shiny Spotlight every Thursday.

Have you discovered BlogHandmade? It’s a fab blog from Justine Smith, of Plume Adore on etsy. While visiting the site, make sure to subscribe to the email list. Each email includes a Take Action activity to grow your business as well as helpful tips, links and well, sometimes a good kick in my lazy buttocks.. I love it. You can subscribe here.  And you SHOULD.

Have you added your favorite jewelry supply sellers to my Jewelry Supplier’s List? I”ve tried to only include sellers that are recommended by other jewelry makers. Is your favorite there?

http://shinyadornments.com/simplyshiny/2009/09/artisan-jewelry-maker-suppliers-list/

Etsy rolled out a default relevancy search option for buyers, and then implemented it as the default search protocol on Thursdays beginning January 21, 2010. You can see Rob Kalin’s forum post about it here

What is relevancy search? Search results by items designated as most ‘relevant’ to your search criteria instead of by the item’s price or the date an item was posted to the site. Etsy says it uses a “combination of item tags, titles, descriptions and materials to determine which items are most relevant for a given search query.” The date an item is posted is included in this combination. Buyers will see the “Most Relevant” option in the drop down located on the item search pages. (See the photo below)

Allowing buyers to obtain the results most relevant to their search criteria sounds like a good thing, right? Well, I guess it depends on how it really works. And whether etsy sellers are scamming keywords to potentially move their items ahead in results.  There are multiple threads with differing opinions in the etsy forums. Perform a quick search for relevancy thursdays and you will receive a plethora of information to peruse. I’ve not seen any metrics released by etsy yet about efficacy. Have you? I’d love to see them.

Speaking of metrics, I checked out my google site search stats to see how my etsy site has fared since the search change.  Here’s what I found:

12/24      Grand total 5 site searches
12/31      Grand total 9 site searches
1/7          Grand total 10 site searches
1/14        Grand total 5 site searches
1/21       Grand total 10 site searches
1/28      Grand total 8 site searches
2/4        Grand total 8 site searches
2/11      Grand total 4 site searches

Hmmmm, probably not enough samples to determine a trend. The four weeks prior to relevancy search Thursday had 29 total visits to my shop from buyers that found it using Etsy’s site search. The four weeks following generated 30.

What have you seen? What kind of results have you obtained since the change? Have you changed anything about how you post your items? Changed your tags? Renewed less? What do you think?

Hi everyone.  The blog has been renovated.  And, why, you ask,  did I need to completely refurbish?

I wanted a newer, fresher look for a new, fresh year.  I also hated the URL of the old blog. I didn’t realize when I set it up that the folder I chose, /wordpress, would always be part of the blog url. DOH. So I changed it to better connect with the blog itself.  In addition, I upgraded my blog software. I was 6 or 7 versions behind. eeps!

For the most part, the content you are used to will still be here. But, expect more personal posts too. I think version 1.0 ended up sterile and impersonal and I’d like to avoid that this time around.

I’m a mom. The mini Smith, and his shenanigans are a big part of my day, and I’ll probably start posting about them a bit more.
I have opinions.  I’d like to be able to blog about them.
I’m kinda geeky. Fortunately, or unfortunately, you will most likely hear a bit more about that as well.
I make jewelry.  Ok, so, well, you already knew that and are used to that content.

Is experimenting ok with you? I think for awhile that’s exactly what this will become until a nice rhythm develops.

I’d love your comments. And your notes about broken links. (I’m still working on them. There’s a LOT!!)

This is a work in progress. I’m slowly moving content from my previous Simply Shiny blog. This one will contain more personal content…..I hope.

Check back. I should have things up and running in the next week or so.