A marathon jewlery making weekend

I spent the entire weekend making jewelry. Neglected the house and the hubby. I'm going to MN in a few weeks and several people have told me they are eager to see my things, so I want to bring as much variety as I can produce and I want to bring things they haven't seen before. I'm excited to show off my work to friends and family!

I got a nice shipment of wire last week, so I have many types and wire gauges in stock to do whatever I want to do! Options are a very thing! I put aside my sheet metal for the weekend and got back to wire work; a nice comfortable place to be for me. I made several items and got a good start on a few more. I did some fine silver fusing (fire! - my favorite) and need to finish some clasps for them and oxidize a few other items. I listed some this weekend and will continue to list other items throughout the week.

I had a strand of lapis beads and made a necklace out of them, but I'm just not happy with it. The edges of the spacer beads are blunt and scratch my neck when I tried it on, so I'll have to come with another plan. I hate taking things apart and re-doing them, but it always comes out better the second (or third) time around anyway.

I've also been working hard to make my photos better. I usually just use Office picture manager to edit my photos, but this weekend I downloaded Picassa photo editor, which I've used in the past for real estate photos. Can't quite get the hang of it yet and I need to review some of the software's basics before I can use the shots I've edited there. It does have some flexibility that office doesn't have, but it's missing the ability to have complete control over the size of the picture, which I don't want to give up. Maybe I'm just missing that part of the software.

The cats will sleep well tonight - I've put away my hammer and steel pounding block for the evening!

I hope you had a good weekend!

"Artistic" Photos?

I've been reading a fun blog lately by FlyingButtons http://happyflyingbuttons.blogspot.com/ Here she talks a few times about the importance of lighting and staging listing photos in order to convey the feeling that you want your listing to portray.

I'm still having a hard time just wrapping my head around the whole "artist" title, since I've never really made anything "artistic" until my recent (1.5 years) period of jewelry making. I have yet to call myself an "artist". But, I do spend an awful lot of time dreaming up ideas for my jewelry and even more time creating it. Admittedly, I am consumed and passionate about my "artistic" hobby. And it is not a cheap venture, so I need to sell my "art" in order to afford to make more. That's the practical, business major, former Realtor side of me. But then again, I do get warm fuzzies knowing that there are people out there wearing my jewelry and enjoying the way it makes them feel. Oh, I'm so conflicted!

Anyway, back to the photos... artistic photos... I went on a mission today to find props for my photos. I was going to take pictures of a bird nest pendant to be highlighted in my breast cancer awareness fundraiser collection. I wanted something pink for breast cancer identity, something earthy to coordinate with the bird nest, something soft looking for love and caring feelings. I found items in a scrapbooking dept at a craft store. Green leaves, pink rose petals, shimmery pink petals, pink paper, sheer hearts. All that for a tiny little photo! The props get so muted that they don't really show as anything defined, but I think they do add a certain fresh "feeling" to the photo. This took my afternoon, mind you. Time is valuable, too, isn't it? http://www.etsy.com/view_listing.php?listing_id=22518459

I have to wonder how much effect a "great" photo vs. a "good" photo has on a person's buying decision. The other night, I listed a pair of earrings with what I thought were quite good photos. Once they were in etsy however, they looked darker than they had on my computer while I was editing them. So, a few hours after I listed it, I lightened all of my pictures and re-entered them. In the middle of that process I got a convo from a buyer, saying she was trying to purchase the earrings but she got an error message saying that the listing was no longer available (it was because I was editing the listing). She assumed they had already sold and she wanted me to make another pair. But - she was buying them while looking at the too dark, original photos! Flyingbuttons' blog posts regarding photos are geared towards getting into a treasury, but ultimately, that boils down to being seen by buyers and being enticing enough to keep looking at the item in the photo and hopefully moving deeper to look at your entire shop; then to actually purchase an item!

So my question is, with 40,000+ jewelry listings on etsy.com, does a great photo make enough of a difference versus a just a good photo?