Updated Etsy Shop Sorted!

Now Etsy has my whole new range for view.
Given that, I have to say that I am not relying on etsy very much at all for bringing in sales.
The fact that my wares are ceramic and therefore heavy, shipping rates from UK to the states are astronomical.  (This is one of the few times of recent years I have yearned to be in the states so I could take advantage of national postal rates!).
With such high shipping costs, I'd imagine most people are put off.  I guess posting my wares on there is more of a way of being seen.  I don't imagine it will amount to much and that's why I am pushing Folksy more.  If I was a jeweller or a textiles person, the Etsy world would be open to me, but for now I am just going to have to use it as a showcase.
So, here it is!

www.etsy.com/shop/jmlpottery

Colouring clay

Last month, I decided to join etsy. After spending a long time looking at other potter's shops and their policies, I realised that shipping was going to be a big issue for me. I noticed the shipping charges for US sellers to US customers was expensive which had me worried about what I'd have to charge to sell to this US market from the UK.

I "mock" packed various items in bubble wrap, peanuts and a box to get some sample shipping weights. I then went onto Royal Mail to to check out the rates for regular first class international vs insured international. Can you believe the rate to send one mug insured was roughly $30?!! I nearly fell over! The cost to send regular post was $16 which is the cheapest I could get it.

So, out of the two items I managed to load onto etsy, one (the set of bowls) has the $16Us/$6UK regular international delivery charges for an item that costs $40 for set of 2 AND the other (the mug) has the $30US/$10UK delivery charges for an item that costs only $18! Obviously, I decided I was gonna have to sort this out!

In my efforts to get items loaded onto etsy, this whole delivery issue really threw me, so I decided to stop until I figured out an alternative to sending bulky pots over the ocean.

My first option is to look at making smaller, lighter objects. The other would be to go with folksy, a UK alternative to etsy!

I haven't gotten around to getting loaded onto folksy just yet, but had a look around. The great thing is it looks like less than 10 potters are on there right now, so it isn't saturated just yet!

In the meantime, I have been doing some tests to formulate some of my ideas for lighter, marketable items to crack the US market with! I'm gonna keep them a secret for now, but I thought I'd show you the testing side of the delevopment of these items because it is really exciting for me!

Okay, what I am really going for here is coloured clay. I started by weighing out same size balls of clay (all kneaded) and three different percentages of a stain for each colour I wanted to try.

So, 3 balls. 1 ball with 2% stain added; 2nd ball with 5% added and 3rd ball with 10% added. I was testing 6 colours, so that made a total of 18 tests!

A lot of potters on potters.org recommend when mizing clay to wear gloves and protect your surfaces with a barrier like plastic. Well, I didn't have anything slightly pourous that I could use other than the table and well, you can see that the gloves didn't work very well either!

These were the first set of gloves I worked with and had to stop. See that texture there, NOT good for mixing clay! You are better off with plain smooth gloves.

This set of gloves were less flimsy but still somewhat textured. They didn't work either! In the end, I used my hands....

Here are the finished balls ready for throwing

Taadaah!!! Cannot wait until they are fired!

Myetsy shop

Well, it took two hours yesterday and esty online help, but I managed to create my banner on etsy!

I worked with gimp, a free piece of software alternative to photoshop and let me tell you - it ain't easy for graphic illiterates like me!

But, anywho, here is one photo I started with:

On gimp, I managed to reduce it to 760 pixels wide by 100 pixels tall and came up with the following banner. Oh yeah, and the coolest thing was the insertion of groovy text (free from dafont!) for my company name!



Another photo I used was:

And, again, with my amazing gimp abilities, I transformed it into this:

I decided to use the latter of the two, as seen here on my etsy page!

To get great advice on how to do this yourself, click here for etsy tutorial!

Come visit my etsy site! Okay, it is a work in progress, but I promise it will be updated soon!

I'm left confused by a GIMP!

I was playing with a GIMP last week, as one does, to find a way to create a banner for my etsy account. Two hours later and several failed attempts at producing anything looking remotely like a banner, I gave in to GIMP!

For those of you who don't know, GIMP is an open source FREE alternative to Photoshop. And seeing how that program costs a load a moola, I decided to give GIMP a try.

I don't blame GIMP for my failings, I blame my ignorance of all things remotely photoshop-like.

I'm not sure why I find it so confusing, but that and Illustrator bring me right out of my comfort zone.

So, here is the banner I created....

NOT a good start. I worked with a photo I had of my nestled casserole dishes.

It is fuzzy, lacking in interest or excitement. I tried to transform a portrait photo into a long narrow banner and it just didn't work. I think I'm gonna have to wait until I take some more photos to get a better source for the artwork. Back to the drawing board!

The good and lucky thing is that I know two fab people at Oscar and Dehn (you know who you are!!) how I can ask instructions and tips from regarding web graphics!

So, two weeks after my start with Etsy, I still have a dodgy banner and only one item on to sell!

I'm working on my shop policies and the whole shipping internationally thing at the moment. Once I have sorted out those, I will retype my profile and add more pots...until then, I'm afraid dodgy is all I got!

The great news is that one item got 15 views!!! So, that is a start.

Finally, I just found a groovy icon for my blog to link back to Etsy!