Tag: etsy

Hats to order

Russett cloche with organic cotton lace

I was doing well for a while, keeping up with the blog, and then I was ill, and then busy catching up with work, and here I am behind again. This is one of the things I’ve been up to – a new hat! It’s my favourite asymmetric cloche shape, with an organic cotton lace motif and Swarovski crystal trim. Available now in the Etsy shop, or made to order in a colour of your choice!

Nicola's ORANGE hat!

I’ve popped a few other hats in the Etsy shop too, so that I can make them to order. This is one of the first hats I made, and I’m still completely in love with the giant felt flower. You can now order one of your own, though it doesn’t have to be bright orange of course!

I never did get around to making fascinators with the other felted flowers that I made, and they haven’t sold at all well on hair combs, so I think they’ll be coming soon to a hat near you.

Hand blocked wool felt fuchsia pink cloche hat with black guipure lace and button trim

This is one of the simpler styles of hat, a plain round cloche trimmed with guipure lace. I think it’s the one I’ve made the most of (three pink and one grey, at the last count), and now you can order one for yourself. The hat can be made in any of 25 different colours, but the lace is only available in black or ivory.

The next step on the hat journey is going to be pillboxes! I’m just waiting for a clever widget to arrive from Guy Morse-Brown, which will allow me to use my existing blocks to make little felt pillbox shapes. I’m not sure yet how I’m going to trim those, I need to see how they sit on the head before I decide. At the moment I’m thinking big felt bows, or maybe lots of little flowers. We’ll see.

Milly's witch's hat

And just by way of a complete contrast, I spent the weekend making this! The reason it looks a little bit too small for me is that it’s intended for my three year old niece. Although I have to confess I’m pretty tempted to make another one that I can keep! This one has a secret pocket inside the brim (where else does a witch keep her important things?), complete with a little packet of “Magic Dust” for casting spells with. I really hope she likes it!

Making Changes

Right! Here we go. All of my sadly neglected Etsy listings have all now been moved into the Eternal Magpie Etsy Shop. It’s rather flooded with felt flower brooches and hair clips as the moment, which is emphasising the fact that I really need to take some new photos of those “in action”, so that people can get a better idea of what they’ll look like being worn.

I have some new hats drying on the blocks at the moment, so while I’m waiting for them to be ready I can have a good think about what kinds of trimmings I want to add to them. After several months off, it’ll be nice to have some new hats to work on!

I’ll also be getting rid of the sewing patterns and haberdashery altogether. Once their listings expire, that’s it, I’ll be taking them down to my local charity shop. They’re taking up space, they’re making the shop look untidy, and I’d rather they just went to a good home.

The Inexplicable Emporium on Etsy is now almost empty. I’m allowing the remaining listings to expire, and keeping up one post which explains where all the hats have gone! The reason for emptying this particular Etsy store is that I’ve started the process of moving it to its own domain. As a result, Mr & Mrs Magpie’s Inexplicable Emporium will have its own website, with a blog and a store, although it’s very much a work in progress at the moment. The purpose of moving this one away from Etsy was to allow us to have greater scope in the products that we’re able to offer. The ceramic oil burner, for example, goes perfectly with the soy wax tarts that I’m going to make. But because the burner isn’t hand made, I didn’t feel comfortable selling it on Etsy. (I know that I could probably have “got away with it”, under their new rules allowing third-party manufacture, but frankly I don’t think that’s what Etsy should be about. So there you go.)  There’s a lot of fiddling still to do (and a lot of blog posts and an entire back-story to write), but I will do a proper announcement when it’s all “officially” up and running.

It’s all slow progress, I know. But I am starting to feel as though it’s actual progress now, rather than just faffing about, so that must be good!

Birthday Sale on Etsy – 41% off everything!

I am 40!

Today is my very last day of Being Forty. As of tomorrow I’m forty-one, which puts me officially In My Forties. Does that mean I’m supposed to start pretending to be a grown-up? I do hope not.

Anyway, for the third year running, I’m having a one-day Birthday Sale in both of my Etsy shops. If you’d like to make a purchase, you can use the code “HAPPYBIRTHDAY” at checkout to receive a whopping 41% off everything except the cost of shipping.

The Eternal Magpie shop can be found here…

…and here’s Mr & Mrs Magpie’s Inexplicable Emporium.

Enjoy my birthday and your shopping!

Yet more shuffling about.

Ivory Hat

I’m still shuffling things about between Etsy shops, as I think about where they really need to live. This ivory hat has been really popular in terms of Etsy favourites, but it hasn’t sold in the Emporium, so it’s now going to live in the Eternal Magpie Etsy Shop for a while.

The hats generally seem popular on both Etsy and Pinterest. They’re being included in Treasuries and re-pinned like mad (thank you!), but people seem very reluctant to buy. I’m hoping it’s just a seasonal thing – after all, who wants to think about wearing a warm felt hat in the middle of summer?! Now that the weather’s started to turn a bit more autumnal (I WILL NOT put the heating on in August, damn you summer!), perhaps people will be thinking more hat-related thoughts. I hope so anyway, as I have a batch of felt hoods in lovely autumnal colours just waiting to be turned into more hats.

Headscarf

These headscarves, made originally for the Vintage Night at work, back in May, are also now in the Eternal Magpie Etsy Shop. I must take some new photographs of these, I hadn’t realised they were still on the polystyrene head – and in some cases, not on a head at all! There are eight of these left (two of the dark blue floral), and I don’t think I’ll be making any more once these have sold out. They were really just for that one occasion, and not something I want to keep going with. I have too many different ideas to restrict myself to making the same thing over and over again! I might consider putting together a kit or a pattern though, as these are very easy to make.

Four sash belts

And finally, these sash belts have undergone a make-over, and have also moved into the Eternal Magpie Etsy Shop, out of the Emporium. The starry velvet one has sold, but the other three have had nice heavy D-rings added to one end, so you can just loop them through instead of having to tie yourself in knots. I made one for myself which fastened that way, and then immediately changed all the others, as they’re so much easier to wear – especially with trousers. No more having to wrestle with some nightmarish Gordian knot every time you want to go to the loo!

Once again, I probably won’t be making any more of these belts in precisely this incarnation. I started work on a prototype felted version weeks and weeks ago, I just haven’t quite got around to finishing it yet. I want to wear it a bit first, before I decide whether felted D-ring belts will become a new addition to the shop. I think they might.

I haven’t set foot into my craft room for what feels like weeks now – although I did sleep in there for two nights, while some friends were visiting! That was strangely comforting, to be sleeping on a little fold-out bed surrounded by all of my Stuff. Being the school holidays, I’ve been doing a few extra days at work (teaching wet felting and how to make bread and butter – not at the same time), and all of my spare time at home has been taken up with gardening and tidying and enjoying having guests to stay. Hopefully once we move into September (next week! already!), I can start to get myself back on track again.

An unexpected venture.

Oh, good grief. It’s a month since I last posted here, and I haven’t made a single one of the buttonholes I mentioned in my last post! I have made four in this blouse, though I accidentally made them on the left instead of the right. I decided it didn’t matter too much, as the blouse was for me… but then it didn’t fit, and now the blouse is sitting in the Etsy shop, waiting to find its new home. What you may or may not be able to tell from this little snippet, is that the print is covered with My Little Ponies!

I made the executive decision to split my Etsy shop into two, although at the moment they’re both selling a mishmash of the same things. Once the listings start to expire in one place I’ll re-list them in the other, and hopefully it should all be sorted out over the next couple of months.

The eternal magpie Etsy shop will sell bits and bobs that I’m clearing out from my stash, organic cotton clothing and zipped pouches as I make them, and the more “everyday” styles of felt hat. Oh, and my own sewing patterns, more of which in a moment.

Mr & Mrs Magpie’s Inexplicable Emporium has become a little bit too explicable lately, so I want to have a bit of a tidy-up. This is where I’ll be offering some gemstone jewellery pieces, some of the more complicated-to-make styles of hat, and some corset belts and felt work, once I get around to making them.

So, I mentioned sewing patterns…

A little while ago, a customer who I’d made one of these tunic dresses for (way back in 2009!) got in touch. She wanted to know whether it was possible, as I no longer made these tunics for sale, for her to have a copy of the pattern. I thought about it for a minute, said yes, and set about writing up the instructions.

Since sending off the pattern, Maria has already made not just one, but three tunics – and in the absolutely most fantastic choice of fabrics! And proving that word of mouth is absolutely the best way to sell things, Maria has been very kindly sending everyone who’s admired her tunics over to the eternal magpie Etsy shop, where you can now buy the pattern!

It’s a bit of an experiment at the moment – I’m drawing out the patterns by hand onto brown paper, as I don’t quite have the technology to get them into the computer. I drew them by hand in the first place, and haven’t yet managed to replicate them accurately with my pattern drafting software, which is very frustrating. Also, my greatest bugbear about printing out patterns is having to spend ages sticking all the pages together, so I thought that sending out the patterns complete would be a nice way of saving other people from having to do that.

So, I’ll see what kind of feedback I get about the patterns – whether they’re the right sizes, whether people can understand the instructions, that kind of thing – and decide after a little while whether this is something I want to carry on with or not.

I seem to be pulled in so many different directions these days… I’ll have to see what starts pulling me most strongly.

Pleasure doing business…

Well, most of the time.

Today I woke up to discover outrage all over the Etsy forums, because a percentage of shops have been enrolled in an “experiment” without any prior warning. Okay, I’m sure it says somewhere in the T&Cs that we’ve all agreed to this kind of fiddling about as part of our contract with Etsy, but in this particular case a bit of advance notice would have been nice. What Etsy have done is to remove all information about shipping costs until after an item has been added to the shopping cart. This is resulting in loss of sales (who wants to faff about adding things to a cart to find out information that should be part of the listing?), and for European shops, anyone involved is now in breach of EU distance selling regulations by not displaying their international shipping fees up front. There’s no way of opting out, no way of changing the situation, we just have to ride it out until Etsy deems the experiment finished and hopefully reinstates the shipping information!

I have to admit that I’ve been thinking about moving away from Etsy for a while… not because of any problems I’ve had with Etsy (until this morning!), more because I’d like to have my own store with its own design and branding, which I can’t have on Etsy. One of the strongest points about the stalls I’ve done with the Emporium in Real Life has been the branding, and that’s lost amongst all the identical-looking stores on Etsy. I’m doing what I can with my product photography, but it’s not brilliant, and I’d like my branding to be stronger.

I’ve used Big Cartel before, and I’m quite tempted to try them again – although with around 100 products in the store at any one time, their fees will be more than I’m paying on Etsy. But then I can do things like adding the different styles of zipped pouches under one listing and still retain inventory control of each different print, which is something you can’t do on Etsy. The shipping information is set up in the same way, which I like – you simply set a profile for each object. This works well, as it allows me to charge exact shipping fees, whether it’s £1 for a sewing pattern or £12 for a hat.

I’ve also been looking at Shopify – a friend has recently set up a lovely gift shop on this platform, and my husband’s using it to launch a board games shop very soon. The fees again are more than I’m currently paying on Etsy (and Shopify’s lowest monthly fee is only 99 cents less than Big Cartel’s highest!), so I’d need to be sure I was definitely going to be making enough sales to be able to cover the cost of the fees. On Etsy you pay by item rather than by month – so at least if you don’t sell anything (depressing thought), you don’t pay anything. The other down side of Shopify is that you can’t specify shipping per individual product, you have to set a flat rate based on the overall total of the order, or by the weight of the products. This simply doesn’t work when Royal Mail calculate their prices by size as well as weight – hats aren’t heavy, but they’re big, and I want them insured!

Shopify is perhaps the most professional-looking of the three though, and allows a great deal of customisation. It would also allow me to import and maintain this blog, which would be a bonus! Both Shopify and Big Cartel would allow me to use a custom domain name if I wanted to, and they both have integration which allows direct selling on Facebook. What they don’t have, however, is the huge community surrounding them which is the biggest benefit of Etsy. Admittedly I don’t get too involved in teams and forums and groups, but the fact remains that almost two-thirds of traffic to my current shop comes from within Etsy itself. And that would simply disappear if I disappeared from Etsy, which means I’d have to do an awful lot more work on marketing – which frankly is not my forté. I want to spend my time making stuff, not running a marketing campaign to sell it.

I don’t do very many stalls in Real Life, and my products simply aren’t priced to be sold in other people’s shops, so I really need my online presence to work for me in terms of actually selling the things that I make.

If anybody has any suggestions based on their own experiences, I’d be really grateful to hear them. I’m so confused right now that I don’t know what to do for the best!

New mannequin, new photos

First glimpse of my new ghostly mannequin. Isn't she lovely?

Please excuse the grainy Instagram snapshot and the incredibly messy sewing room, but this is the first glimpse of my new mannequin. Isn’t she lovely? Much more sophisticated than my polystyrene heads.

Organic bow tie

The arrival of the mannequin has led to a day of product photography, which (as it turns out) is rather difficult. Especially when your “studio” is two pieces of wallpaper propped up on the bed, and a reflector that’s quite difficult to wrangle at the same time as the camera! Still, these photos are a definite improvement on the previous ones, even though they do still need improvement themselves. Work In Progress, and all that.

I wanted to showcase the last few bow ties, as I’ve added a coupon code to the Inexplicable Emporium. Simply enter “FATHERSDAY” when you check out, and you’ll receive 20% off your order. This is valid until June 15th – but don’t forget to allow enough time for your parcel to arrive in the post!

Purple cloche hat

I’ve also re-photographed all the cloche hats (some with greater success than others), to try and make them look a bit more tempting. I’ll finally be able to work on some new hats soon, as the lace I’ve been waiting for has finally arrived! Although I had a slight incident with a vegetable slicer at the weekend, which means I can’t do any hand sewing until the hole in my thumb has healed a bit more. Oops.

(By the way – the code “FATHERSDAY” works throughout my Etsy store, not just on the items that your Dad might like. So if you’ve been coveting a hat, you can take advantage of the offer to buy it at a bit of a discount.)

I do love this pink and purple one. If somebody doesn’t snap it up very soon, I think I might just have to keep it.

Fleecy Things

Fleece bolero

I had another mad day in the Etsy shop yesterday, this time listing three versions of this fleece bolero jacket, and three versions of the new top below. This afternoon I went out and bought some patterned fleece, so I can actually make and then take photos of the patterned versions that I’ve listed.

This is my own jacket, and it lives very firmly in my wardrobe. I love it, and it looks just as good with jeans and a t-shirt as it does with a smart dress. My friend Karen (whose wedding I made this outfit for) has the prototype, which is the same style but plain black. She says it “Makes me feel like some kind of thief/archer elf in a fantasy film!”, which is perfect because that’s exactly what it’s supposed to do!

The one change I’ve made to the design is to replace the hidden hooks and eyes with decorative frog fasteners – though I don’t have any pictures of those yet. The one problem with this jacket is the hooks and eyes slipping open as you move around, and the frogs won’t allow that to happen. Much better.

It’s now available to order in plain fleece, patterned fleece, and organic cotton sweatshirting.

Fleece drape top

This is a new top I made to wear to work, last week or the week before. It’s always cold on the reception desk, so I wanted it to have a high neck at the back to keep me warm. I also wanted to be able to wear layers underneath it without feeling constricted, so it’s longish, loose fitting, and has a draped cowl-style neckline at the front. The edges, like the jacket, are finished with bias binding which is hand-stitched into place on the inside. This top is so comfortable I’m going to have to prize it out of my own cold dead hands to put it in the washing machine… or of course I could always make another one! I’m quite a fan of having duplicates of clothing that you love.

Fleece drape top

This one’s available in the Etsy shop too, in the same incarnations as the jacket – plain fleece, patterned fleece, and organic cotton sweatshirting. I’ve got a piece of bright pink fleece with white spots to make another one of these, so if you’re a size UK 14-16 ish (size M), look out for that popping up on Etsy soon!

I’ve had a couple of requests for custom dressmaking projects lately, to which the answer I’m afraid is still no. I’m trying very hard to concentrate on sewing projects like these, from patterns that I’ve drafted myself, and also on the hats and felting. Because I’m also working part time, I simply can’t fit in anything else. I’m contemplating putting together printable PDF patterns for these items, so that you can go ahead and make your own, but I don’t even have the time to devote to that right now.

In fact, I shouldn’t really have spent two afternoons filling the Etsy shop with haberdashery and fleecy tops instead of working on the hats, but there’s only so much felting my poor arms can take. I’m at work-work for the next couple of days though, then it will be back to felting and hats at the weekend. I have so little free time before the craft fair I’m taking the hats to on Easter Sunday that I really don’t know when I’m going to get anything done!

While stocks last…

I should probably mention my other special offer that’s up and running on Etsy, before it up and runs out!

All of the remaining scented candles in glass jars are being discontinued,  so there’s currently a voucher code to receive £5 off any candle in my shop. Simply enter the code “CANDLE5” at checkout, and it should do the maths for you. Unfortunately it only works once per order, not once per candle, so if you’d like to order more than one just contact me and I’ll make a custom listing for you.

When I made these candles they were greeted with great enthusiasm, but while the tea light packs sold out almost immediately, the large candles have mostly been sitting in a box. Realistically, I think they’re just too expensive for buyers to take a risk on without being able to smell them first. Hence the discount, which I hope will encourage a few people to go for it!

Airship Fresheners - tealight sample pack

Unfortunately four out of the five fragrances we chose for the Airship Fresheners have now been discontinued altogether, which means that they can’t now be repeated. Any large candles that are left over at the end of the month will be melted down and turned into tea lights, to try and prolong their availability just a little bit, but after that it’ll be all new smells!

I also want to try some new things as far as candles are concerned. Keeping in the theme of the pseudo-Victorian Emporium, I’m thinking along the lines of candles for banishing monsters, or lighting up a seance, or attracting (and repelling) all manner of fictional creatures of the night. A little bit more research will be required, but that will mean delving into my pile of of gothic horror novels, so I’m rather looking forward to it!

There’s also the long-standing project that’s been in the back of my mind for years, about making candles scented with essential oils. There are quite a lot of safety considerations involved with using essential oils at wax-melting temperatures, so again more research is needed before I can go ahead.

Whatever I make in future though, in the way of candles, will definitely be tea light sized! That way people can buy them individually if they want to, or I can offer small packs. Either way, they’ll be cheaper and easier to send through the post than big glass jars!

New hat, new options for a mannequin

Hand blocked wool felt baby pink cloche hat featuring a floral design with hand embroidery, felt flowers and vintage buttons

Here is today’s felt hat offering – now in the Etsy shop. I’m really pleased with how the flowers came out, although I learnt an important lesson about doing all the work in the right order. (Note to self: Yes, putting the flowers on first allowed you to check their placement. But it made for incredibly fiddly stitching of the stems!)

I had been vaguely planning to work on felt hats during my full days off work, and then do other kinds of sewing during my half days. Given how sore my fingers are from doing all of this hand sewing through machine-made felt, I think I might revise that plan. Ouch.

Excitingly, my previous hat (the bright pink one with the black guipure lace) sold out almost immediately, and was swiftly followed by an order for another one the same! So I’ve ordered some new felt hoods from Parkin Fabrics, and I’ll make a start on some more hats once they arrive. Perhaps without embroidery this time though.

Interestingly, after my earlier post contemplating the purchase of a new mannequin, I received a very helpful email from Equipashop.com, directing my attention to the existence of the lovely lady above. She’s perfect!

Okay, so she’s still out of my budget right now, but she’s much more affordable than the one I was looking at before, and she’ll be able to display hats, cowls, gloves and jackets. Brilliant! I’m now following Equipashop.com on Facebook, I’ve signed up to their mailing list, and I’ll be making a purchase as soon as funds allow. (And she’s SPARKLY. I mean really, how can I resist?)

Looking around the rest of the site (which turns out to be FULL of bargains!) I was also pleased to see that they offer a plus size mannequin, although she’s not in stock right now. Granted, at roughly a UK size 14/16 she’s at the smaller end of plus size, but that’s still several sizes bigger than most garment display options. Conveniently her measurements are almost exactly the same as mine (though she’s quite a bit taller), so she’d actually be perfect as a dressmaker’s dummy for my own sewing.

Hmmm.

Maybe it’s time to get on with having that pattern de-stash sale that I keep thinking about, to raise money for the newly instated Mannequin Fund…