how do you craft?

So, how do you pull it all together and manage a few crafty moments in your day? How does it all fit together in your family life? Whether you're a stressed new mum following the 'sleep when the baby sleeps' mantra or the follower of a very active out-and-about preschooler it can be a real juggling act to try keep that ounce of sanity going by snatching a creative moment or two in the day's itinerary.

Recently I found some inspiration from an article run in the Etsy blog, The Storque where seller Nikki aka BabyBelle talked about her studio and how enmeshed in family life it is. Far from the usual unfeasible "Quit Your Day Job" (!) series, this article actually addressed the ins and outs of working at home and weaving it around normal family duties. It turns out that there are a whole slew of work-at-home mum articles available here ....... maybe you can find some nuggets of inspiration in them too!

it's sale time!!!

Does anyone not know about the Saturday night specials available on Etsy?

It's when a bunch of sellers band together and promote sales in their shops which are only available for a limited time ie. Saturday night.

It was started originally by willowglass, who sells the most amazing fused glass supplies and creations. There is a thread here for the shops taking part in this promotion and a thread here for chatting (pssst! it also contains a list of shops with SNS secrets in place too).

Confused? see the SNS blog for further info

and without more ado, here are my specials for the evening ...

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Saturday Night Specials (running August 2nd 5pm until 6am 3^rd August EST)

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at ebbandflo BOGO - buy one, get one at half price (discount applies to the less expensive item).

Further items will be discounted by 25% off. Just mention “SNS” in your message to seller during checkout then wait until I send a revised PayPal invoice.

at pomomamadesign Free shipping in North America on orders of two or more items (shipping at domestic rates for international buyers). Just mention “SNS” in your notes to seller at checkout and wait for the revised invoice in your email inbox!

Happy shopping!

time saving hints for etsy sellers

This great portable crafting hint comes courtesy of a thread by littleputbooks who worked out how to save listings to finish at a later date. I use it when I have lots fo free computer time to stack listings up for days when I'm running on empty (as most of the summer holidays seems to be right now!).

Basically all you do is complete all the listing steps up until the final page, and then instead of hitting 'Finish' and seeing your listing go live you bookmark it! Then when you are ready to make the listing 'live' all you do is pull up your bookmarked url, and hit 'Finish'. The listing appears at the right place in the category page and is available for buyers to see. Simple!

Littleput's suggestion is to make the bookmarks portable by emailing them to yourself and then copy/pasting the url of each listing into the browser bar to complete the process. Mine are static as I just bookmark them on my computer in Internet Explorer or Mozilla but I'm thinking of using my Google Home Page bookmark widget to keep them too as occasionally I use a laptop rather than the desktop around the house (ooh luxury!)

Read all about it here.