EtsyRAIN - Saturday, May 7th - Seattle, WA

This coming Saturday is the next installment of the EtsyRAIN craft shows. We'll be at INTIMAN Theatre in the Seattle Center from 11am-5pm on Saturday (your last chance to buy a Mother's Day present!).


The first 50 people in line will get a bag stuffed with free samples of the awesome craftey-ness that you'll find inside.


Check out a photo of the Swag Bag line-up. Oh yeah!

And if that's not enough to grab you -- Doug and I will be selling Shower Arts. YAY! 


The perfect gift for hella cool moms.

Unanimous Craft -- It's ALIVE

I made this. I made it good. Oh yeah.


Unanimous Craft is a taggable, searchable index of resources for indie business. 


You can find accounting spreadsheets for your profit and loss statement. You can find inspirational blogs. You can find potential places to sell your products wholesale. It's all in there baby -- and tons more.


Indie business folks can post their own resources too and share them with the Unanimous Craft community. Then, we all vote on which ones are the most useful. Oh heck yes. 


It's not over either. You can even curate lists of your favorite resources that share a common theme and bookmark them -- and then share them with the rest of Unanimous Craft.


If you own a resource - say it's a website that you operate - you can sign up to write little updates that are shown on the same page as your resource.


The site just launched on Monday, but already there has been a huge amount of interest. My lovely EtsyRAIN Beta testers did a great job of finding flaws and providing feedback so this updated version of the site is working great. 


I'm offering a couple of specials to get the ball rolling: 


1. Until the end of March, 2010 - Premium Memberships will be $45 per year (that's $15 off the full price of $60). You get to fill out a fancy profile and one Premium Member is shown on the front page each time the site refreshes. You also get discounts on additional advertising on the site and you get shown on the Premium Member page. It breaks down to $3.75/month for front page exposure on a potentially popular website.


2. Advertising on Unanimous Craft is currently set at an introductory rate. It will stay at this price until I reach 10,000 page views/day. BUT - you can purchase as much advertising as you would like now and lock in the introductory price -- so when other people are paying much more -- your ads only cost $20/month. Awesome Sauce.


In any case, please tell your crafty friends who might be interested in the site. You can also follow Unanimous Craft on Twitter and fan us on Facebook. There is also a forum thread on Etsy where you can post your feedback. 


Many thanks everyone -- and I love your faces.
Rosalie

Frankenscarf Winner Announced -- -

A couple of weeks back, I posted a new product idea -- Franken-scarves -- and to get some feedback about pricing, I asked folks to post a comment saying how much they thought I should charge for them. I picked a number out of a hat and that person won their very own Franken-scarf. The winning number was 13. And http://rekojrants.blogspot.com/ posted the 13th comment on my blog. Check out her Etsy Shop. Congratulations! Enjoy your Frankenscarf!

What the heck is a Franken-scarf? Well, you take some old t-shirts, or a jersey top sheet and you sew them into strips. Then you free-motion embroider the heck out of it and a Franken-scarf is born.

Here's another one:

I'm SICK -- but Look What I Got

I sneezed yesterday at work and all of a sudden, I'm completely sick. It was weird. For the past few days, I've felt like I was fighting something off and I think that sneeze was my last chance to rid my body of whatever was trying to get in. My body lost and now I'm in my jammies doped up on all kinds of decongestant and cough syrup. I apologize in advance if this blog is "wackier" than normal. And now...the bARTer Sauce update:

bARTer Sauce is an experiment in trading for art and odd objects. The basic idea: whatever I get, I trade for something else. And then I trade that thing for something else again. And on and on. The only rule: everyone who trades with me has to tell me a story. About anything. Just a story.

First Jen -- I call her Jen Snuffalupagus because she has a really long last name and I can't pronounce it. She traded me these two pieces for a giant painting of a pigface.

Here's us making the trade at my studio: Then Tara traded me one of the Twisted Tree t-shirts that she designs and screen prints for a painting of a two headed boy. Here's us making the trade at the EtsyRAIN show in Kenmore.

And finally, the vintage, tattooed farting duck that I got from Nik for a Red Screamer. Here's the awesome farting duckie:

Heck yeah! If you want to trade for anything you saw here, visit bARTer Sauce, create an account and send me a trade offer. There's more available for trade than just what you see here. Check out the full list.

Craft Show Sunday

You know you want to go.

I know you want to go.

My cat, Karma, knows you want to go.

Why don't you just go?

The first 50 people in line get a super fantastic swag bag FILLED with great stuff. And I DO mean great stuff -- I do not mean stacks of business cards -- I mean awesome stuff that would probably take care of lots of your holiday shopping.

Look What I Got

I call it "Super Bright Kisses" for reasons I think might be obvious. I recently did a bARTer Sauce trade with a nice lady named Laura from my EtsyRAIN group. She makes pottery and stuff and sells it in her Etsy shop: LAS Designs. You should buy one of her mugs. I have two and I drink coffee out of them all the time. I highly recommend coffee -- and Laura's mugs. Read Laura's story that came with the bARTer Sauce trade. Read about the trade. Here's some pictures of Laura's super-cutie-potato-face son who came to the trade too and seemed obsessed with Shower Art. He's a winner in my book:

Here's Laura and I doing the trade at the September First Thursday Art Walk in Pioneer Square. I always stick my tongue out for the first picture for some reason. And the second shot is where I go for moderately normal. If you would like to trade me for "Super Bright Kisses" or anything else that is currently available through bARTer Sauce, get in touch -- rosalie(at)bartersauce.com. What the hell is bARTer Sauce? It's an experiment in trading for art and odd objects. The only rules: Whatever I get, I trade for something else. And everyone who trades with me, has to tell me a story.

Enough Said...

Yes, this is a real thing that I made. It's Shower Art - waterproof art you can hang in your shower. Abe wants to see you naked. Real bad.

New Shower Arts to Celebrate Friday

To celebrate this sunny, lovely Friday -- some Shower Arts. Enjoy. Yay Friday.

EtsyRAIN Donation to The Sampler

The Sampler is "a super fun marketing & promotional tool for indie businesses. Each month, independent crafters, artists, shops, zines and record labels who run web-based businesses send samples and promotional materials to a contribution pool. All the samples are photographed, posted to the site and then are portioned out, put in little packages and sent off to Sampler Subscribers, other Sampler Contributors and members of the Media all over the world!"

EtsyRAIN, the NW Etsy Street Team just made a donation of over 200 pieces for the June edition of The Sampler. Check out the shops below who made it all possible:

i make cute stuff Scary White Girl Designs Ugly Baby Shower Art

Entangles

Junk into Funk-Tion DaisieMai Creations

Sweetpea Cards & Gifts

LASdesigns.etsy.com

Woven Chains

Sima Bella Designs

Do You Like Crafts and Live in Edmonds, WA?

Awesome craft show alert! Awesome craft show alert! Show up early and get an awesome handmade bag FILLED with crafty goodness. FREE! Just for showing up! I like free.

First Thursday Art Walk -- March

This First Thursday was lovely. As always.

Some special friends stopped by:

• My lovely husband, Doug, although, he kind of has to be there
• My father-in-law, Robert, who probably had other things he might have wanted to do in Seattle, but instead came to my art show. Nice.



• My ex-roomie, Val, (& her new boyfriend - teehee) who filled up on Shower Arts even though her birthday party is today and now I have no idea what to give her. Sigh.
• A past bARTer Sauce supporter, Kelly Lyles (possibly my favorite bARTer Sauce trader to date) who literally gave me the coat off her back after I told her I liked it
• Roxanne, who is 1/3 responsible for bARTer Sauce now having trading cards and who has agreed to design more of them for me until we have one for every trade and then we will rule the world
• A past bARTer Sauce trader -Josiah - came by with some friends and bought an entire bottle of sparkling apple cider
• Another past bARTer Sauce trader, Tim, who gave me an artist's sketch book that he found (which is still available and awesome!)
• Some new bARTer Sauce traders -- Staci and Stacy - weird, I didn't even realize they had the same name until just now
• EtsyRain folks: Kimberly (of course she's there -- we share a studio!) & Carrie & Marlo & Laura & Jill & Tarah & Halina & Trina....Did I get everyone? Yikes, there were lots!

This was the first show where I hung Parisite, possibly the best bARTer Sauce item ever (no offense everyone else, no offense). Everyone who came by commented on how awesome it was and then when I pointed out that Paris is actually PAINTED and not a magazine cutout, why then people pretty much just fell on the floor and fainted and we had to get smelling salts and stuff to revive them.

So, in short, I expect to get lots of trade offers for it.

Starting....NOW!

Staci traded me this fantastic box 'o stuffs with Mona Lisa on the back and drawers full of jewels. It's called "Mona didn't need bling". It's awesome. She got "Wood Face" for it.

Stacy traded me two paintings that I thought from the picture were going to be tiny, but they are actually quite large and even cooler than I thought. One has a tiny tomato that has fangs. FANGs people! I call it "Fangy Tomato." I'm sure the artists I trade with must love it when I re-name their work. Yeah, I'm sure they do. Now, Stacy's last name starts with an S too and these paintings are from when she was younger, more naive maybe, and she signed them SS but she swears she is in no way responsible for crimes against humanity, just naiveness.

Stacy, I love her, Stacy took the CREDIT CARD COSTUME!

oh man, I am not sorry to see that gigantic foamy thing leave my posession.

Go free young credit card. Ride into the night with Stacy and fill up her stupid closets with your credit card-ness!

That's pretty much all I have to report, except for one magical quick thing.

Ariane traded me a cardboard cutout of myself that she made. Well, she had the package in her car to mail to me....and her car got stolen. She emailed me last week to let me know and I mourned and got angry and went through the seven stages or something.

And then today, while I was writing this blog, there was a knock on the door.

And what was it?

A surprised mailman.

Yes, my hair is a mess and I'm wearing jammies.

It's 11am on a Friday. What do you expect?

And in the surprised mailman's hands....

A box from Ariane with a cardboard cutout of ME inside.

I wonder if that means she got her car back?

Or if the thief felt bad enough to mail it for her?

I'll never know....until I finish this stupid blog and email her.

Bye suckas!