I love finding free places to promote your shop and I can’t believe I haven’t found the EtsyMini blog before now. It is essentially a collection of all the Etsy Mini’s of anyone who signs up, organized into categories, and it is a great way to browse Etsy Shops visually. It serves as a little unofficial catalogue of shops in each category, and we all know how much I love catalogues. Wait, do we know how much I love catalogues? I wonder if I’ve ever said. Well, for the future, I LOVE catalogues.

Getting your mini included is as easy as leaving a comment with your name and shop number under the category you best fit into. There are also lots of opportunities for more exposure by becoming a volunteer and assisting in the maintenance and marketing of the EtsyMini Blog.

Supply and Vintage sellers are not left out, either, as there is a SuppliesMini blog available as well.

The most popular posts on Sixth & Elm this year..

1. The Wedding Files: Project #1 – Guest Favours
2. Things We Learned While Painting the House
3. The October Tree
4. Turkey Day
5. On Weakness and Strength
6. Death By Cashew
7. Photographic Evidence
8. Font Cheat Sheet
9. The Story of My Craft
10. You’re Not Going to Throw That Out, Are You?

Take a peek over on Modish today for the Sixth & Elm Handmade Spaces interview, and a write-up of my studio. Thanks again Jena!

A quote I found by Brian on his blog, “the Bleacher Life:”

When people say that, “life isn’t fair,” they’re right, but you can still react to that unfairness in a way that fights for equality and justice…for fairness. What happens to us is out of our hands but how we react to it isn’t. Accepting that life isn’t fair is absolving yourself of the responsibility to do something about it.

Of course, being Brian, he also lists this helpful piece of advice just above it:

Try not to put yourself in a position that makes it necessary to use a toilet amoungst 70,000 other people. On most occasions it ends up being a bad idea.

I’ve been tagged by Stormy Designs to share 7 facts about myself. Last time I got tagged I waited too long and then forgot who tagged me, so I better do this one before I forget again.

1. My favorite food is berries of any kind.
2. I cover my ears in scary movies.
3. I put ketchup in Lipton Chicken Noodle soup and have since I was little.
4. When I was 12, I broke my arm when I fell asleep while riding my bike. (What? It was a really long downhill coast and I was tired!)
5. I have walked on top of the Green Monster at Fenway Park.
6. I hate black licorice. Like barf-hate.
7. I started to stain the unfinished wood stairs down to the dungeon studio, but got distracted after one stair. The cat won’t step on that one stair now, for some reason.

Adam asked me to note that he gave me most if these answers because I couldn’t think of any except the first one.

Here are the 7 people that I’m tagging:

um. I don’t actually know who to tag – I tagged everyone who would do this the last few times I did this and now I am out of people, and I am too shy to tag people I don’t know. So, if you read this and want to participate you can consider yourself tagged by me! Passive tagging.

Here is what to do:

1. Link to your tagger and post these rules on your blog.
2. Share 7 facts about yourself on your blog.
3. Tag 7 people at the end of your post by leaving their names as well as links to their blogs.
4. Let them know they are tagged by leaving a comment on their blog.

I may have been raised in Ontario, but I was born in rural Saskatchewan and I am, therefore, very familiar with the teenage dairy pastime of cow-tipping. When Ascender Rises Above left me a note to say I was the most recent recipient of some blog-tipping on her part I was worried, to say the least. Even to those who have never heard of cow-tipping must agree it cannot be a pleasant experience for the poor cow, so I held my breath, steeled myself and followed the link.

To my delighted surprise I found the experience to be much less unsettling than would a overturned cow. Blog-tipping is closer to hat-tipping than cow-tipping. Ascender makes it a habit of giving a “shout out” and awarding a Thinking Blogger award to three blogs each month that have caught her eye and I was fortunate enough to be one of them. As Ascender explains, according to Business Blogwire, “Blogtipping is where you publish a blog post in which you link to three blogs that make you think.” Apparently, you also get a link in Business Blogwire if you let them know about it.

The rules for blogtipping and a thinking blogger award are (summarized): 1. When you get tagged, write a post with links to 3 blogs that make you think 2. Proudly display the ‘Thinking Blogger Award’ with a link to this post so that people can easily find the origin of the blog that you enjoy. Easy enough, here we go:

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The original list I had was a consolidation of my blog list and Lis Kidder’s blog list. Then I found the list jointly created by Indiscretion and Moth to Flame, so we decided to consolidate, and Moth to Flame went through both lists and manually checked for differences and adjusted the lists (wow, by the way). The result is this HUGE list and I am very grateful to Lis Kidder, Indiscretion and Moth to Flame for all the hard work they have done joining the Etsy community through our collective weblog ramblings. Moth to flame is now managing the list, but if you leave a comment to add your blog on here I will pass it on and make sure you get added on.

The list, now newly expanded, can still be found here: The Etsy Blog List

There are an astounding number of Etsy sellers that hail from the Great North, so we have set up a web ring to connect the blogs of as many current or former Canadians as we can. The idea is to help generate traffic to your blogs (and hopefully, your stores) and to help us all keep updated with each other’s busy lives. It will help make this huge land a little smaller.

If you are a Canadian Etsy seller, feel free to join the ring and add your blog to the roll. Please submit blogs only at this time, but feel free to recommend fellow Canucks to join us. Please make sure you also check out the Etsy Canadian Shops List and the Etsy Sellers Blog List posted on this site and verify your shop and your blog are on these lists.

You can find many of us daily in the Canadian Buy/Sell Party in the Promotions and Critiques section of the Etsy Forums, and we always want to hear from you. You can also check out the Canadian Street Team – The Trans Canada Etsy Team – on the blog and the flickr group.

To join the ring, click here. For instructions on how to join, or for details about what a blog ring is, click here.

Along with the Canadian Etsy Sellers List I have also been compiling a list of blogs run by Etsy sellers, which you can find here. I have added them all to my Technorati and would love a link in kind if you are on the list. If you are an Etsy seller and have a blog and I have not put you on this list, just leave me a comment with your Etsy username and blog URL and I will add you on the list.