I hate naming items I list in the Sixth & Elm Etsy shop, so I sometimes ask for help from my friends. I really should know better by now.

Tonight I asked for help from my friend Colin in naming this box with the image of a Spencerian Peacock I burned on it. I got the following suggestions in reply:

“The End Boards”
“Circle Gets the Cube”
“Sphere Gets the Cube”
“Jo Jo and the Giant Moose”
“Mo Jo and the Gigantic Goose”
“Chin Strap Chafing”
“Cupboard Pirates”

and my favorite… “Perforated Coffee”

Note: The image I burned on the box above came from my new favorite source for vintage graphics, The Graphics Fairy. You gotta check it out – a goldmine I tell you.

You may have noticed that the Sixth & Elm Etsy Shop has been closed for a bit, but rest assured that this closure is only temporary and I plan to reopen at the beginning of February. I had a very busy fall season and I needed time to finish my lengthly queue of orders before I took any new ones, and I knew that I would need some extra time off once Noah arrived too. In addition to that, there is a rule against earning extra income for the first 13 weeks of maternity leave while collecting maternity benefits from the Canadian Government. I will get paid for the full year off like everyone else, but for some reason they do not allow you to work for the first 13 weeks. I don’t mind though. I am using the time off to come up with some new designs for the shop re-openning in February.

If you would like to be notified when the shop is taking orders again to can sign up for automatic email notification on the Sixth & Elm shop page (don’t worry, you won’t be signed up for newsletters or spam) or you can check back here as I will post once I am up and running.

The Heart-O-Matic, the super-cool tool written by Julian of Juln.etsy.com has moved from Majaba.org to a new site, http://www.craftcult.com/. Craft Cult is co-owned by Julian and Karena of Magicjelly.etsy.com and features all of your favorite Heart-O-Matic Stats in a fancy new design, with more opportunity to advertise on the very popular site.

For the uninitiated, the Heart-O-Matic is a tool designed to help you easily see who has favorited your shop, which of your items have hearts and how many, and what your total item views are without having to click on each item or doing more math than any of us need in a day.  Go check it out if you are not familiar – you’ll love it. Of course, us Etsy sellers are so starved for shop stats that almost ANYTHING stat related gets us drooling.

I forgot to show you all my new Moo Cards…

I also grabbed a cute little leather holder that holds 25 cards to carry around with me for times when a random “Well, hey, let me give you my card!” situation turns up.

And don’t forget that you can make your Moo mini-cards (and full size cards and stickers and postcards and…) right from your Etsy listings instead of through Flickr.

Never seen a Moo card before? They’re little half-size, unique business cards based on pictures you provide. Here, read about ‘em on the Moo website.

My day job revents me from reading the storque back to front, or reading all the admin forum posts so sometimes I miss new features, like the Moo.com partnership with Etsy. Did you know you can print your Moo minicards, stickers and other stuff from your product listings, instead of going through Flickr? You did? Oh. So I was the only one who didn’t know? Damn. Never mind.

I wish I had found out sooner because there was a coupon code for a free keychain/card holder, but it expired in may. I found the deal by randomly wandering through the “Community – Resources” section on Etsy and clicking on the “MOO” tag. Wonder what else I can find…

So. I joined Twitter. I figured I wasn’t wasting enough time online since I haven’t been fired yet and my husband still knows my name. For the un-initiated, Twitter is essentially the Facebook ‘”status updates” feature and nothing else. It allows me to send little updates (“New items posted to the shop!”) or random musings (“If everything in the universe suddenly doubled in size would you notice?”) or current observations (“There are 50 snails on this stretch of sidewalk”) from the web or my cell and get updates from other people sent to my phone as well, if I want.

I Installed a Plug-in (I’m all about plug-ins this week, aren’t I?) called Twitter Tools that automatically posts an update to Twitter when I write a new blog post and makes a summary blog post each night from my Twitter updates for that day (in case you were wondering what that post was).  You can also use services like Twitterific to update your Twitter, Facebook Status, MSN or Adium Status and Skype Mood all at once.

I swore I wasn’t going to give in and join Twitter, and then I couldn’t remember why I had sworn that. Give in to what? If I don’t like it, I can just stop using it. I know everyone else is doing it too, but that isn’t a reason for me to boycott. I think not doing something because everyone else is is just as silly as doing something because everyone else is. My philosophy for all these viral fads is just do it if you want, and if you don’t want to anymore, stop.

So, if you want to Cyberstalk me, here ya go: (Love to hear from you all)

Blog: www.sixthandelm.com (you already know this one, you’re there now)
Shop: www.sixthandelm.etsy.com
Flickr: www.flickr.com/photos/sixthandelm
Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/home.php?#/profile.php?id=512543545
Twitter: www.twitter.com/sixthandelm
YouTube: www.youtube.com/user/sixthandelm
Trunkt Portfolio: www.trunkt.org/client.listing_detail.cfm/id/2592

Phew. Anything else?

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:

(more…)

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.