(My Project Wonderful Ad)

Yes, “Project Wonderful” sounds like the spawn of a Disney mascot and the Make-A-Wish-Foundation, but it is in actuality a two-way ad network where you can either post or host ads on blogs all over the blogosphere. Yeah, I just used that word. Blogosphere. Whatcha gonna do about it?

Signing up to host an ad box means submitting your site and then populating your ad box with ads you approve, so you can pick only other artists if you want, or designers, or Etsy stores, for example. To avoid the embarrasing “YOUR AD HERE” that proclaims to the world that no one thinks you important enough to advertise on yet, you can start the bidding at $0.00, which should fit in anyone’s budget (if it doesn’t you’re doing the budget wrong) and fill up the spots until someone starts to bid for the spots in higher increments. And you can either withdraw the money you generate, or use the profits to bid on ad spots for you on sites in turn.

I just started my ad boxes, so they are still going for anywhere from $0.01 to $0.50 per day an ad. That’s not bad at all – 1 cent a day means 30 cents for a whole month of advertising. If you want to get in on the action before the bidding gets high (because, let’s face it, it will because I am awesome) then click on the link below either of the two 5×1 ad boxes in the sidebar and check out Project Wonderful for yourself.

Last night the blog hit 10,000 visitors and I ran a little contest in honour of that milestone. About 20 visits before the big mark I announced that the 10,000th visitor would get a $50 gift certificate to Sixth & Elm’s Etsy Shop if they caught a screen grab of the ticker reading “10000” and sent it to me.

Didn’t know about the contest? It was an exclusive for followers of Sixth & Elm on Twitter, so add us on if you haven’t yet. We will be playing more games like this, each with a gift certificate for the shop ranging from $25 to $250, so stay tuned to the Blog, Twitter and the Facebook Blog Network for your chance to win. (Hint: the Facebook Blog Network application is new with not that many followers yet, so you have a better chance to win if I do a Facebook-exclusive contest. Just join the network and I will post on the wall or send a message for the next contest).

By some weird internet magic, we actually got TWO confirmed winners for this contest. Both DigitalMayhem and 3zArt will be enjoying their $50 discount – in fact, DigitalMayhem has already spent hers!

Fellow Etsyian, Loopy4ewe is participating in the 60km Weekend to End Breast Cancer Walk next June, and she is attempting to raise $2000 to participate. Once she let the other Etsy sellers know what she was up to, they responded en masse by donating tons of items they have made – large and small and mostly pink – and listing them for her, all proceeds to go toward her walk.  She didn’t even ask for donations, but she didn’t have to.

I added my little bit by adding the most popular item I sell, the Scripted Box, stained in Antique Pink in honour of the cause. I sanded it down a bit it looks cute and vintage-y – like a little Parisian treasure. All of the money I raise from the sale of this item will go to Loopy and hopefully get her close to her goal.

Here is a list of some of the other Etsy sellers who have listed or donated items as well:

KritterKnitter

StuffbySteph

PaisleyBaby

NancyWallisDesign

HarvestMoonPaper

UxCritter

Loscann

Adornyourself

StringMeAlong

MyHandboundBooks

Gillian’sBeads

How can you help? Easy, buy something from someone on this list!

Our recent side-trip to Oregon gave me another chance to observe the odd American obsession with our Canadian money. Comments about the colour, denominations and nicknames for the cash (okay, I admit that “toonie” is a lame moniker) are ever-present when our Canadian currency is displayed and I have a couple of points for anyone with an unusual fascination with our moola:

1. I am really not sure that the Clown commuminty as a whole has one accepted form of currency, so please stop calling it “clown money.”

2. The colours help us tell them apart at a glance and reduce the risk of slipping a $50 bill to our cab driver instead of a $20 when we have been having a few too many at the bar. Good idea, no?

3. Stop trying to pull the middle out of the toonie. It’s way too hard, and besides, I think it is a federal offense.

4. Okay, so we don’t have a bill for anything under $5 anymore – just the one-dollar and two-dollar coins. But you can have a whole wad of cash in your pocket and still only have $7, whereas we can have $35 dollars worth of “just change” in our pockets and not even know it until we count it. I like good surprises.

5. Loonies may look like Pirate gold to you, but I can use it to get a coffee from Timmies while you are still trying to get the chocolate out of it.

Thank you. Carry on…

We’ll start with an easy project, but something you need to get started making early since you have to make so many.

For our wedding favours we decided to make coasters for each guest to take home – 2 per guest or four per couple so that even people who came without a date would still have a matching set. We were told that if you have good wedding favours you will have none left over after the wedding and we think we did okay because there weren’t any left for us – I had to make some more for ourselves later.

The coasters we made from bathroom tiles from the hardware store. A box of 75 tiles cost about $70, giving us a final price of about $2 per guest. We bought 5 boxes and tried to carry them home ourselves since we only live across the street. Don’t do that. They are damn heavy. We almost died.

The only thing else we needed to buy was a roll of cork lining. Then came the fun task of cutting 1400 cork circles – one for each corner of 350 stone coasters. It wasn’t as hard as you’d think. I had a cork cutter from work, but a 3/4″ punch would work well – or you could cut grids and use square feet for the coasters.

Here’s where hubby-to-be comes in. You can either use the “if you loved me, you’d do this for us” or “you can either do this or sign all the thank you cards by yourself,” but whichever you choose, set him up with the tiles, some epoxy glue (the kind you mix together – or some other glue for tile surfaces) and the 1400 little circles. It’s better if you don’t let him see all the tiles at once, just keep bringing in more little piles, or else he may refuse at the beginning. One cirlce per tile corner and you’re good to go.

Then you can package them in little bundles of two. I printed little tags (using black chancery font – like I used for all the wedding stationary) and cut lengths of 1″ wide velvet burgundy ribbon. I attached them with antiqued brass eyelets and used the eyelets to string thin black ribbon to tie the coasters together and place them on each place setting. Ta-Dah!

The best way to make yourself sub-conscious about your photography skills is to marry a photographer. But despite the self-doubt, there are also some upsides to having a skilled eye and a $2000 camera around the house. And you get to use the “if you can spend that much on a camera, why can’t I spend that much on a kiln?” speech. In lieu of this, I advise a digital camera at the least. They don’t cost an arm and a leg anymore; you can get a decent one for only part of a shin, maybe a tibia or two. Adam uses a Canon Digital Rebel and I also have a Panasonic Lumix for back-up (like, for when Adam is inconsiderate enough to use his own camera that he paid for when I need it) and I find I can take decent pictures with it, though it took a bit of practice to get used to composing a picture on the digital screen without the aid of a viewfinder.

But, remember, before you start shooting, put the camera strap over your head. I can’t really see how this will improve your pictures, but Adam swears the camera will blow up if I don’t have the neck strap on and swears it has nothing to do with the fact that I drop nearly everything I pick up.

There are a million articles about lighting, DIY light boxes, and how to place your products. But I have found that one of the keys to god pictures is to be careful about how you compose the final shot. The following are some different types of shots that I try to include in every listing, if possible:

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It’s little blog thing going around (God, that makes it sound like a flu) which asks the fairly simple question: what’s on your fridge? Take a picture, point out the highlights and introduce us to your little refrigerated world. Oh, and no fair putting up stuff to make you look cool. Can’t really think of something you would put on your fridge that would project an infallible aura of coolness, but you get the point. I am only showing the freezer door to my fridge. Why? Come on, you can’t give it all away on the first date. So, here we go.

Oh, and I didn’t arrange the things on the fridge to line up geometrically like that for the picture, I actually put stuff on my fridge that way.

1. Magnets I have recently made, all of which are available at Sixth & Elm (or will be in the next week when I finish posting the rest). It is mildly interesting that with all the magnets I make I am not actually using any of them on my fridge. I just store them there as they are waiting to be sold and I use tape to stick stuff on. But the magnet population on my fridge is in a state of constant flux as new sets are made, sold and replaced, so it is just easier to use tape then the round up replacements to hold our treasures when I sell one of them.

2 & 3. Sixth & Elm promotional postcards that I designed and the Sixth & Elm Magnet Mini Calendar. Email me if you want one. No place like home to get in as many shameless plugs as you can.

4. Etsy.com button magnet – the first one I made with my new button maker. Email me if you want one of them, too! 3 for $5…

5. Chicken Note: “Don’t open the freezer or a chicken will fly out”…. this wasn’t a joke. Adam likes to do this thing where he stuffs the cupboards or freezers in a clever way so things will fall on you if you open them. His sisters said he had been perfecting his technique in this long before I met him. This note was in regards to a chicken he had propped against the freezer door. I tried to shove it in fully but couldn’t and we were having party, so i put the warning on the door. Didn’t work though. Everybody kept opening the door to see what I meant and then gasping in surprise as a frozen chicken fell into their arms. Well, I warned them. The sign was never removed, even though the chicken eventually was. It was yummy.

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Following a recent “social gathering” I showed my friend Sue the bead spinner that I had made. I think I had a bit too much wine, or I was just dumb that night, but I don’t know if I made sense, so I am officially documenting the creation of my bead spinner for Sue, and everyone else who is curious

1. Accidentally break the hard plastic lid of a sample jar from the lab, rendering it useless for actual sample containment. Try to break the lid on a wide-mouth, fairly stubby jar. Take the useless jar home.

2. Take apart the dot matrix printer (circa 1980) that VJ kept for no conceivable reason. Retrieve metal rods from printer interior (note: a hammer and some re-directed bitter angst about something will be needed for this step).

3. Buy some “NuLustre 55″ resin from Rona, Deck Stain aisle. After writing to the company to point out how lame the product name is, read all safety precautions on the package.

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The flavour of the week. Yes, for all you ducks that keep correcting my spelling on Etsy I spell it flavour. And humour. And colour and jewellery and neighbourhood. Why? Because the queen said so and she’s on my money so that makes her worth listening to. Anyways. I have a flavour of the week, but sometimes it is only the flavour of the day or maybe it lasts as long as a month. The point is, I have “phases” that wax and wane in every aspect of my life. Three weeks ago I wanted cottage cheese for every meal. Now it makes me gag. That kind of stuff.

So the reason I make so many things isn’t because I am particularly talented, or eclectic, or even well-rounded. I just start doing something, then get bored, and learn something else. I hate to admit that because I was kind of liking the “she can make ANYTHING” reputation I was fostering, but really I just had trouble staying with something long enough to get a name in that trade. I am deeply jealous of those who have a name. Adam is a photographer. Emily is a designer. I’m a … yeah, can’t even think of anything that fits there. I can tell you a lot of things I WAS. I guess I still am, as I still know how to do them, but I no longer do them so I don’t know what that means for my status. I know I may do woodcarving again, but is it like being a catholic who doesn’t go to church? Can I still be a carpenter when I haven’t even powered up my circular saw in half a year?

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