Etsy, the Holidays & a whole New Year
I’ve had a busy couple of months since I last blogged and I feel it’s been pretty productive! I’d been working on building up an inventory for sale on an Etsy shop and got that launched around Thanksgiving. A few sales started rolling in soon after launching and that has been a nice confidence booster! I’ve added more illustrations to my website and a number of block printed products to my shop. Now I wait to see how those products move while attempting little stabs at free marketing via Instagram and Google. I’m trying to create a new business email and then hopefully I can figure out how to get my Facebook business account up and running again so that I can do even more promotional stuff. I love technology when it works, but when it doesn’t it’s so frustrating. It seems that help teams are hard to come by given that Covid has come roaring back to its previous vitality… technical help delays are terrible!
Other promotional efforts (that ARE working!) revolve around two new demonstrations and workshop events I’ve scheduled. One will be hosted by the Center for Teaching and Learning in Edgecomb, Maine. It’s a lovely little non-profit private school for kids K-8. On January 19 I’ll be presenting my work and then follow up with a demonstration and lesson for the first and second graders. This is a closed event.
The other event is a workshop at Cove Street Arts in Portland, Maine, which will be accepting students once the campaign has been launched. It will be a weekend event either in the first or second week of March. The class will teach artists how to work in gouache and handle the medium in various ways. I’ll offer tips and training for best results and post some of these on my blog. If these workshops are successful and enjoyable I might build off of the idea, host more, and start a YouTube channel offering techniques in the medium. We’ll see… that idea literally just crash landed into my head.
In other news… it’s the week before Christmas and time is in crunch-mode. I realize I still have some last minute shopping to do and the weekend menu to prepare for. As for Christmas day itself we will wake up at home, open gifts and then pack everyone into the car for a night at my mother’s. She’s planning a delicious dinner and a gender reveal celebration- for us! We are expecting late in May and this time we plan to find out the sex. It will be a fun event and I am looking forward to it.
After the holidays we really don’t have much on the horizon. My family is just planning to hunker down this winter. It’s a sad state of affairs with the second winter in a row predetermined by Covid fears, and we are thoroughly sick of it! The way things are going I wouldn’t be surprised if it were an issue for a few years yet, with new variants creating new complications just when we thought we were through the worst of it. Oh well, I guess another hibernation will be good for my art practice? Here’s to silver linings! Real, or imagined.
