Adornment, ahoy (the jewelry update)

I added six new pieces to the Almost/Nearly etsy shop today. I love a hobby that takes my mind off packing, but I am Really Bored with cropping photos. ::grins::

When I sent the second batch of wrapped lampworked marbles back to Mattie a couple of weeks ago, I kept one here because I was having some sort of wrapper's block as to what would best "fit" it. I tried a couple of things and didn't like the way they looked, so I sent a note back with the other 17 pieces that let him know I was very sorry but that one was just going to have to wait.

Something struck my fancy a week or so later, so I wrapped the marble and loaded it on etsy with a bunch of other stuff. Surprise, surprise: It's attracted the most attention. That boy really knows what he's doing. I guess I should've listed all of the marbles on etsy to see what would happen. Sigh. Maybe he'll bring them to Charleston and we can work on photographing and posting them.

The best investment I've made so far has been to buy sterling in bulk for these projects. It's about half the cost of what I was paying retail. I'd buy my stones in bulk too, but there's a local retail store I love and want to continue to support. I'm going in tomorrow to price some things for a special order. (Here's hoping they don't mark it up too much.) After I move, the owner has said it shouldn't be a problem to drop-ship orders.

By the way, the stone in the picture is a mahogany obsidian I wrapped before work Thursday morning in the time I should've been catching up on the news.

So that's that. I made my first etsy sale last week and was absolutely ecstatic. I'm trying to be patient -- I mean, things on there don't sell super-fast (I've checked out a LOT of other sellers), so I felt pretty confident selling one within less than two weeks after posting my first six or so. As long as I can sell a few here and there, I'll feel justified to keep it going. I really have Mattie to thank for all this. If I hadn't broken his necklace two years ago, fixed it, then shown him when he was in town, we wouldn't have come to the agreement to wrap marbles. And I wouldn't be spending a couple hours on the weekends ... cropping photos. (So it comes full circle.)

Besides all that, I did some packing this weekend and went to the arcade on my anniversary. <3 Cool, huh?