When Selling on Etsy Lifts My Spirits

I've been an Etsy.com seller now for a year and a half, and have made a lot of new friends through selling items and buying them myself (see here and here here ) as well as through the teams I'm on, particularly the two I'm a Leader on: the Etsy Pickers and Sellers Team and the Farmhouse Treasures Team, along with the Vintage Etsy Society Street Team, which has opened up two new groups I belong to: the Etsy Vintage Elites and Etsy's Best Vintage.

But sometimes when items are sold I find out why the person purchased it--and in the case I'm writing about today, it's this quilt I sold in September:

Etsy Feedback

It always makes me feel good when I check my shop and see that a buyer has left positive feedback.

Today when I logged in, I found that one buyer, who also happens to be a seller herself--Rachel, from Sweet Briar Rose, whose shop can be found here--wrote to thank me for a vintage Columbia scale I sold her (really the best I've found so far--sometimes you have pangs of "why did I sell that?!"):

An Etsy International Friendship Part 2

Last March I wrote about how an Etsy purchase turned into an international friendship--if you click here you can read it.

The short version of the story is that another Etsy seller, who lives in Indonesia, purchased a bunch of wooden spools with thread from me that had belonged to my mother. During the course of  Etsy "convos" back and forth, Henny Augustien--who lives with her family in Semarang, a coastal city on northern Java Island, Indonesia and has an Etsy shop called HennySeashell--shared some of her life and I shared some of mine and we found we had lots in common. That's how our "international friendship" was born.

Recently I saw a beautiful pillow cover in Henny's  shop:

An Etsy Sale Leads to a Good Cause

The other day I sold a set of aurora borealis jewelry from the 1950s--necklace, earrings and bracelet--that had been languishing in my shop for a long time.

Amazing Etsy Story from Ohio Picker

I love to hear stories about strange and wonderful things that happen on Etsy, and I recently read an amazing one while hanging out at the Etsy Pickers and Seller's Team, affectionately known as Epsteam. This comes from the Epsteam captain, Kevin, whose shop is Ohio Picker:

"I've rescued and sold probably well over a hundred thousand photos over the past 15 plus years. On one occasion I purchased the entire contents of an old photography studio at a Sheriff's bankruptcy sale. The owner lost the shop and it was locked and sold at auction. I tell this story because as I was removing box after box of negatives and photographs, many dating back to the 1920s, I was approached by a sobbing twenties something girl looking for her wedding day photos. I helped her look to no avail. The now bankrupt photographer probably took her money and never developed her wedding photos. I've often wondered over the years if selling these photos and albums was a small way of keeping them from being lost or destroyed forever...I wondered if they ever found their way back home to family members??

"Fast forward...I sold this photo album last week to an artist for his upcoming artistic project:

Happy Easter! Happy Passover!

My Easter/Passover "card" is a sampling of visual greetings from some of the vintage bloggers I read ~ this one from The Little Round Table:

Celebrating One Year on Etsy with an Interesting Sale

Last March I put my first item up for sale on Etsy.

I'd actually joined as a seller in December 2010, but it took me several months of studying how to do everything--reading articles to help new sellers and attending live Etsy symposiums with other newbies--before I felt confident enough to actually publish a listing.

That occurred on March 15, 2011. The next day I started this blog and made my first entry.  And here's the item I put up:

How An Etsy Sale Created an International Friendship

It began simply with thread--27 vintage wooden thread spools:

Getting Back to Blogging and the Old Blogger Interface

Hoorah--I finally figured out how to return to my old Blogger interface!

It wasn't that hard, as I finally discovered today, but I switched last October and hated it so much that I just stopped blogging. And every time I went back to take a look, I couldn't figure out how to get back to what I had, so I just went away again.

Until today. During a morning visit to the Vintage Etsy Sellers Team--Vesties--of which I'm a member, I came across a thread on blogging. Oh yeah, blogging, I thought--I used to blog...but then I changed my interface and now I don't...

So I went back and googled some info and played around and clicked some on the dashboard and--voila!--I'm back!

Now I feel like blogging again. I've also been thinking about it for the last week or two because I'm coming up to my one year anniversary on Etsy and was considering sharing some thoughts about my life so far as a seller.

To give this post some color, here's the last item I sold, which happened yesterday and is my 119th sale: