New Year, New Etsy "Studio"

(Note  4/7/16: For some inexplicable reason, a number of photographs used to illustrate this blog post disappeared. I have re-written the post, accordingly, as I'm loath to simply delete it. Hopefully you'll enjoy it anyway!)

One of my New Year's resolutions is to write a new blog post every week. Well, we'll see how that goes...

So today, being snowbound in New Hampshire (schools are closed for the second day in a row, probably just because it's so cold here right now with temps of about 3-5 degrees and a good wind chill going), 

I decided that this was a good time to write a little bit about my new Etsy "studio."

A Reunion on Etsy

One of the fun things about selling vintage on Etsy is the people you meet, both customers and other sellers. I've written here about some of these encounters.

Recently I re-encountered an old friend, B. J. Elvgren, who sells her amazing handmade creations on Etsy (here). Years ago we'd met each other through our husbands--both playwrights and both at the time teaching theatre and playwriting at universities in Virginia and New Jersey. Her husband had invited my husband to give a talk at his university and I went along, spending a wonderful several days with B.J. and Gil sight seeing, talking, and admiring their antique-filled home. B.J. also had a beautiful studio filled with her quilted creations, and I bought several pillows from her that still grace our living room couches.

Time passed, and after a hiatus of quite a few years, B.J.'s husband got in touch with mine over some business. During their email conversations, my husband happened to mention that I had an Etsy shop and gave the URL. Gil said that B.J. did, too, and almost immediately I received a convo (Etsy lingo for its internal email system) from her saying that she'd checked out my shop and loved it. So I clicked on her shop link--I knew I'd love everything because I knew how talented she was--and got back to her and before long were talking back and forth and wondering how we could all get together again.

Then, after responding to a convo from her, I went back to check my Etsy activity stream for any new purchases. Suddenly I saw that wonderful green "view order" sign on this item:

An interesting Etsy sale, the Examiner, & Life in General

Starting out with "life in general," I haven't written a post for a month--hard to believe that so much time has gone by--but I must admit it's a challenge just keeping up with the stuff I'm doing on a daily basis: writing two articles a week for Examiner.com, putting items up on my Etsy shop, writing press releases for the Sharon Arts Center, babysitting my two youngest grandchildren every afternoon, and doing all the other things that have to be done to maintain a household. Not to mention spending time with my husband and friends and family members....

But everybody is busy these days--it doesn't matter who you are or what you do, we're all busy!

In addition to writing local antiquing articles for the NH Examiner, I've done some fun pieces as Vintage Home Decor writer for the national Examiner, such as:

Another assignment as a writer on vintage

I've been writing articles for some months now as the Manchester (NH) Antiquing Examiner, and recently I've been doing "Antiquing This Weekend" features on various locations in New Hampshire like Portsmouth and Peterborough, Amherst, Keene, and Milford, but a few weeks ago I was assigned a position as Vintage Home Decor writer for the national Examiner.com.

My first article in that position was called "How vintage lovers decorated for the 4th, and what you can do next year" and the most recent was "Decorating with vintage maps and where to find them." Both of these articles have slide shows, and here's some pix I used in decorating with maps (for credits, see the article)--all great ideas:

From Decor 8: 8 Decorating Trends in Europe

I came across a blog today called Decor 8, where I found an interesting post on 8 decorating trends in Europe ("trends you'll love," they said. They're right...):

1.Industrial lighting