Oops! Or: There Goes Another Etsy Sale...

Well, it had to happen sooner or later.

That morning I'd gone out into the garden and found that the bleeding hearts, narcissus, and purple lilacs were in full bloom. And I thought: what a perfect time to photograph a bunch of my vintage glass bottles and put those up in my shop!

So I picked an armload of flowers, stuck them in a pot of water, retrieved the bottles from my storage shed out behind our house, and went up to the stair landing that I use as my photography studio. I've got a small table there, which I cover with a piece of white poster board, and put another white poster board behind it. I got out my camera and started shooting, doing the cobalt blue bottles first with a few stalks of bleeding hearts and narcissus:

An Unexpected Gift on Etsy

(Note written 4/7/16: For some inexplicable reason, all the pictures that were on this blog have disappeared, but I'm leaving the text here, because I still like the story ~ sorry not to have it illustrated as formerly!)
 
I'm getting ready to list a Norwegian wool cape on Etsy--a cape that belonged to my mother.

I've sold a lot of her things since I opened my Etsy shop--mostly jewelry, which she was especially fond of and collected at church sales and yard sales; some of it Dad gave her, too, for birthdays or Christmas. I've sold even her vintage thread on wooden spools (she was a great seamstress) to another Etsy seller who lives in Indonesia.

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: