New Fuzzy Friends in the Store! Fifi and Harley!

Introducing some new fuzzy friends!

Fifi, the Pink Terrier! She's pink and bubbly, and looks like cotton candy!

Harley, the Skinny Doxie.
All he's got is this bone! Take him home and feed him a ham sandwich!

Come check them out in the shop!

Customizing Your Facebook Widget

I put my Facebook Fan Box widget on my blog a couple of days ago (see right hand column and scroll down), and I love how it looks! Rather than the text link to my Facebook fan page that I have under the "Important Links" section, I now have an attractive Fan Box that shows my fans on facebook, and hopefully entices others to click and join! Have you gotten yours yet?


Of course, as I did with the Etsy Minis on my blog, the code for the Facebook Fan Box had to be modified a little to make it fit correctly. If you have a blog on blogspot, the Fan Box may be too big initially.

Here is how I got the code for my Fan Box from Facebook, and how I implemented it to fit correctly in my blog:

1) Go to your fan page in facebook.

2) Click on Add Fan Box to your site

3) This will take you to a page where you can set up your widget. I chose to check "Include Fans" only. The streaming version takes up too much room in my opinion, but you can check it if you like.

4) Copy the code generated and add it to your blog layout (this would be a gadget in blogspot).

Now take a close look at the default widget that is produced in Step 3 (sorry for the bad resolution). Do you see how it is wider and has more fans listed than the widget that is in my blog? There are a couple of parameters that you can change in the code to get the same results as mine. Or you can play around with the numbers and see what suits your blog best.

In the code that is generated, the default number of fans listed is 10, and the width of the box is 300 pixels. I changed these two parameters to make my widget fit better:

- To change the number of fans, look for the text in the code that says connections="10" Simply change the number 10 to the number of fans you want to display. In my case, I changed it from 10 to 6.

- To change the width of the widget, find the text in the code that says width="300" (which should be right next to the "connections" text) and change the 300 to a smaller number to make the box narrower, or a larger number to make the box wider. In my case, I changed the number to 200. Depending on your blog layout, this number can vary.

And there you go! I hope this helps you all put a nice Facebook Fan Box on your blog!! Good luck, and convo me if you need help!

Happy 4th of July and The Wonderful World of Project Wonderful

Happy 4th of July everyone! I'm going to the San Diego County Fair today to watch fireworks and then watch Smokey Robinson in his post-fireworks show! I love Smokey's songs, but I hope he'll be able to move his mouth to sing, given all the plastic surgery/botox he's had in the past years!

I'll also be checking up on my Fuzzies that are on exhibit at the Home and Hobby competition! Hope they're all still there, and that nobody took any of them. It turned out that they didn't win anything. I guess this year there just weren't any judges with a penchant for pipe cleaner arts. Maybe I should submit them to the miniatures competition next year. Either way, the submissions cost $6 each and you get a free fair ticket for participating! Tickets are normally $14, so it's a nice discount and totally worth it!

Also, a quick note, yesterday was a record day for new Fuzzington followers! I received 50 visitors to this blog, 6 new blog readers, 20 new twitterers, and 8 hearts to my shop! Now I just need to work on getting traffic to my facebook fan page. Thanks so much everyone for all of your support!!

Now on to project wonderful. My latest obsession are free ads on Project Wonderful! In the past, I had heard about it, but I figured you had to pay for ads. But then one day I saw a listing in the Etsy forums for a free project wonderful ad! So I signed up for a PW account, and set up an ad square. By the way, the ad square that I set up looked so simple and cute (see below). I'm thinking of switching my banner to something that looks like that.



Anyhow, I have since been keeping an eye out for those "Your Ad Here $0" messages on PW. I think it's a great way to attract people to your blog. I've found a few blogs that I really like through these searches. My only question is, how effective are these PW ads, and why do people offer free ads? Is it to bring traffic to your site even if you don't make any money on them? Can you make money with free ads? Also, does anyone get a lot of traffic from their paid/free PW ads?

I don't think I really understand this whole PW thing yet, or how it works. All I know is I get lots of emails from them about how I am the highest bidder, and then I've been outbid, and then I'm the highest bidder again. I get these like 4 times a day, and I'm not sure how I even become a high bidder again with $0. There seems to be something almost philosophical about that: How do you become the highest bidder with nothing? What is zero dollars higher than? A negative bid? Or for you math geeks, an imaginary bid, as in $4i?

I've also signed up to be a publisher, but haven't heard back from PW yet. Perhaps if and when I start publishing my own ad spaces, I'll understand why I want to put $0 ads on my site.

Any tips or advice from you wonderful PW users out there?

I'll look forward to your responses. In the meantime, heave fun porking out today! I know I will on funnelcake, hotdogs, and lemonade!

Etsy Mini Custom Code For Your Blog

I've decided to start featuring my favorite shops on my blog using Etsy minis for those shops and posting them on the right side of my blog (scroll down on the right).

The only problem is that I wanted to put a 1x1 Gallery Etsy Mini for each store, but I didn't like how Etsy did theirs. This is what theirs looks like if you take several Etsy-generated 1x1 minis and post them to your blog:


See how it looks if I post multiple shops this way? I see all that text that says "Etsy: Your place to buy & sell all things handmade, Fuzzington.etsy.com" under every listing, and it just seems seems so repetitive and takes up a lot of room on my blog. So I decided to remove it so that it looks like this:


I love how it looks a lot less cluttered! It may not make a huge difference with only two shops, but with 5 or more, it sure can!

How did I do this? I generated an Etsy mini for my store in Etsy to play with, and edited the flash code that is generated (guess my Engineeering and Computer Science degree finally paid off!). I tried to post the code at the end of this blog entry, but blogger actually uses the code and you can't see the code. I've posted the code in the Etsy forums at this thread: http://www.etsy.com/forums_thread.php?thread_id=6206975

Now, here's another trick. Rather than asking people to send you their Etsy minis, you can just change any references to the user ID and name of the Etsy shop that you need an Etsy mini for. When you look at the code for your Etsy mini, look for text like that shown below, and the fields that I've highlighted in red:

object data="http://www.etsy.com/flash/spots/etsy_mini.swf?user_id=6289001&user_name=fuzzington&item_source=shop&item_size=gallery&rows=1&columns=1

So, for example, the code that I posted in this blog entry is for my store. To change it to an Etsy mini for MyDadsHands' Etsy shop, I would replace my user ID, 6289001, with hers, 7220882, and my Etsy account name "Fuzzington" to "mydadshands.' As far as I know, there are only two places in the code that looks like this, so you should be changing the user name and IDs twice each in any Etsy mini code. Make sure you type in the name of the shop exactly as it is shown in the Etsy user name, and make replacements for all id's and usernames in the code. You can use this trick with any code that you get for your Etsy Mini, regardless of the dimensions of your mini.

I think any Etsy seller would be ecstatic if y ou went ahead and made a mini-Etsy for your blog, but as usual, make sure you let them know you did as a courtesy. I'm sure they would love to know!

For those of you who would like to try this for Etsy minis larger than 1x1, the same kinds of modifications that I made to my code apply. If you need some help, feel free to convo me.

Hope this comes in handy for your blogs!!!

Made My Own Lightbox!!

I love the outdoor pics that I take of my Fuzzies and post in my shop, but there is a certain time of the day where the sunlight is just right to get good pics. Generally it's between 4-5:30 pm, when the sun is starting to go down. It seems that's the best time to get indirect natural light is as the sun is going down. The next best time is early in the morning, like 7-8 am. Unfortunately, my day job cuts down on my opportunities during the week to take pictures, and the weekends are usually booked. So, how do I work around this? With a lightbox!

I've been meaning to make my own lightbox because I really like the idea of having the flexibility to take pictures whenever I want, plus the pics look professional in a different way. I found some instructions on this site that were really clearcut, with lots of pictures for reference:

http://www.studiolighting.net/homemade-light-box-for-product-photography/

You can buy a manufactured lightbox for around $100, or you can make one for a fraction of the cost. Since we're all crafty, creative, DIY types, why would you ever want to BUY one?

So here we go on my journey of making a light box!

Here are the materials I bought for the box. Overall I shelled out about $30 for everything: $10 for the foam board, $12 for the shop lights, $3 for the masking tape, and $5 for the lighbulbs (does that add up to 30?).

(Cute little Maggie's always wondering what I'm up to)

I couldn't find "daylight bulbs" as specified in the instructions, so I got "full spectrum" bulbs instead, hoping they'd have the same effect. Next I cut each of the large foamboard pieces in half. My first try wasn't so good, but it got better:

Then I placed the pieces together just to make sure they would fit together. I'm notorious for mis-mearuring things and screwing projects up:

Like they talked about in the instructions, I cut a flap on the side and on the top so I could peek into the box with my camera from different angles if I needed to. You can see, I've taped four of the sides together already with the masking tape.

Taped the bottom side on, and viola! The box is complete!

(Gasp! Is that a picture of ME? I look so proud of myself, don't I?)

I attached the shoplights to the box and turned them on! Looks beautiful!

I then took some test pictures with all of my Fuzzies. I had to play around with my camera settings a little, but here's what I ended up with:

I had to do a little tweaking in photoshop to get the colors to pop a little more, but you see overall how it looks! I'm thinking of adding one more shoplight to get more lighting power.

I'm really excited with the results! It's definitely a different quality to the photos... they look like they've been taken in a studio, and the colors are certainly more vivid! I'm not sure which style I like more. I still love how my Fuzzies look in an outdoor setting... gives them more character. Someone on Etsy suggested using both types of pics.

It turned out the lightbox was a lot easier to make than I had anticipated! I'm still experimenting to find the optimal combination of camera settings, lighting angles, and photo software to get the optimal pics, I'm already very happy with the results I've gotten so far! Certainly glad to have options in photographing my items now. What do you folks think? Hope this helps anyone thinking about making their own lightbox!

Promotion Ideas

I've been trying to think of new ways to promote Fuzzington (as if I'm not trying a lot already with twitter, facebook, myspace, flickr, craftster, etsy chat, etsy boards, oh and this blog!). Ideas seem to be popping into my head everyday, and I've been writing them down in my Fuzzington journal. I'm starting to realize that I've got lots of ideas, but just don't have the time or energy to do it after a long day of work!!!

My latest promotion idea that I really like is to make an instructional online video on how to make a simple pipe cleaner animal. The one I have in mind is this really cute butterfly that I came up with a few days ago. It looks really good, and it's fairly simple to do. Plus, by doing a video I can put a face to Fuzzington, my face. I don't think anyone really knows what I look like... I can also put it on Instructables.com or youtube... I think people would like to get a glimpse of my craft and how fun it is to work with pipe cleaners.

Some other ideas that I would love to do, but just don't know how to do yet:
1) Craft fair
2) Sell at a local store
3) Pass out business cards or flyers (to just anybody?)
4) Make promotional items and pass them out
5) Blog giveaway for promotional item

Any tips out there? I'm sure a lot of you have experience with this!

BUT, my biggest problem right now is that I don't have enough product!!! Gotta get working on those!!! Promotion is no good if you don't have items to sell!!

We shall see what happens in the upcoming weeks!

A Great Etsy Refresher - Etsy 101

To all you Etsians that follow or happen to stumble upon my blog, here is a great refresher course that I found online for your shops! Modish has compiled a list of cool resources on the Web that talk about how to make good Etsy shops.

http://www.modishblog.com/modish/2008/03/publish-320buil.html

I know you all have perfect shops, but it doesn't hurt to remind ourselves of what sells! We could all use sales! =)

Another Shop Critique!

So after the last shop critique that I had about a month ago, I decided to get another one. The reviewers on Etsy remembered me right away, which I'm not sure is a good or bad thing. Overall, they didn't have too much to comment on my shop. The only comments they had left were:

1) Shorten the item descriptions so that they can be easily scanned by the reader
2) Post items more often to get more exposure!!

Number 1 was easy.

Number 2 will be a little more challenging...

Got a Shop Critique Today!!

I sat in on one of Etsy's virtual workshops today to get my store critiqued. Overall, it sounded like I was doing most things right.

Things I'm doing right:
1) Good pictures, using angles, natural lighting, etc...
2) Cute items
3) Overall good look of the store
4) Good listing of other promotion sites like myspace, facebook, etc...

Things to improve on:
1) Shorten the shop announcement so items appear at first glance by customers
2) Add shop policies
3) Better utilization of tags - use all 14, and include colors in tags!!

I'm definitely going to do these things! While I think marketing seems to be the number 1 thing needed to get business, the look and feel of your shop is a close #2!!! Still trying to figure out the marketing thing!