For a little while now I’ve been participating in a new social shopping site called ThisNext - as you’ll see if you look in the sidebar of Make Me. In fact, without realising it at the time, I signed up and started using it within days of the site launching.

I’ve been using it as a way to show my handmade jewellery to the world, as well as to recommend just some of my favourite handmade items by other indie designers.

And it’s great! I’ve had a play with a few social shopping sites and ThisNext is by far my favourite for its excellent design, fast loading and very user-friendly interface. Plus the people who run it are all (in my experience!) lovely and very supportive of indie design.

Today ThisNext have featured a couple of my pieces of jewellery in their blog, as well as those of other handmaking types and a great write up about the joys of shopping at Etsy.com.

In terms of my own work, my cherry blossom earrings and one of my Japanese etch pendants featuring a chrysanthemum design were written about in this blog post by Kristopher Dukes.

Also read read the great review of shopping at Etsy which features some wonderful designers and makers who all sell their wares via Etsy.

Don’t forget to have a look at my ThisNext recommendations. And if you do sign up to make your own recommendations then visit my profile and recommend me too - the world needs more recommending!

I’ve been chopping up bits of fabric and playing with bits of ribbon and working out how best to package my Christmas pudding charms/coins (or tokens - still can’t decide what to call them!?).

And I think I’ve pinned it down, so I’ll give you a bit of a sneak preview - and of course I welcome any constructive criticism you feel like throwing my way!

Here is the final package containing the coins in their little box and a little folder with recipes for Christmas pudding and brandy sauce and other information.

And here it is all opened up so you can see some of what’s inside - the pudding tokens are wrapped up inside the little plastic box.

As I mentioned in a previous post I’m also awaiting delivery of some lovely looking fabric with cherries on it which I plan to use for Australians who purchase the pudding coins. For those who don’t know, cherries are everywhere at Christmas here and are very much associated with the festive season.

I still need to get the final set of vintage Christmas designs etched onto silver and cleaned up, but what do you think of the packaging at least?

Just a little update to say that these are still definitely in the pipeline. I hope to have the first saleable Christmas pudding coin/token packs up on Etsy early next week - fingers and toes crossed!

Today the fabrics I ordered from the Fat Quarter Shop arrived - and they are as lovely as I’d hoped! The Christmas baubles fabric is different to what I had expected - I had thought the baubles would be bigger - but this is a good thing as I was worried they’d be too large for the little boxes I’ll be putting the tokens into.

The other bright pink fabric is for … well, I don’t know! I might use it for wrapping pieces if I send out samples of my work. I just couldn’t resist it! I confess that I’m a sucker for lovely fabrics, even though I can’t sew to save myself and don’t really have the time or inclination to learn properly (I have isssssues with sewing!).

Over the next few days I will be cutting up the Christmas fabric to the right size for wrapping things up, plus I’ll be printing out the Christmas pudding and brandy sauce recipes along with instructions for care and use of the tokens and will be doing an etch of a few sets of the actual tokens themselves.

So keep your eyes peeled - by Monday or Tuesday next week I hope you’ll have pretty Christmas tokens to look at (and buy!) in my Etsy jewellery shop. Of course I will also let you know via Make Me, otherwise known as this very blog.

I’ve managed to get another Etsy Treasury list up and running for the next (just under) 48 hours. This one is all about trees!

In my new list is this absolutely beautiful watercolour by rhradcliffedesigns.etsy.com. If someone wants to buy it for me as a gift, please do feel free - I promise I won’t complain even a little bit and will instead love you long time!

By the way this image is just a portion of the whole piece, which is entitled Rites of Spring.

I came across a link on another blog (That’s Hot) for this very nifty little online website graph generator … which completely fails to work in my browser (Safari) but looked interesting enough for me to go to the effort of opening up Firefox so I could get this pretty graph for you to look at. See how nice I am?!

What does it all mean? Well, who knows! But I enjoyed watching it grow and gather that it must be a map of all of the sites which are somehow connected to Make Me up to a certain point. So, yes, fairly pointless, but very pretty!

In other news, I’m still exhausted and busy. And I received this in an email last night after complaining of being kept awake by a nasty headache:

i’m sure that at least some of your discomfort could be alleviated by NOT WORKING SO HARD. SO LATE (and) SO LONG.

I did accuse its sender of telling me off and even of shouting at me, but he informed me that he wasn’t doing either - he was simply making a suggestion in uppercase!! Ha!

I am intensely busy at the moment and wish more than anything that I could clone myself!

And I feel like I should take a moment out to tell you about it all (or is that whine?). Actually most of it is good busy-ness with things happening for my jewellery and various other interesting bits and pieces going on too.

Although it’s hard to know how long I can keep up the pace - I’m currently working from when I wake up to when I go to bed every day of the week.

Today I found out that a buyer for McCleod’s Daughters (an Australian television drama) has just bought several of my pieces for the show and she also requested a special piece be made asap. So I suspect my work is going to be on the telly at some point! I’ve never seen the show but I’ve seen the ads … and, well, I’m not quite sure what to make of that! But it’s all good, really.

The shop where the buyer purchased my work is also selling a lot more for me than usual for this time of year, so that’s keeping me busy as well - and there’s still the whole of the Christmas season and January sales to go yet!

Plus I’m getting stuck into doing some marketing for my Etsy shop as right now is really the best time to be doing it as we start heading into Christmas shopping season. So there are quite a few things to be done in that regard - I have a long list!

For starters I’ve just had a flier printed to promote the shop and that arrived today. I’m really pleased with how it came out and as of tomorrow it will be winging its way to various other indie designers, people going to craft shows, friends, family and anyone else I can think of!

I’m also doing an exchange of promotional material with a few other Etsy people (hi Meshell!) as I’d like to send out a little pack of promos for other indie designers with my sales - and I hope they will include my promos with their sales.

On top of all of that, work (yes, I also have a job!) is incredibly hectic just now. Tomorrow I will send their new newsletter to the printers, having almost completed laying it out. In a couple of days I will need to start on laying out the annual report - and I’ve not even made a start designing it yet! Plus I need to get an interim version of the new St James Ethics Centre website up and running in the next few weeks - which is a very big job and only part of the monster-size task of finishing the whole thing. We’ve been working towards this since February!

Plus I also need to work with my lovely friend Marc van de Griendt, a really wonderful illustrator, to come up with a nifty and thoughtful Christmas card for the Ethics Centre, something we’ve been doing for a few years now. Above is the card Marc did for us last year.

And soon I will need to start gathering content for the next issue of Filings, the newsletter for JMGA-NSW of which I am the editor. Plus there’s a meeting to discuss a national contemporary jewellery and metalsmiths body which will be held in Adelaide at the end of October and in which I’ll be participating. And ongoing Committee meetings and the like as well.

At some point I need to actually get enough sleep, eat properly, excercise enough and possibly (maybe perhaps) get a life! But I’m thinking most of that will need to wait until after Christmas.

PS. My Etsy front page list is being chatted about on the Etsy forums It seems it was a hit - hooray!

My too much jewelry on etsy? Treasury list has been selected to be today’s Etsy home page list of featured work! Yay!!

I love that people are going to see that there really is some wonderful jewellery on Etsy which is definitely above the run-of-the-mill stuff and also isn’t limited to precious materials or metalsmithing techniques.

In case you didn’t read my earlier post, Etsy Treasury lists only last for 48 hours so you may find the link above no longer works, but there will be plenty of other engaging lists for you to enjoy nonetheless.

Now … back to work for me.

Yes, I’ve been slaving away tonight. I’ve been doing all sorts of things, but I have been concentrating on a spot of production jewellery making - mostly piercing (or sawing) of a few bits and pieces which are now in need of making up into finished work.

The large blossom and the chrysanthemum are the closest to being finished. The chrysanthemum is for a custom order for the lovely Diana. It needs to be tumbled and then hung on two strands of deep red silk thread. I’m also making some extra thread pieces for Diana in different colours. Diana tracked this design down in my exhibition jewellery and object gallery.

The other pieces are some teensy blossoms and leaf pieces, all of which need cleaning up - filing, sanding and tumbling. The leaves need some wire soldered to them to be made into earrings and the blossoms need holes drilled in them so they can be used for chains and earrings.

So there you go - this is what I do at almost 4am in the morning! But now I will love and leave you and finally head for my nice bed.

Night night!