Dreams, Hopes, Death, and Aftermath.

During my last post, I did not mention that my father had been battling Lung Cancer, diagnosed around Thanksgiving of 2009.

On July 16, 2010, he lost that battle.

We had hoped that, since he was doing so incredibly on his treatment, that would not come to pass. Unfortunately, in some kind of freaky reaction, a cancer nearly in remission attacked, faster than even his doctors could believe possible. Within a month after stopping Chemo to start a pill form of treatment, he was gone.

Since then, I have tripled my efforts to get word out about my work, and started research on how I can donate a portion of my sales to cancer research and cancer charities. Considering that the few sales I get, this is saying something, however, as since opening my Etsy shop, I have had only 6 peices sell, 3 of them to personal friends.

However, I am also hoping to bring my work to a local flea market - For those of you in the Savannah, Georgia area, I want to try to get space at Keller's - this holiday season. With any luck, this will give me sales from holiday shoppers, and with more luck, I can not only cover things I need to, but also be able to start sending to charities with the start of 2011.

With that said, I have been working like mad to stock at least 2 bracelets each of every color I have (37 in all; 12 birthstones, 25 others) with a pair of 1-2-3 drop earrings to match every one of them. I have brought out a new line with my niece's help. Beth and I came up with the Dizzy Drop one afternoon over fondue... and now that is part of my line. I am working right now on Breast Cancer Awareness items to celebrate Breast Cancer Awareness Month this month (after a delay in some supplies). I have made Lung Cancer Awareness pins for my family, with more to do, and would love to spread those as well, hoping to get an order for some of those and the Breast Cancer pins for a local hospital, if I can. The World of Warcraft phone tags are done - one set each only right now - and can be viewed here. Not all of them are photographed right now, but I'm working on that. I also have been poking at bridal work, and have one set up on my Facebook page too, currently in the Sets section.

I am trying to spread the word of my work further than ever, working on my Facebook Page and also posting my work on deviantArt, where I'd had an account for some time, but never thought to post my jewelry until recently.

So I work, and keep plugging away, and with luck, manage to do better, not just for myself, but for those who honor those who fight cancer, past, present and future.

Sales, Prom, and Geeking Out

I finally landed a couple of sales, thanks to an Etsyan who asked me to custom design a two-fingered hand-flower/Slave-bracelet.

It was a lot of fun to design this piece, as well as the 3 others I did, one of which I got to redo for my neice's Prom:

Her theme was green butterflies. I also did a necklace, and earrings for her. The earrings stem from a design I have up now in two colors (Cascading Swarovski Butterflies in Aquamarine and Cascading Swarovski Butterflies in Clear). I used two different shades of green for them, though, drawing a bit more attention to them:

While Beth was doing this photoshoot for me, I asked her to model some other things for me. The album can be found on my Facebook Fan Page, here.

Also looking at my page, two additional sales went up. A Mother's Day order of two sets, both of which I am extremely proud of; I thought out of the box in accordance to the style I was asked for. I heard after that both sets were much appreciated by the two Mothers they were given to.

And yes, I mentioned Geekery.

I have made phone charm tag things. Lots of them. In World of Warcraft colors.

... Let me explain.

One day I looked at my Priest shirt and thought I had some jewelry to go with it... I did. My Ocean Blue bracelet. After a few minutes of admiring the way it almost matched, I thought "waitasec...." And thought about doing jewelry to match the shirts' colors, or at least complimenting them.

I went to over to Jinx and looked up the shirts for each class, and then got crystals about the same colors. While I waited for that crystal to arrive, I made a few "Spec" (or Specialization) arrangements in Fire, Frost, Shadow, Nature, and Poison. I put Frost, Shadow, and Nature up on my Etsy.. though they haven't gotten too much attention. Once the crystal for the rest arrived, I made all of the classes (Warrior, Priest, Shaman, Druid, Death Knight, Warlock, Rogue, Mage, Paladin, and Hunter). Not all of the colors exactly match the shirts, but are close. On each of the tags, I used the four primary colors on the symbol of the class. It made a few of them kind of awkward, like Warrior, which doesn't have many colors to choose from.

I am now looking over the banners for each city, so I can customize tags further - I can now break down the tags, which each has three crystal components, into Faction/Race (by city banner), Class, specialization.

I also was challenged to do class/specialization bracelets, which I can also do now. The Demonology Warlock bracelet came out really well. (For the record, my warlock is destruction ;)

Since I figured making jewelry and geekery tend to go well together, I started this line... We shall see how it does. Right now, I can do phone tags, bracelets, and wine glass charms/bottle charms (what LAN party is without its bottle charms for the raid beer?)

To go back a bit, one of the orders I did for Mother's Day was done in Opal crystal and Freshwater Pearls. Looking at the pieces I did for that order, they would look quite at home on any bride. And yes, Beth showed those off for me, daring the sunlight in her eyes:

For the Mother's Day order, I tarnished the silver as requested, but took this photo before I did so. I think that this set would look wonderful on a bride, and I'm seriously pondering remaking it to offer up as a bridal set; and seeing about matching designs in colors instead of the pearls.

We shall see how this goes!

Ta for now.