Etsy Editor's Picks Best of Spring Under $30 ~

Parsley, Sage, Rosemary & Thyme is an Editor's Pick on Etsy!

                                                                    EDITORS’ PICKS

Best of spring: Under $30

A breath of fresh air

Fresh For Home Section

It's very exciting!

Click here to see this garden marker in the shop ~

Happy Easter ~

New Logo ~ Melancholy Monday

Have you heard? Etsy is launching a whole new look on April 5th, 2016

The new look applies to all of the shops and is touted as being more mobile friendly for shoppers. At this point they aren't preserving a desktop or laptop version. Which seems odd for a site that size.

The design feels like a blog or stand alone website in that it's vertical, scrolls down without pages (think Pinterest).

The new design gives shop owners more real estate for individual shop branding.

Back to the vertical. My old banner/logo, which was horizontal in nature, wasn't cutting it in the new & larger format. I made some attempts, but quickly decided this was the kick in the butt I needed to create a new logo. My Taxes aren't done, the house is a mess, the pasture & garden need tending and I'm making a new logo! 

Thanks Etsy 0_o

So there it is and I'm glad it's done. I like that it looks fabulous in the new format but will also be great on tags & biz cards.

For reference, here's the old one below.

As you can see, I kept the font & anvil. The bees have a very special meaning, but 3 was too busy, so I used one bee to symbolize my bees. I have been an equestrian since my first pony at age 2. The horseshoe fits because of who I am, but also represents the welded items we make using horseshoes. I think it's a meaningful addition.

Feeling a bit melancholy, but moving forward <3

xoxo

Moonshine Vintage Silverware Assemblage Necklace

Oh how I struggled with this. Originally I made the moonshine silverware knife handle to be a liquor bottle tag or charm. 

And like so many things I create, I got so far with the idea and then set the unfinished focal piece aside, waiting for it to reveal what it was really meant to be.

It didn't want to be in some dark bar, it wanted to be seen in the sunshine and under the moon & stars.

Moonshine $115.00

Happy moonshine Monday to you~

Measure Up ~ Upcycled Assemblage Earrings for Carpenters, Contractors, Remodelista's & DIY Queens

Yesterday I was working on a custom order and staring back at me from my workbench was this piece of broken tape measure. 

It had been sitting there a long time, a couple of years I'd say, patiently waiting... So in the middle of the custom order it said "marry me to that piece of tin shed, earrings would do". 

Seriously, I stopped what I was doing and set to work on this marriage!

"Measure Up"

Available on Etsy $36.00

I had the sense to grab my camera because heck, how often does a broken tape ask for marriage to a broken shed? 

The white tin is the destroyed shed I also use to harvest my LOVE letters. The white is part of the shed trim. The large red bead is coral that I have had for many years and the ear wires are oxidized sterling. I felt the dangles made enough of a statement and a simple wire would show them to the best advantage.  

Shout out YAY for Milwaukee Tin Snips!

I had a lot of fun photographing these too ~

Have a great weekend!

Road Trip Series Assemblage Necklaces #3

Road Trip

3rd in the series

Flat Tyre 

found object, vintage toy car, rosary style, mille flore, skull, turquoise, glass, ceramic, shell & copper assemblage necklace by Anvil Designs / Barn Swallow Studio

May only your jewelry get a flat tire ~

Road Trip Series Assemblage Necklaces #2

Here we have the second vintage toy car in the Road Trip series.

The Road Trip necklaces are available in Anvil Designs Etsy shop and on anvildesigns.com  

Barn Swallow Studio is a little shed on my property where the swallows build their nests in the eves. One day it may be a proper artists studio and retreat, heck it may even become it's own shop. For now I use it for my vintage assemblage pieces.

2nd in the series

*Highway Star*

Assemblage necklace using a vintage diecast "TOOTSIETOY" (as found) as the focal piece. 
Also features beads of Freshwater Pearl, Lampwork, Swarovski Crystal, Crystal & Glass. 
Handmade findings and vintage rosary sections.
Car is marked TOOTSIETOY - Chicago USA - 2
Car is 2 1/2" long - Total necklace length is 26"
One of a kind~

Available on Etsy

Full Shot

Clasp Detail

$95.00 on Etsy

I love it, I need it, I bleed it ~

A Few New Fall / Halloween / Thanksgiving Items

Available now in the Anvil Designs shop~

Halloween Set

~

Harvest ~ Thanksgiving Set

Fall is upon us, happy harvest!

Inspiring Client Follow Up Post

As a follow up to this post Inspiring Client~ 
I wanted to share a couple of shots of all four pieces I did for my most awesome client JR. The original post shows the first piece a created for him as a memorial to his beloved Grandmother who had recently passed away. Her name, Rosemary :)

I was in such a hurry to get them off to him I didn't realize I hadn't taken the best shots possible and I was working with a brand new camera to boot. So apologies for the photo quality!

Happy gardening~

The name "rosemary" derives from the Latin for "dew" (ros) and "sea" (marinus), or "dew of the sea".

Using Every Little Scrap~

I love to use every piece I can when working with the vintage silverware. Sometimes you make a mistake when stamping or bending and end up with odd pieces. I have been or will be turning these odd pieces into beads, buttons, guitar picks, toggles and anything else I can think of so nothing goes to waste.

To that end here are 2 new listings of items I have made using every little scrap~

I Pick You (sold)

This pick was hand cut from a 1930's spoon bowl I flattened. It is silver-plate over brass & it does show some wear from it's previous life as a spoon. I have filed the edges so smooth it's like butter. I drilled a small hole off center so it could be used as a charm if you don't want to use it to play.

 It's truly one of a kind ( OOAK ) if you like food and music and want a pick with an 80 + year old vibe rather than some mass produced blank from overseas, look no further. This is a no waste, upcycled product.

I Pick You had only been listed for a few days with 2 views when it sold!
I consider that real success! I already had another one I was working on and decided to show a before and after. 

Next time I'll have to do some progress shots as well~

Music Is Life

This pick was hand cut from a 1916 era spoon bowl I flattened. Holmes and Edwards Silver Inlaid Pat 04 ~ Jamestown Pattern circa 1916. I tried purposely to leave as much of the original patina on this one as possible. The back side has a lot, the front lost a lot! The soul of this pick is almost 100 years old~

I almost always listen to music when I'm creating whether it's my art or cooking. Stevie Ray Vaughan is one of my favorites to cook with and create by.

Here is a rare video of SRV

 

10% Off Coupon for Blog Readers~

In celebration of 1 month of blogging I'm offering a coupon for 10% off any purchase over $10.00 ~ This coupon is good for one week and expires on July 8th!

Shop Anvil Designs

Please use coupon code BLOG1 when checking out! 

Thank you & enjoy~

Faerie Folks are in Old Oaks~

I was researching poems, rhymes, songs and sayings for rosemary for a client and as we are prone to do while following links on the interweb I stumbled across some fun rhymes that had nothing to do with rosemary but were so good I had to use them~

Fairy garden markers have always been popular in my shop and now I have added a new one.

Faerie Folks Garden Marker on Etsy

It is said this old rhyme originated in the New Forest, southern England and goes “Turn your cloaks, for fairy folks are in old oaks!”  it was thought by turning your cloak or coat inside out you could ward off the chances of a faerie encounter~ (I don't think I'd want to avoid that...)

The oaks are considered the very symbol of longevity and fertility, generation and life. It was common to carry an acorn in your pocket for luck~

Rock & roll gardeners this one's for you! Available now~

Faeries Wear Boots

Here's another in the shop now:

Fairy Garden Marker on Etsy

And a few others we've done that are in new homes~

Magic~

Inspiring Client~

I have this client who just flat out inspires me. He causes me to challenge myself which I love!

He sent a request earlier in the week and my sticking to being on a break this week (see post below) I let it ride until I found the desire to go for it.

He has commissioned 4 custom pieces, below is the first, made yesterday. I'm looking forward to creating the next 3. Thank you JR!

Taking a Break

I have become a “goal setter” since I quit my day job. I even post in those pesky “what are you goals this month” threads in the Etsy forums. I feel like I’m throwing it out to the universe and I don’t want to let the universe down of course! Really, it’s more of a personal shaming especially when those equally pesky month end “how’d you do with your goals this month” threads come back to haunt me.

In May I set some pretty big goals for myself. It was my birth month so I figured the universe might reward me with some gifts! I met or exceeded all but 2 of my goals and even got some done that were going to go on the June list. I’m not going to bore you with the met goals; instead, may I introduce the un-met:

1. Get 75 items listed in the Anvil Designs shop. 
2. Curate a treasury that makes it to the front page. This is on my list every month…

On May 31^st I had 58 items. I’m not complaining I sold about the same amount of items in May as I did in Feb., March & April combined. I still ended the month with 10 more listings than the prior month so I’m carrying this one over. I might make it; I have 63 items listed as of this writing.

I have an obsession regarding curating a treasury that makes it to the front page. What can I say? I think it may be a whole post one of these days. At any rate I cant complain about this one either as I hardly made any treasuries in May due to working on realistic goals.

All that said back to the title of this post. I decided to give myself a bit of a break this week as far as the shop is concerned. My only goal is to do only things I feel like doing during my normal working hours. Yesterday I felt like working in my garden and spent about 3 hours doing so until it got too hot. But oddly when I had to take cover from the sun I went to my work bench and pounded out these 2 garden markers. Isn't it nice when nature inspires even when we are taking a break? 

Brand new design inspired by my morning yard work.

Not a new design but a new font for this design.

Now I'm off to collect seeds from my lettuce plants I let go to seed! 

Happy gardening~

My Etsy History Part 3

I’m going to do a little fast forward here to wrap up the B & A shop days or this is going to turn into a 10 part series! 

At some point, a new customer wanted to take a premade $5.00 banner they had purchased and customize it into the $25.00 range but only wanted to pay the $5.00 and threatened bad feedback if I didn’t. I shut the banner shop. I never did banners for the money as I was probably making $2.50 an hour, but at the time of that incident it was my only creative outlet. It was a sad day.

It had been a good run though. 99.9% of my clients were some of the nicest, most creative, and funny and kind and generous people I have ever come across.  I want to give them all a HUGE public THANK YOU! You know who you are, your patronage and friendship is priceless to me ♥

Anvil Designs was conceived in December, 2009.

I was hosting a “stitch & bitch” for a group who had been stitch’n & bitch’n for a couple of years off and on. There were five of us that evening and we were all working on Christmas gifts. A friend had given me a dog tag he had made out of a washer that he stamped to personalize for my dog. I wanted to make one for a new dog I had as well as doing some for gifts. A couple of the gals loved the idea and one of them said her dad had some stamps so off she went to get them! Nothing we tried to make that night turned out worthy of gift giving but a seed was planted. 

In January, 2010 I/we opened Anvil Designs on Etsy, I had the support of 2 partners. My mojo was back!

The 3 bees in the banner represent the 3 partners. The rest is self explanatory. We had all read and were inspired by Sue Monk Kid's book The Secret Life of Bees. 
A few of our favorite quotes are: 

“After you get stung, you can't get unstung

no matter how much you whine about it.” 

"She liked to tell everybody that women made the best beekeepers, 'cause they have a special ability built into them to love creatures that sting. It comes from years of loving children and husbands.” 

“August: You know, somethings don't matter that much...like the color of a house...But lifting a person's heart now that matters. The whole problem with people"

Lily: They don't know what matters and what doesn't...

August:...They know what matters, but they don't choose it...The hardest thing on earth is to choose what matters.”

“The world will give you that once in awhile, a brief timeout; the boxing bell rings and you go to your corner, where somebody dabs mercy on your beat-up life.”

Things went very well for us at first. This shop took off like my others never had! There was a strong demand for this type of product. We got two nice wholesale accounts and conducted very successful trunk shows.

However, like this quote from TSLoB “There is nothing perfect...only life.” life went on and Anvil is down to just me now. My partners are like a sister and a daughter. The daughter has moved out of state and is getting married this year! I am so happy for her. She may even open her own Etsy shop once the newlyweds are settled. The sister and I will be doing some shows this summer. I'll put a notification in the shop. 
My day job shut the shop down for a while and the momentum was lost. The good news is I "quit my day job" and I'm here to create for you full time! I'm finally following my dream to make a living doing what I love and my mojo / soul is thankful everyday.

My Etsy History Part 2

The banner shop took off and I felt like my other shops were now being somewhat neglected. Thank goodness for the forums! I found that this was not unusual at all when you had multiple shops and there was a lot of info on how others juggle it all.

In the banner shop I sold a lot of premade banners but at this point with so much competition I had to offer more custom work and people also wanted matching business cards, blog templates etc. I was not trained in graphic design, I played with images and editing programs because it was fun.

I now have 3 shops and a very demanding “day job” that totally sucks the life out of me.

That is something that had been building. As my day job became more demanding, my creative edge became duller. I stopped creating everything except banners as I still got some joy from doing that. I wasn't listing many new items in the other 2 shops as I didn't seem to have the time (or desire) to do the photo shoots, editing and descriptions. Not to mention I was on dial up.

Etsy was changing during this time as well. New owners and management, new search etc. Now there was a new learning curve for tagging and SEO. Previously all we did to stay on top was renew. Now I had to research and play around with tags, titles and descriptions to find what worked. I had no extra time in my day for this.

I remembered being so happy with 3 shops that were so diverse and realized it was just that, a memory.

In fairness, I had moved to a new place not long before opening my first shop and the man I’d been with for 27 years told me he wanted a divorce not long after we had moved. All alone, a day job that was killing me, 3 acres in a remote location (14 miles to town), 3 dogs, 5 horses, a cat and some chickens… It took half a day on Saturday just to mow the property. I was drowning. I put the CJ shop and the boho shop in vacation mode, stopped doing custom work in the banner shop except for return customers and tried to figure out what I really wanted to do going forward. My mojo was gone and without it I didn’t even know who I was.

Part 3 tomorrow~

My Etsy History Part 1

I opened my first Etsy shop, Cowgirl Junk in the summer of 2006.

I’ll be honest, I was mad about changes going on at Ebay where I had been selling for 10 years. I thought, don’t keep all your eggs in one basket girl! Cowgirl Junk was mostly vintage items with a little handmade jewelry. Being a DIY kinda gal I made my own banner for that shop. I had a lot of compliments on it and people asking me how I made it, could I make one for them etc. I gifted some and took a few special orders. It just kept growing! I began listing some and as I felt so many people didn’t have a nice banner or the skills to make one I listed PIF banners and just asked that the person purchasing Pay It Forward to someone else, in some way.

One day I looked at my shop and didn’t like how fragmented it looked. Vintage, banners and my handmade, it was a mess. So I opened a second shop, Bohemian Flea Market! I sent my banners and handmade items there and listed some destash that I felt didn’t work in the CJ shop.

The banners were taking off! 
I enjoyed the creativity of it and not having to go to the post office was a plus as well. Soon the Boho shop was a mess and another new shop was born, Banners Avatars.

I digress for a moment, how awesome is that name? I no longer make banners but how many people who do would love to buy that shop & name from me? We should be able to sell shops we no longer want I think. Of course there would have to be some disclosure, maybe mark the existing feedback with “former owner” or something…

To be continued in part 2 tomorrow.

                         

The above is what happens when you make banners!