Weiswomen Creations

So, um, yeah...I know how bad this looks. It was over a year ago that I returned from a blogging hiatus and now I'm back in the same boat. I have no real excuses...lots of stories and pretty pictures and shiny objects but no real excuses. In a fit of productivity this weekend I resumed tweeting and decided to focus primarily on our Weiswomen Creations shop on Artfire. I also did some major stash-busting in the bead collection and have lots of new earrings (and a few bracelets) to be posted in the coming weeks. In between showing off the new shiny objects I'll attempt to entertain you with some of the highlights of the past year. A few photos to hopefully pique your interest:

That's right, I said sale. Thanks to a cool new feature at ArtFire, we're have a 20% off sale on all of the jewelry in our shop there. Lots of earrings from our Etsy shop have even been temporarily moved there so you can have a wider selection to choose from. The sale ends this Saturday, October 10th and use the code OCTOBER at check-out.

More frequent entries coming soon about my new precious (i.e. MacBook), why weekend with your girlfriends rock, and the dates for this year's holiday shopping open houses.

Well, maybe not famous. But one of Judy's fabulous fall photo cards was featured in the Find of the Day on FoundHandmade! They did a wonderful collection of scarecrows and we're very proud that the photo in this post was included. FoundHandmade looks like a pretty cool site and I'm planning on checking out more of what they have to offer.

It's been busy here at Weiswomen HQ. The other half of Weiswomen Creations (aka, my mom) is headed to Boston as we speak, along with another Weiswoman (aka, my sister). We have a fun-filled weekend planned, including a Duck Tour. In addition to getting ready for their visit (oh, and working at my day job) I've been ramping up different aspects of our business. I already posted about rearranging our Etsy shop but there has been lots more going on:

*Making more jewelry (like the lovely starburst earrings pictured in this post).

*Adding all the new jewelry to our inventory program, photographing it, and listing it.

*Listing our fabulous Fall themed photo cards in all three shops.

*Setting up an ArtFire kiosk on our brand new Facebook Fan Page.

*Ordering a new design for our business cards and labels, by the wonderful Thompson Designs. They are going to have the same awesome design as all of our shop banners.

*Ordering mailing envelopes, jewelry boxes, earrings displays, and gift bags.

There are still lots more new products to come, including our Halloween photo cards. Plus, be on the lookout for the announcement of our first ever sale!

I'm so excited. After a long (reaaaaalllllyyy long) wait, we can finally rearrange our Weiswomen Etsy shop. Every who knows me can attest to the fact that I'm a little (well, a lot) anal retentive. It has always bothered me that our shop looked disorganized - the items are featured in the order they were posted, so items of different colors and types were all mixed in together. Well, today was my lucky day. The new "rearrange your shop" feature went live and I could take action. There are so many possibilities! Do I put all the channel set Swarovski earrings together? Or all the photo cards? Or all the cloisonne?

I decided to start with organizing by color, a preference I've mentioned before. Of course there are dilemmas - like the pretty mixed stone memory wire bracelet in the photo, where does that go? What did I decide? You'll have to visit our shop to find out.

And last but not least, the pet that lives with the other Weiswoman - Buddy Harry. Like Pierre, Buddy was an accidental acquisition. We had dogs growing up, most notably two different dogs named Daisy (and come to think of it, the second Daisy was an accidental acquisition as well, this might be a family thing). This story won't be as long as the other two Weiswomen pet stories (stop applauding!) because I wasn't there for this one. Apparently, my father came home from work one night with Buddy and now he's part of the family. My sister is a major Harry Potter fan so she added "Harry" to his name. He's a Pekingese, a pretty chill dog and as you can see, pretty adorable as well. When my mother started using Photoshop Elements to make photo cards she got the great idea to make Pop-Art style pet portraits. We're going to have her create one for Bunk and you can have one made for your own pet too!

It has been hot in the Boston area lately and because our house is old (and I mean old, like 1800s old) there is no central air conditioning. I work from home and our bedroom and my office is on the third floor. For over a week the thermostat read 90 degrees on the third floor and not much cooler on the second floor, which is where our living room and kitchen are. I know, I've just confused everyone not used to the whole two-family house thing. If I try and explain the layout of our house I'll probably just confuse you more.

So, all of that rambling was just an introduction to the fact that it was too hot to cook for quite a while. I really like baking and now that we have our nice new kitchen I like it even more (someday I'll write about what our kitchen used to look like, including the picture of the carpeted floor and the stove with two knobs). A few weeks ago I got two new baking cookbooks that looked amazing and last night it was finally cool enough to bake in our kitchen without baking ourselves. I started with Baked, from the guys at the bakery of the same name in Brooklyn. I have been drooling over this book since I got it and last night I tried the Pumpkin and Chocolate Chip loaf you see pictured above. I have to admit, I only really started liking pumpkin recently and if you're a skeptic at all, this will make you a major fan. Very easy to make and absolutely delicious. If you want to try an entree, I highly recommend the pumpkin ravioli with Gorgonzola sauce from Cooking Light magazine (recipe at the link). The thought of making a layer cake frightens me for some reason but someday soon I'm going to tackle two of the cakes from Baked: Malted Cake and Sweet & Salty Cake. Bon Appétit!