I'm having a sale!

Wow, it feels like I've barely been home at all this week! So to make up for the lack of new jewelry listings, and to celebrate the three day weekend, I'm having a sale! Use coupon code DISCOUNTME to get 20% off your entire purchase at Handmade Jewelry by Erthe Fae Designs. The beautiful beaded anklet shown above is just one of the over 90 items currently in stock right now!

I hope everyone has a fun weekend, whatever they do. I'm looking forward to being home, as my next three weekends in a row will be spent up in Phoenix for dance events!

New jewlery next week, promise!

You may have noticed that it's been approximately forever since I posted any new jewelry. I've been up to my eyeballs in things, ranging from custom orders to learning algebra to working on a solo for belly dance class, and as such my jewelry productivity has really taken a nosedive. Well, no more! I've got a house full of beads and I want to create with them! Also, I want to sell some jewelry because I like having spending cash to buy other peoples' handmade creations.

So enjoy your weekend and come back on Monday to see what I've got up my sleeves!

...and Sunday's just along for the ride

If you would like to do some holiday shopping, or maybe buy yourself a present to reward yourself for the massive amounts of housework surrounding Thanksgiving, you'll be pleased to know that you can use the code discountme to get 20% off of everything in my shop Handmade Jewelry by Erthe Fae Designs this weekend. Sale ends 11:59pm MST Monday Nov 29th.

This sale runs all weekend so I can hit all of the big sales days. First, there was Black Friday, the day when retailers supposedly made most of their money. Then someone decided that even though many on-line business ran Black Friday sales, they needed their own imaginary big sales day... Cyber Monday, when everyone goes back to the office and shops on-line on company time. This year, there's a big push for Small Business Saturday as well, with some credit card company sponsoring free Facebook ads for small businesses.

And then there's Sunday. Poor, lonely Sunday, just waiting to be acknowledged as the last day of Thanksgiving weekend. Why doesn't Sunday have its own special label? Is it because of the religious importance of Sunday? Or has no one gotten around to deciding what it should be? Maybe Thrift Store Sunday? OOH! Second-Hand Sunday! There we go. Let's all spend the Sunday after Thanksgiving hitting up the thrift stores, yard sales and resale boutiques in search of slightly-used treasures and vintage goodies.

By the way, the necklace above is new! It's called The Traveler's Key and it is part of my budget-friendly steampunk jewelry line.

Special Weekend Etsy Update

It's been a busy, rather emotional week, so I unfortunately did not list any new items on Etsy, but I do have a few Etsy related things that I'd like to share with you.

First, my SEO efforts on items like the above-pictured Beaded Pomegranate Faerie Necklace (aka, The Hungriest Pixie Ever) are starting to pay off. I did a little Googling last night and was pleased to find that Handmade Jewelry by Erthe Fae Designs is the #1 Google result for handmade fantasy jewelry! My visits are still low, but at least I know that it's getting easier and easier for people to find my shop. I even found a pair of my Steampunk Key Earrings on a search for handmade steampunk jewelry.

Then today, when I logged into my shop to do more SEO work (it never ends!), I found that Etsy has given me the capability to offer coupons! I'd like to be able to use this to do some great holiday sales, but if you'd like to get a head start on the other shoppers and help me test the system, you can use the code "yaycoupon" to get 10% off your order!

In FAETeam news, our latest Gift Guide is Decorate for the Holidays with FAETeam. Although the main focus is ornaments, there's also a tree topper, a few holiday-themed prints, some greeting cards, and a few decorations well-suited for your mantle, centerpiece, or desk to lend a little festive cheer.

I also curated a treasury just for fun. Green and Magical is pretty self-explanatory, I think.

This week's cool find is VooDooBunny. I saw her featured on another blog and her shop has several items that I might have to buy as holiday gifts!

Kitteh in a box!

It's a special Sunday blog post! Just wanted to share this picture of my big fluff-monster Topher squeezing himself into a shoebox. All boxes that come into this house immediately belong to the cat, whether or not he actually fits in them.

Dance Recap

I may go back and edit this post later to add a pic or two, but the pics from the workshops haven't been posted yet.

My dance weekend in Tempe was both invigorating and exhausting at the same time. There's nothing quite like a great show and 6 hours of workshops to really inspire a dancer, but by the same token there's nothing like excitement-fueled insomnia and 6 hours of workshops to wear a dancer out!

After my usual two hours of tribal class with Anaya Tribal, I went home with my awesome friend and classmate Meghan, who has generously offered up her sofa as my home-away-from-home for belly dance weekends (I say generous because I'm going to be up there for 3 weekends out of 5!). We had fun times talking about dance, costumes, jewelry, and all the things that make tribal dancers happy.

Friday was shopping with Meghan and Jen. We went to Beads Galore, where I picked up some great tribal beads. I guess I could have photographed those and used them on this post! We also went clothes shopping, where I picked up a couple of scarves, because being a dancer makes you a scarf addict. It's true.

Friday night was the super cool and amazing show! Many of Plaza de Anaya's teachers and the workshop instructors took to the stage, each doing what they do best. There was Egyptian style belly dance, ATS, ITS, Tribal Fusion, Bollywood, and fire-spinning-without-the-fire. I even got to see Helena Vlahos, who you may be familiar with even if you're not a dancer -- she holds the world record for flipping coins on her belly, and can do crazy things like line up a row of quarters on her abs and flip every other one. But for this show, she focused on good old fashioned belly dance.

And Saturday was workshops! Dance Therapeutics with Deb Rubin, focusing on the upper body, gave us some great yoga and stretches for warming up and taking good care of the spine and shoulder girdle. It reminded me how badly I really need to get back into yoga on a regular basis. Supah Saucy Spins and Kicks with Zafira featured Spanish-inspired choreography and lots of fun belly dance roleplay exercises, including a belly dance gang fight. Ooey-Gooey, Slow and Slinky with Jill Parker wasn't nearly as slow as I expected, but Jill taught us some great traveling moves inspired by vintage belly dance, two fun combos, and gave us some time to just play with gliding around the room with whatever traveling steps we wanted and then dropping into the combos.

Because I'm really used to workshops that cram too much info into my head, causing me to forget all the combos, I loved that Zafira and Jill both gave us the chance to take what we had physically learned and apply it creatively, and explore our personalities as dancers. All of the teachers and their assistants did a great job, and I'd happily take workshops with any of them again.

Now it's back to normal life as we know it... of course, there's a three hour Turkish Romany dance workshop I'm considering this weekend!

Sneaky Sunday

I don't normally post on weekends, since I'm usually pretty busy -- and definitely don't expect any more weekend posts from me for the rest of the month, as I have major plans almost every weekend. But! I'm having a quiet Sunday afternoon, so I thought I'd sneak in here and share a picture of Teal 'n' Green, my version of the Lincoln Street bracelet from Rachel Nelson-Smith's Seed Bead Fusion book.

More pictures tomorrow!

Back from an amazing weekend!

I am back from an incredible weekend up in Tempe! On Saturday and Sunday I spent 4 hours a day in class with Fat Chance Belly Dance, the founders of American Tribal Style Belly Dance! It pretty much rocked my world. I learned SO much and spent so much time dancing, with my friends and various people I know from the dance community and people who were new to me, but all of them were great.

There was also a performance on Saturday, with Fat Chance and a lot of great tribal troupes from the Phoenix area. I'm not sure if there was a single group performing where I hadn't either taken a class alongside or from at least one of the dancers, so it was a lot of fun to see them all dressed up and performing, and to cheer them all along.

Now I am back home and my head is swimming with inspiration to dance better, and harder, and more often, and to come up with more costumes and jewelry to go with.

Recital Number Two

So, the recital this weekend was fun but crazy. The drum solo performance was canceled last-minute, so I only danced with two classes, which was actually better for me in a way because it meant one less costume change. We had several people just not show up, which threw off our formations, and there was some confusion on exactly what we were doing for zill class... but in the end, it all more or less came together, and if any mistakes were made, well, we all made the same mistake, so only we know that it wasn't supposed to be that way :)

Even though there was a bit of stress involved, I found myself feeling really refreshed as I drove home to Tucson. There's something about spending the entire weekend with my dancing friends and classmates that just makes me happy. I get a real sense of community, especially as we all help each other get ready and congratulate each other on a job well-done (and convince each other that the audience didn't notice that little misstep).

Video is forthcoming. My parents loaned us their nice camcorder, which should have taken some nice footage, it just needs to be transferred to the computer and such.

Gone for the weekend

I'll be up in Phoenix all weekend, for a friend's birthday party and the Plaza de Anaya Spring Student recital. I am not taking my laptop with me because I want to focus on friends and dancing. I will also be gone all of next weekend, so I should probably just give up on weekend blogging, since I'm always gone or busy.

Today was exciting because we bought a new car, a 2010 VW Jetta TDI. I would love to gush about it, but I need to finish packing for my weekend away, so gushing will be postponed until next week.

Experimentation!

I have a bra that I hate, but because I hate to throw away perfectly good bras (darn things aren't cheap), I decided maybe I could modify it enough to turn it into a steampunk dance bra.

The first step, though, would have to be changing the color. It's that hideous peachy fleshy beige-y tone that only a bra could be. There's no pretending it's any sort of outerwear when it's that color. My first thought was to tea-dye it, and a quick Google search revealed that tea-dyeing is so easy that I really had no excuse not to try it right away. So I brewed up some cheap tea, snipped off part of the bra, and went on my merry way.

Of course, this bra isn't just hideous, it's also synthetic. The tea dyed it, but only to a slightly darker, still fleshy tone. Drat.

I'm now examining my options... I could try dying it with coffee, which supposedly makes a deeper brown. I could try making some Kool-Aid dye (Grape + Orange = brown sludge, right?). I could apparently use Lumiere paints (I found directions for using them to paint/dye bathing suits). I could use Rit dye. I could cover it with more attractive cloth. Or I could say that this is all a lot of work for a bra I don't really like anyway, and go down to Target to buy a white cotton bra that would take better to tea-dyeing.

And that is the story of what I did this weekend. I played with my bra. What did you do?

A Bust

The bazaar that I was supposed to do today was such a bust that I didn't even do it. The Etsy shop is open again, and there's still tons of jewelry there to tempt you. Go forth and shop!

That said, I can't believe the long weekend is practically over. I have a lot to do this coming week, including taking the car to the shop for routine maintenance, and taking Daisy to the vet to get her stitches out. Now that I'm driving, I get to run all of these exciting errands while Chris stays home and works.

I also plan to bead, because I wasted too much time this week preparing for the bazaar-that-wasn't.

Just what we needed

Today was a much-needed quiet, relaxing day for Chris and I. He's been working 7 days a week lately, putting in much more than eight hours on most of those days. It's especially hard on him, and a little hard on me, because hey, I married the guy because I like to spend time with him. I feel lonely when he's working all the time. It was nice to have the chance to be lazy, to spend an hour just sitting on the couch giving our puppies some love.

The rest of the weekend will be really busy, so I'm glad we had this chance to be with each other, without any major obligations or tasks hanging over our heads.

You know, other than the mountain of Thanksgiving dishes I'm trying to ignore...

What to post on a Sunday

I often find that I don't have a lot to blog about on Sundays. I usually spend the day running errands and hanging out with Chris, not really doing anything that anyone would be interested in. And it seems like no one really reads on Sunday anyways, because I rarely get blog comments over the weekend. Not like I can blame you guys, I usually just catch up on my blog-reading on Mondays, too.

I've considered not blogging at all on Sundays, but that would throw off my goal to blog every day. As it is, right now I'm thinking of posting beading book reviews every Sunday -- but that would require me to get 52 new beading books a year, and they just don't publish that many.

Maybe I'll do a Finds post, like my old Fashionable Fridays series, but on a smaller scale.

Is there anything you'd like to see become a regular feature here?

Autumn is Back

There's a chill in the air today! Looks like it may really be Autumn this time. As much as I do enjoy warm weather, it's unnatural for it to be warm this late in the year, so I guess I need to resign myself to lower temperatures.

My Dad came over today and winterized the cooler and set the furnace up for us, so I don't have to worry about freezing. We needed to ask for his help, as I'm afraid of heights and there's no way Chris was going up on the roof with one bad hand. It's nice to have family close enough to help.

The cool weather put me in an Autumn-y mood, so I put together a tasty dinner of ahi tuna, grain medley with dried berries, and squash tossed in a mixture of butter, maple syrup, and chai spices. Yum! We washed it all down with hot spiced cider. Hot drinks are the best thing about cold weather.

Just passing by...

This is one of those cheezy "I'm posting just so I can say I posted" posts, as cooking dinner took longer than I expected and now it's almost time for gaming.

Not too much to post about anyway, as I spent most of the day running errands and playing video games. I did pick up the latest issue of Beadwork, but I haven't had time to read it yet.

Aww man

I was really excited for Sunday, because I was going to take a 4-hour workshop called "Fire For Bellydancers." It was going to cover fire fans and palm torches. What could be more awesome than adding fire props to my dancing?* Unfortunately, I got an e-mail this morning saying that the class was canceled due to lack of interest. Lack of interest? Seriously Tucson, what is wrong with you? How could there not be enough interest in Fire For Bellydancers.

Apparently they're going to try again in January. I may have to find random people and convince them to sign up for the class.

Anyway, today I went back to the gym for the first time since Monday, and I did a really hard workout. I even learned some new things. Hopefully I won't be too sore tomorrow, since I want to go to the Saturday afternoon workout.

*Actually getting good at the moves I already know, which is what I'll do instead.

A good day

Today was a fun day. Chris and I went to the gym, where he managed the workout despite only having one usable arm. This impressed quite a few people there. I just hope that he didn't over-do it with his right arm. We'll see how he feels tomorrow!

Then after we cleaned up, he dropped me off at Margaret Zinser's open house. You may already know that Margaret is one of my favorite lampworkers, which makes it even more awesome that she lives just 5 minutes from my house, and has open houses a couple of times a year. This time she also had the lovely and talented Anne Mitchell there displaying her beautiful fine silver jewelry. I spent an enjoyable couple of hours chatting with them and the other bead and jewelry people who came in and out of the house while I was there. And of course I bought a few pretty things, which I'll take pictures of tomorrow.

Chris left his usual Saturday game long enough to pick me up, say Hi to Anne and Margaret and tell his broken thumb story, then he took me for a quick deli dinner, ooohed and aaahed over my goodies, and dropped me off here at home, where my puppies were happy to have me home.

Now I'm going to kick back with a bead magazine and a mug of tea, and maybe get my zillage on in a bit.

Fish-related disaster

Well, not really, but it's a fun title for a blog post. We were supposed to have fish for dinner tonight. The instructions said to baste it with butter and broil it. But the butter got so hot that it burned holes through the foil and filled the house with smoke after only 5 minutes of broiling. We decided that aluminum-flavored fish was not the ideal meal, so we went out for burritos instead.

And that's really the most exciting thing that happened all weekend. We gamed a bit, I got a lot of work done on my necklace from Beki Haley's class at the bead retreat, and the corgis were cute as ever. Also, I finished reading the last book in a trilogy I've really been enjoying. Good times, just not much to blog about.

Sunday Blogginess

I didn't do much worth blogging about today, so here's a picture of Maggie, captured mid-bark. It was taken last month not long after her dental cleaning -- hence the bald patch on her leg where they shaved her for the IV! Those are all grown back in now.

Remember! Tomorrow, I'll post a new picture of Cthulhu!