After My Morning Shower...

aftershowershop was suggested to me by Etsy the other day and I am completely smitten!  I love all of their cute and airy looks, especially in this summer heat.

Such cute little details and easy-to-wear colors and shapes!  The Sweet Thursday Dress is everything I want in a dress.

The Two Tone Part II dress would be a flawless option to throw on before leaving the house for any excuse; grocery shopping? no problem! dinner date? of course!  Maybe finish it off with an array of belts to switch up the look.

The long Waterfall dress is perfect.  I've been looking for a long dress all summer, to no avail.  I only wish I had seen this beautiful outfit earlier!

Its All Coming Back!

There will be a MASSIVE shop update through out the day today.

All of my knitted items are coming back to the shop!

All of my hats, my scarves, mitts, bags, and other et ceteras will be added to the shop and finally available for purchase again :)

Who else is excited?  (Obviously, I am!)

Goals, Ideas and Hopes for 2010

Merry Eve of Christmas Eve to you all! This could potentially be my last post for the year (but who knows, I make no promises) and I wanted to let you know some of my goals, ideas and hopes for the next year concerning this blog and my shop.

In the shop:

• I want to bring more luxury knits, cashmere, silk, angora, etc
• I want to bring more patterns - since the patterns I have in there are doing so well I really want to bring more to the table.
• I want to bring better photos and descriptions

*Your turn: What do you suggest for my shop? Any items or materials in particular? A certain type of pattern you'd like to see? Anything you'd like NOT to change? Please help me out with this :)

For the blog:

• I want to engage my readers a bit more - I know you're out there, my analytics tell me that you read, but you don't comment so I need to figure out a better way to entice comments :)
• I want to interview some other bloggers or shop owners and perhaps do more giveaways (if you're interested, please let me know!)
• I want to know what you want to read - which features did you like that I tested out this year? The Monday Color? Tuesday Learn Something New Day? Friday Feature? Again, please let me know so I can bring you what you want to read :)

I hope you all have a wonderful Holiday Season and that its filled with rest, relaxation, food, family and laughter :)

*and, as always, if you click on the pictures, it will take you to the item listing in the Etsy shop ;)

Tuesday Learn Something New Day - Advertising Ideas

So for my second installment of Tuesday Learn Something New Day I have decided to list a whole bunch of ideas for pimping your shop. Please don't take these as the only suggestions, feel free to get creative and post your creative advertising methods in the comments below. These are merely meant to get you thinking of ways that may help increase traffic to your shop. Some may not work for you, some may work better than anything else you've tried. One thing I've learned is that you simply must try everything at least once to truly see if you have good results from it. So, without further ado, here is the list of suggestions :)

-Post in Etsy Forums

-Engage in Etsy chat rooms

-Project Wonderful advertisements

-Flickr

-Twitter

-Facebook

-Myspace

-Business Cards

-To friends and family

-To waiters/waitresses

-Mail in with the bills

-On bulletin boards

-In restaurants “free meal” bowls

-to random people you think might be interested in your store

-leave them in movie cases when you return them, Netflix, libraries, rental stores, etc

-leave them in library books

-Carry something with you

- if you make bags, carry one

- if you screen print T's, wear one or have your kids, SO or friends wear one

- if you make journals, use one

There are so many different ideas out there and don't ever think that just because something works for "everyone else" that it will definitely work for you as well, or just because something never works for "everyone else" that it won't work for you. Part of finding your niche in the market is finding what advertising brings your target market to your products. Now hop to it and try out some new things!