Hello everyone! Happy summer solstice day! Today is the first day of summer, and the start of the days becoming shorter and shorter. That means only one thing... Fall is close behind. I can hear everyone screaming 'Noooooo!!!!' Don't despair! :)
So I have to say that my first ever custom job to create a monster was, shall we say, interesting! The girl, Ivy, who drew the monster sure did give me a challenge. She drew her monster with 4 legs, 3 out of the 4 were all different colours (all different from each other mind you). The process went well, but the price I charged was too low. For the amount of time it took me, I could have perhaps charged for $30, but the woman only wanted to pay $20 so I did it anyway. Besides, it never hurts to do a job for less once in a while. I mean, I'm not SO busy that I couldn't do this for this 8 year old girl, right??
To recap, here is the sketch that she drew me:
By looking at this photo (and confirming the main colour with Ivy) the main body was pink, one leg was purple, then pink, then brown then green. The ears were white with pink insides and then green hair. Looks simple enough, but really, it wasn't. :) But do not despair, I did do a good job!!!!
See!? I'd say that I did a pretty good job! It certainly took a lot longer than I hoped, but one must live and learn from their mistakes. When I get more custom work in the near future, I will know next time how to price accordingly. I guess after having such a successful day at the craft fair, I wanted to please this woman, and it's always nice to do custom work.
In other news the post office is still in lockout. I haven't renewed anything in my Etsy shop. I don't see the point right now since I don't think anyone would be willing to pay $20 for shipping with FedEx, for example. This gives me time to do more important work. :)
Once my French grammar class is done (June 28th), I'll be able to relax and stop doing homework (hooray!) and I can concentrate on my more important work, my monsters and applying for the entrepreneurship program with the Québec government. Oh yes, that reminds me. I'm officially a little business now! No, I haven't registered anything yet... In fact I'm not sure of the QC rules as to whether my company name needs to be bilingual or not. I'm not even sure how I would translate "Curious Little Bird" into French. The best translation is "
Curieux petit oiseau" which I suppose works. :) It's just a few letters more than the English version.
Speaking of birds, has anyone checked out Le Nichoir and their artist submissions to help birds get rehabilitated and released back into the wild?? It's open to all artists all over the world, in any country! Here's the URL again in case you didn't write it down last time: http://www.lenichoir.org/wildcard/
Alright well hopefully I can make a ton of monsters in the next month. There's another craft fair in July, on the 30th, but there's also one in September?? and I believe in December. I heard from other vendors that the one in December can bring about some decent coin, since everyone's buying gifts. I'd like to be able to work up a nice little gang on minions to sell around that time. I find with my big project and monsters, I can only manage to do one monster a day. I will need to find a more efficient way to make them. Perhaps I should mass produce one kind of body, and then just change the face. I know that would help speed things up I think. I haven't yet decided on what body style I want. It's hard to decide. Comments on that would be helpful if you have any. :)
Oh I have other news!! Tiphanie Verhoye who writes the blog
Mademoiselle Maman and
Au cerisier du mesnil emailed me on Monday morning, and asked me if she could write an article all about me, what I do, and my monsters she saw on Etsy. I'm so excited!! I haven't met with her yet, just waiting until my crazy schedule calms down a bit. Her and I will be meeting in July and as soon as she emails me the link I will for sure post it here! I haven't even told my mother yet, but I bet she'll be impressed to hear about this! She's been amazed so far of my success of my monsters. Quite frankly, in the last 3 months (wow, has it been 3 months already??) I think I've done quite well for myself. I've worked my butt off! I started my Facebook fan page for my monsters
Curious Little Bird Facebook page and in a few months I've managed to get over 100 fans!!! I'm also trying to promote myself through
Twitter but that's a bit more difficult to figure out, and I've yet to figure out how to use lists etc. In case some of you aren't aware, social marketing through Facebook and Twitter etc. takes a lot of time! I mean, I spent hours every day making sure it all worked. And when I would get comments, I would make it my first priority to respond to everyone. The thing about Facebook one must remember is that it's like a conversation... if you ignore the other person, they might just unlike your page and bad-mouth you. Who knows?? It's imperative to have fabulous customer service no matter where you are, even if you are hiding behind a computer. I think since the postal lockout on June 15th, I've sort of taken it easy with the online thing. I obviously haven't been posting as much. I'm not really creating monsters right now, so I have to make sure that everyone knows I'm still alive.
Don't worry if I don't write for a while. I'm still here! I will try to continue posting a few times a week. :) I'm sure I can find something to write about! haha
Well have a good evening and I wish everyone had a great time reading tonight's blog!
