My Prize Treasury

Oh this was sooo much fun for me.

I got this idea to do a treasury with a secret theme. What is a treasury, you ask?

Well on Etsy there is a section called 'The Treasury" where one can showcase items from the shops of other Etsians. These treasuries only last 2-3 days before they expire and are gone.

Each time a treasury is created it is given a name/title. Usually, there is a general theme for each treasury such as a color, like items, etc...One of the objectives of a treasury is to get people to click on your treasury and THEN to get them to click on all 12 of the items you have featured. When an item is clicked on it takes the viewer to that item/store and you are able to see the full description of the item, selling price, etc...

In order to attract people to look into your treasury, I have found that a catchy title is the key and we are only given 31 characters for the title. So I titled my treasury " Guess the Theme of my Treasury"...inside my subtitle was "An Win a FREE ACEO card from my alter ego 12Midnightoils" (which is my oil painting shop on Etsy)


The rules were simple: the 1st person to post the correct answer in the comment field would win. The theme was a phrase and each item in the treasury represented one word(s) in the phrase.

The comments field below the treasury was where people would submit their guesses.


Here is what my Treasury looked like :
(and in case you would like to play along, I won't give the answer until the very bottom of this posting.)

And so it began...I got all kinds of answers involving peace, love, and harmony. Then I got real long drawn out answers where the guesser tried to tell a story and use the items in their story. Some of them had me LMAO.

On day 1, it was established that PEACE and LOVE were correct. Then the dove card that I had in box 3 sold and the link to that store no longer worked, I scrambled to find another replacement and then let everyone know that the DOVE had been replaced.

When people click on the items in a treasury, they usually click and go unless it is something that really catches their eye. So I tried to make it so that people would pay attention to the item being sold.

On day 2 I asked everyone if they had actually paid attention to the items, or just hurriedly clicked thru them, and reminded them that some pictures were not what they seemed. For example the little coffee and donuts are actually beads. I don't know how many guesses I got that had coffee and donuts in the answer! At this point I began to doubt my own memory and wondered if I needed to check with the author to be sure if I was indeed remembering correctly.

On day 3 people started getting frustrated. I started getting comments like "Is this just a phrase you made up or is it a common phrase?' I really wanted a winner, so I grouped all the clues together and told them that all they had to do was write it out. They already had PEACE, LOVE,DOVE and told them they were over-thinking the whole thing. Just write out what was in each box

SPOILER ALERT !!! SPOILER ALERT !!! SPOILER ALERT !!!

When it got down to the last 8 hours, I finally got a guess that was so close, that I let everyone know it was only missing two words. Within the hour someone guessed it perfectly and identified the author as Tommy Chong - Cheech & Chong. For those of you who are of the younger generation, Cheech & Chong were a comedy duo very popular during the 60/70's and they portrayed a couple of potheads that...did what potheads do...very funny stuff for all us aging hippie types. The phrase was:

peace, love, dove, bells, beads, light shows, incense, crash pads, Hari Krishna, right on , and power to the people!

When I said earlier that I had began to doubt my memory, I actually googled Tommy Chong and found he was on MySpace. Since I already had a MySpace I invited Tommy to be my friend, so that I could personally ask him if I was remembering something I spent hours trying to memorize. So if you look me up on MySpace and look at my friends you'll see Tommy is one of my friends now......still after all these years! Yeah, right... after all these years, he still doesn't know who I am, and he never answered me back. Guess he's too "busy"...LOL

A good time was had by all. I got so much positive feedback from this Treasury contest that I am looking forward to doing the next one.