Do you have an Idea?

Wow my articles are getting published faster than I thought they would! Here is my latest, and if you are getting a little thin in the memory area, this is perfect for you. It is something I have practiced for the last year. So instead of giving it all away here, I shall post a link to my Idea Basket. As always, please be sure to drop on by and leave a comment and a vote. This means a lot to our advertisers and keeps me in good standing with the editors.

It has been an extremely busy week for me, and here is what I have accomplished:

ClayItAgain is having a Christmas in July sale going on right now on Etsy and ArtFire. Those links will take you directly to the Christmas sale section. My most popular Christmas item of late has been my elves. I have discounted so much, I'm practically giving it away. And just for this weekend, I will offer an additional $10 savings on any wreath. With all the markdowns, they are 1/2 price now, and I would really like to get those out of here to make more room in my studio. Please feel free to share this info with all your rich friends :D

I also took the plunge and set up a fan page for ClayItAgain on FaceBook. My first goal, is 100 fans and when I reach that, I will have a drawing for a gift certificate good for anything in my shop. I also set up a fan page for 12MidnightOils. And I will also have a drawing for a gift certificate when I get 100 fans there.

Our garden has really kicked into gear now that the weather has turned hot. The 2nd round of lettuce is starting to thrive. I always thought that lettuce needed a cooler environment, but we've never had a shortage of lettuce...AS LONG AS WE KEEP THE SEEDLINGS WATERED ;) So maybe we will have something to donate to the food bank, after all, this year.

On Monday, I have a job interview. Yay! It's only for a temporary job while a lady goes on vacation. But heck! The $$$ I make in that 2 weeks could carry us financially for another month! So be thinking good thoughts for me on Monday afternoon.

Well I think that about wraps it up for this post. Don't forget to enter the drawing for my giveaway. There's only 2 weeks left til I announce a winner, and I think there are only 7 entries...incredible odds I must say!

Yay!! I'm a Published Columnist!!

This morning I awoke to my first column being published! I have been tooting my horn all over the place. Please visit Handmade News and read my article and show me some lubs. The more comments and thumbs up I get, the more I can keep writing and featuring sellers and their items. Plus as an added bonus, there is also a quiz to test your smarts. So now that I've told you all that, you probably want a link, heh? OK, I'm in the Just for Fun section and my article is Attracting Birds (not my choice of title, but whaddya gonna do,huh?)

In celebration of my 1st article published I am offering a 20% discount!! on anything in either of my shops til July 4th! Just send me a convo (thru Etsy), a message (thru ArtFire) or an email (clayitagaincindi [at] yahoo[dot] com) and I will reduce the price for your purchase before you have to pay. Oh, and let me know you saw the special here on my blog. That's all there is to it. That means you could actually get $50 off my larger paintings and the discount is not limited to one item either. This is my stimulus package to help stimulate the economy :)

Ok to bring you up to date with the rest of me :) I finally broke down and set up some Facebook Fan Pages. I guess it's the newest rage for promoting; so now ClayItAgain has it's own fan page....and 12MidnightOils has it's own fan page. So why am I telling you this? Well, become a fan of each of them, and when my fan list hits 100 I will draw someone's name for a $10 gift certificate. Good toward's anything in either shop. That's going to be 2 drawings, not just one. And just in case 1 person happens to win both drawings (not likely..BUT just in case) yes, you can use both at once for a $20 savings. Now how can you turn that down? I have not yet begun to promote my fan pages, so they don't have any fans, except me. I am my #1 fan! How vain is that? So hurry on over there and become a fan. I've always wanted one.......hundred!

And as soon as I get the pictures taken I am going to start a giveaway here too...I am hoping to get the blog promo up and running by this weekend.....so stay tuned to me me me me :P
Have a Great Day everyone!

When it rains, it pours...Also a silver lining in this cloud

Oh my heck! As if things weren't bad enough for us right now. I was sitting in my favorite ($5 yard sale) chair on Friday night and the heater kicks on. And I said to the hubster "wow that sure smells damp and moist".
So I went down to the basement where the heater is, and discovered that we have a leak somewhere in our plumbing. Now, Mr. Clay ( as we all lovingly refer to, as my hubby) can't make the trek downstairs right now, on account of his oxygen and the open flame of the furnace. So it was up to me to figure out the situation. Mind you, I made this discovery near bedtime.

We have a small ( I mean COZY ) home. It is an old miner's camp house, only 766 sq ft on the main level....And then there is the basement (which I call the dungeon). Half of the basement is a big dirt slope and the other half I took over for my studio. On my side I painted the bricks white, wallpapered the ceiling in light colors, and put in a white linoleum floor over the concrete. Since I share my space down there with 'The Dark Side' (the wild untamed and not well lit, dirt side), I have approximately 57 spider traps so that no spider or creepy crawlie can make it past into my domain. It took me the better part of last summer to complete, and when the temperatures heat up, it is the coolest place in the house; everyone wants to be there!

Now the leak is coming in on the 'Dark Side', and the dirt is damp looking and dangerously close to my studio side. And of course there is all kinds of crap piled over there-not quite junk, but certainly not stuff I want to go poking around in-old tools and boxes and such. I went to bed with the words of Mr.Clay rattling in my brain "well I hope it doesn't break loose and flood the whole basement". So naturally I slept a whole 20 minutes that night!
Yesterday, Saturday, I got an early start and began removing everything from the dark side, taking it upstairs and outside to a trailer to be able to sort it later. It took me almost all day, and I still have a couple of heavy misc. items to take care of today. But I got it cleared out enough to know that the leak has made it more than just 'damp'; there are rivers and puddles, and mushy mud...I laid out boards to walk on.
I made it Mr.Clay's job to call a plumber-since he is the one who didn't take care of this plumbing issue years ago when I asked. Of course, it's Saturday afternoon, and no one is answering their phones...except one-and he is out in the desert riding horses...lol. Did I mention we are out in the country? Desert country :)
Now we have been quoted 6K, 8K, & 10K in the past to redo our plumbing; and there is no way that we have that kind of $$$ right now, but we can't afford to ignore this problem. So Joe plumber comes after his horse ride, and says the leak is from the water line coming into the house, and we'll need a back hoe to dig up the front yard and also to hand dig under our brand new sidewalk, and I'm thinking "Ka-Ching!" And says he can do it for $1,400 !! And that includes replumbing the bathroom and kitchen too...And he can have it done on Monday!
How lucky was that???
The leak however, has saturated the dirt so badly that I didn't want to take a chance on it running over to 'my sanctuary', so I filled 8 five gallon buckets of water, called the city, had them turn the water off, and we are now roughing it til Monday.
But oooh, I slept like a baby last night knowing my side would still be white when I woke up this morning :)

Now for some more goodly news- since I couldn't sleep Friday night, I was visiting the forums on Etsy , and there was a lady feeling generous-she wanted to make banners for 5 shops who have never had a sale or less than 5 sales. Since 12MidnightOils has never had a sale and was in desperate need of a banner, I jumped on the chance to grab a graphics designer to create one for me. And I absolutely love it! Her shop name is Drunce and I thank her 100 times over. Please visit her shop, and see if you find a treasure there for yourself. One of her specialties is making banners, and I peeked in at the other 4 shops who won, to see their new banners. All of them were fantastic! Thank you so much Drunce . There was definitely a silver lining to my 'leaky basement' cloud :)

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.