Spring has almost sprung!!

Hey everyone!! How is the spring weather treating you? It's going great on our end.

Mental spring cleaning has begun. Clearing away those winter cobwebs in hopes of new and fun ideas for jewelry. Normally Leane does all of our blogging. She is definitely more word savvy then I am. But alas she is weaving weaving and weaving some more. So your all stuck with me today :) .

We finished our spring contest entry for the Chainmaillers Guild on Etsy. I must say it came out beautiful!! We need to give some special thanks to C & T Designs for a huge bailout on some niobium wire. We ran about 7 feet short and Curt had it perfectly color matched and mailed out the next day. Thanks again Curt!! Once we get the piece photographed we will post some pics of it. Just for a teaser, it has 199 potatoe pearls, 892 niobium rings, over 41 feet of 22g niobium wire made into hand spiraled headpins and it's 26 inches long. It was a work of love.

It seems with springtime comes a desire for people to buy earrings. I never noticed until we were asked for 2 sets within a week of each other. My favorite part of it is gem shopping. Oh how I love those sparkly little buggers. Being that quality gems are so pricey we tend not to keep them on hand. Say it with me.. Yay Rubies !!!!

So is there anyone else out there dreading outdoor spring cleanup? It's the only thing I can't stand about spring. We live in backwoods New Hampshire where all winter long they dump truckloads of sand on the road and then proceed to plow it into your front yard. Come spring you have 2 options. The first being, rake all the sand out from your yard back onto the edge of the road so your grass will grow. The second would be, leave it there and decide that your kids would love a new sandpit in the front yard!! Unfortunately Leane thinks that would be a bad idea :( .

There is something I am looking forward to about spring though. Cleaning up the woods around the house. I know what a lot of you are thinking.... He doesn't wanna rake the front yard but he does want to haul brush...odd. Hauling fallen trees to a giant pile can mean only one thing. Bonfire!!! Yes that's right, a fun filled evening of hot dogs, smores, beer and a giant fire!! I should make the pile smaller this year though. Seems it was a bit large last year and we had the fire department called on us. Ooops.. (Leane took the picture above out of our living room window.)

Well it seems I have rambled enough for the day. I hope you all have a wonderful week!!

On a side note, I need to remind Leane to blog about our newest hobby we are starting in 2 weeks. Beekeeping!!

Pete and Leane
Skelly Designs

Thank You, Thank You, Thank You

Hey everyone! In the spirit of the Academy Awards we'd like to break from talking exclusively about us and send out a few thank yous.

First of all (and this has been a long time coming, sorry we've been so behind), thanks to You've Got Maille over at the Chainmailler's Guild for featuring our Freeform 4 in 1 Necklace. We were so psyched when she asked and even more so when we read her editorial on the piece. For us, it was just another adventure in chainmaille and metalsmithing...we never really looked at it outside our little box.

Our next thank you goes out to Erika over at IndieSpotting for featuring our HooDoo Galaxy Necklace on her Gallery Blog. For those of you who have never been, it's chock full of unique goodies made by independant artisans from all corners of the web. She even accepts your indie finds! Check it out. We found it hard not to spend our PayPal account :)

And of course, we'd like to thank our customers (past, present, and future). Without you all we would not have a reason to sit here and make more jewelry. For us, it's more than just a side venture from our real life jobs, it's a passion. We look forward to creating more jewelry and watching it go to loving homes.

Pete and Leane
Skelly Designs

We Missed the Bus...

One would think that with all the talk we've been hearing about Valentine's Day we might have marketed ourselves better.

One would think that since we make jewelry, and jewelry is the #1 most given gift on Valentine's Day, we might have marketed ourselves better.

One would think that since Leane has been doing nothing at her Real Life Job but marketing their Valentine's Day Dinner we might have marketed ourselves better.

Fact of the matter is: we didn't do a (insert expletive here) thing.

So with one week (actually, 5 days) and little to no elbow room for shipping we're sitting here wondering "what were we thinking?"

So for you last minute shoppers out there, here's a little incentive for you: until midnight on February 14th, any purchase made in our shop will include a free pair of potato pearl earrings and free shipping. Just put "Valentines" in the message to seller at check out. Do not pay for your item, we will send you a revised invoice.

Happy shopping all of you

Pete and Leane
Skelly Designs

Google Analytics - Fun in Geekdom

So Etsy has finally given us sellers what we've been asking for: Web Analytics (if you haven't heard about it, read The Storque article here). So while perusing our statistics from the past few days we found out a few interesting things.

In 23 visits, we have had 91 page views. This means that the average person looked at about 4 pages of our shop before leaving.

1. Our top landing page is (not surprisingly) our storefront
2. From there, most people go to page 2 (again, not too surprising, but we'd like people to look at some of the stuff on the first page)
3. Most of those who don't go directly to page 2 click on our Ooops Ring (see #5 for more details)
4. I could go on with the whole path thing, but that'll get boring. Our most popular Exit page, however, is also our storefront.
5. Interestingly enough, people who used search engines were brought to our page via the following: "pmc silver ring" (normal), "persian bracelet instructions" (fairly normal), and "how to decoupage light switch cover" (really strange).
6. To the three readers out there that found us through blogger - Thanks! Glad to see that someone is reading this :)
7. Twitter also sent a couple referrals as well. Thanks to you guys too!

Now, we've only been messing around with this for a day or two, so I'm sure there's tons more that we haven't figured out yet. But this certainly will prove to be an extremely valuable tool to us. Any of you Etsians out there reading this, we urge you to sign up for this service. It's free, it's through Google, it's easy to set up, and hey, now you know who's visiting and why they're there.

So, I guess we'll go write up those instructions on decoupaging lightswitch covers and list them in our shop :)

Peace,

Pete and Leane

www.skellydesigns.etsy.com