Welcome to this week's adoption. May I introduce Honor Bumblydour, the chicken-girl. She is holding her grammar book and is ready for today's lesson. Honor is very attentive, but is easily distracted by very small rocks.
We hope you can bring Honor home with you because our cook, Mrs. Milleford Skimpole, has tried twice already to roast poor little Honor and stuff her with bread and all the fixings. "Imagine how succulent she'd be!" cried Mrs. Skimpole as the sisters dragged her away. Honestly, can you imagine cooking Honor on a bed of carrots and onions with lots of yummy gravy and...excuse me.
But I digress. Honor is very good little chicken-girl and would go quite well with green beans.
Honor is made out of needle-sculpted cloth and paperclay. She is made from my own patterns. I hand-painted her with acrylics and sealed her with a coat of varnish. Her red grammar book is made out of polymer clay and is also sealed with acrylic varnish. Honor's dress is made from a lovely scrolling floral cotton. Honor is wearing bloomers trimmed with ivory lace, a petticoat and an apron.
On a different note:
Last December I made my mind up to have more discipline and focus by creating a doll from scratch every week. It takes about four days to make one doll. That's tracing the pattern, sewing, cutting, stuffing, sculpting, painting, costuming,photographing it for the auction and writing a new story and finally writing the html for the auction.
Doing this certainly has it's ups and downs. Sometimes it can be very discouraging and at others the most rewarding experience. I don't care what one does, it feels great to complete a task. It only gets discouraging when I feel very crunched for time and feel as though I were neglecting my true passion, dollmaking.
My goal is no matter what, have a doll ready to go each and every week (except the last two weeks in December for obvious reasons). No matter what life has going on, there will be a Coppermouse Doll up for auction on Ebay on Wednesday.
There will be an auction this week. It is for my chicken-girl. However, there is a boycott going on this week at Ebay. You see Ebay is instituting some changes this May and there are those who are very unhappy with it. So those unhappy sellers are boycotting Ebay from Feb. 18th to the 25th.
I am not one of the unhappy sellers boycotting Ebay. I am happy with Ebay and have decided to roll with the waves. However, if things get unsatisfactory, then I shall sell on Etsy and OLA.com. That's a big "if." I am not too worried about it.
If you are interested in joining my mailing list to see where I am selling my dolls, now is the time to join. Just enter your email address in the Yahoo group at the upper right hand corner of this blog. Links are always provided for my auctions. The mailing list is strictly to notify members of the mailing list when I have a doll for sale.
In the meantime, for this auction only, I have a reserve set at one-hundred dollars (ten dollars will go to my chosen charity, Operation Kindness). If the doll does not sell on Ebay for one-hundred dollars, then I shall list the doll in my Etsy store for one-hundred and fifty dollars (fifteen of which shall go to Operation Kindness).
Uneasy feelings about the Ebay marketplace has caused me to do this unusual auction. My next auction will be as before with a starting bid of twenty-four dollars and no reserve.
I appreciate your understanding about all of this. I am sure everything will go back to normal over at Ebay, but I feel I must be ready to change.
4 comments:
She's adorable Melisa! Hmm, since I live in Silicon Valley and my husband and his friends are in the know about the tech world I hear lots of things. They've said that ebay's main reason for instituting these changes are because their growth has stalled in the past years. There's no real reason to expect more money if they continue the way they were going. So the only other option is to really go for the ebay users who provide the most trouble-free revenue to ebay. And those would be the stores with lots of sales. It's the small ebay sellers who take up the majority of the customer service time (regarding non-payers, etc). If they can greatly diminish that then that would go towards lowering ebay's overhead and more profits.
I think that you're taking the right attitude towards it. Use it for as long as it works for you and your doll business. Of course you can always opt to have some items in etsy and ola as ways to keep those options open. Who knows, at times it may be that you'd prefer to have something for sale that isn't in an auction format. :-)
Thanks, Tami. You are correct about Ebay. It's a big beasty with a big appetite.
Beautifully created dolls. I enjoy visiting your blog and seeing your creations.
Connie
You've been tagged by Nina Mason Dolls (don't kill me)! To learn what it means to be tagged, read the post on my blog at http://www.ninamasondolls.blogspot.com.
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