What's a Girl to Do?

Shopping is a woman's prerogative. Shopping and shoes. And hats too. And these days, interestingly enough also cars, the fuel cell or electric cars, especially the new and utterly delicious Tesla Roadster.....Have I left anything out? My point, perhaps. But I can get so easily distracted nowadays.

Okay, back to shopping. In these western cities, an amazing and indubitably exhilarating ritual exists. The day after Christmas, most of the stock in stores goes on sale. The wonderous and exciting event called the Boxing Day Sale. And they are real sales, not like the ones we have in Singapore, where items usually go for 50% -75% off the retail price. A concept that warms the cockles of my value-for-money Asian heart.

Anyway, I took time off and wandered the fabric stores to hunt for fabric, beads and tassels for the new 2008 range. $800 plus later, I have the pleasure to showing off the treasures plucked from the hands of other boxing day warriors.

There's the gorgeous tassel beads in a dozen dazzling colours.

Also found some brilliantly tactile flocked fabrics. The thinner ones are gonna be great for summer scarves and the nice thick ones for the flap covers of the new bags that'll be probably starting next week.

Then there's the sturdy, earthy upholstery grade fabrics, which are destined for lumbar pillows and the inside of bags that I can't wait to make.

And of course interspersed with all the goodies are the beautifully smooth and shimmery taffetas. The mainstay of Rumah Kampung's range of scarves. In soothing blue, cool titanium and juicy black plum.

Fab as these fabrics are, I'm sure that I'll not be able to restrain myself as I see other designs in the shops throughout the year. So I guess this cannot be said to be the all encompassing variety for this enterprising year of the Earth Rat. Which is the first sign of the Chinese zodiac and is said to be an industrious bringer of prosperity, luck and new beginnings.

Enter the BLOGOSPHERE

It's incredible to believe that I started blogging only 10 days ago. Not even 2 weeks and yet it seems a life time. Still loads to learn and I've already learnt so much. It's rather like sinking into a whole new layer of world floating just below the one I currently swim in.

My first post was about going back to Singapore after 2 year of being away. That blog was meant to be a test piece so that I could figure out how to work inside a blog. You know, like placing pictures and changing fonts and making categories to place things like favourite seller. Fun and frivolous stuff like that. And to my surprise, seeing something personal like that out for the whole world (well, at least teeny portion of the world) to see & read was an unexpectedly cathartic experience.

In a couple of days I was trawling through other peoples' blogs to see what they had on theirs and how I could improve mine. In the meantime I set about another Etsy treasury featuring Etsy carfters & artists who blog. The treasury still has 13 hours to go...
http://www.etsy.com/treasury.php?id=1174435528381U94376

Here are some really cool Etsyians with interesting blogs

http://www.marshatoh.blogspot.com/
http://rightoutloudhandmades.blogspot.com/
http://toybreaker.net/blog/
http://www.crystaljsilk.blogspot.com/
http://msessions.blogspot.com/
http://www.tsunamibeads.blogspot.com/

Do you know how many blogs there are out there in the bulging blogosphere? Too many for this girl to blog-hop with a single beer! I needed to focus. Which I did.....on shopping sites, what else? Well that was the most obvious! Besides, so many Etsy sellers were on them. Made sense to have a look.
These I've listed aren't blogs per se but they do have cool widgets to ad to your own blog to make it look better and, well, hipper.

www.etsy.com has a etsy mini widget to show off stuff from the shop,

then there's www.wists.com
& www.stylefeeder.com

that let you compile things you like online and do yourself a wishlist that is open for public viewing and that you can put on your won blog too. Unfortunately the idiot-proof instructions for both those sites left me tearing me hair out because they never told me if my picks were confirmed or not and so I've left those for a while.

Technorati is apparently something no blogger can do without. It's a blog search engine, or so I believe. No wait, it's more than that. It ploughs though blogs and tags like a baleen whale and counts up links and ranks these to tell you in an Internet second which are the most popular. And if your blog is ranked high, the more likely you are to be picked up on a search and it follows from there that more traffic will come to your site. It really doesn't matter to those of us who have personal blogs but if you want to start making money from your blogs, then it MATTERS.


More about making money from your blog in the next couple of posts or so. I've only made close to $5 so far in the past 4 days, so I'm no expert. Mostly from Google adsense. The way I look at it, it's better than a kick in the head.