Tag Archives: umbrella

October 28, 2009 · 10:43 pm

Halloween 20% off SALE! Time to Move On to Gifts!

As you guys already know: It’s Hubby’s and My Birthday Week! In celebration, enjoy 20% off discount on Halloween items! Go check it out! But hurry – this sale will end soon! I don’t do clearance! www.PixieWorx.etsy.com

OK – that’s it now! Custom Halloween orders are cut off and no more Halloween items will be created for 2009. If I get a chance, I will list the last of the Halloween items left in my Etsy store. Or, you can always give me a call!

For next year, I have some great ideas in mind, including a special spider web design to be hung around a ceiling fan! It’ll be great! And I’ll be spending many months planning it out. Due to the intricacies and time involved, I expect that only a few will be made. But I think it will be so much fun to work on!

Now it is time for me to dedicate my full attention to my truest crochet love – designing hats and the stuff people like to go with them! Don’t worry – there will still be some jewelry! Watch my store and blogs for updates!

Giant Crochet Spider Web Pattern…

I am working on my Giant Crochet Spider Web pattern for you folks. This is the kind that can be made up to many feet wide to display in your yard, or a large space. I hope to have it ready to list in my Etsy store this weekend.

Advantages to this design are its durability over most crochet designs, while at the same time, not becoming too bulky or using mass amounts of yarn to achieve this strength.

This spider web pattern utilizes unconventional stitches outside mainstream crochet, which will likely cause it to have an “advanced” crochet skill rating according to the international standard guidelines. However, I believe these unconventional stitches will be easy enough to learn for most folks and are somewhat repetitious.

So stayed tuned for photos and the pattern listing!

Also, watch for a series of spider web umbrellas to be released as well! These umbrellas are a limited run. (I only have so many umbrellas to make these with and only so many webs can be made per week anyway!) So once they are up, grab what you want, because they will be limited this year. Price range for spider web umbrellas depend largely on complexity of the web design and time involved, after consideration of supply cost for the umbrellas themselves. Average time to create a single fairly straight forward spider web umbrella is about 3 hours. Careful handwork in securing the spider web to the umbrella and weaving in several feet of ends is a significant part of the time in my process as well, again depending on complexity of the design. I like to leave several feet for the tails to add to the durability and long-term strength of my crochet webs.

UPDATE: You can find my regular spider web pattern (pdf file) for sale in my Etsy store here: https://www.etsy.com/listing/82366585/6-foot-spider-web-crochet-pattern.

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Filed under Artist Information & Notes, Crochet Patterns, Crochet Techniques

Tagged as aberrant crochet, aberrantcrochet, costume, crochet, decoration, giant, miss, muffet, pattern, pixie worx, pixieworx, spider, umbrella, web, yard

September 17, 2009 · 7:30 pm

Thinking About Advertising with Craft Cult….

So I’m thinking about buying some advertising with www.CraftCult.com. Craft Cult has been a great service for Etsy shop owners. One of my Spider Web Umbrellas was chosen for a treasury created by Etsy and I wouldn’t have known it had happened if it hadn’t have been for Craft Cult, alerting me when I checked on my shop. It was also via Craft Cult when I found out my item had been chosen for a Halloween Costume Gift Guide as well.

Craft Cult is a fantastic service with great tools – all for free. If you have an Etsy store, do check them out. And me? I might just thank them by taking out an advertisement on their site. I’m also thinking I’ll likely benefit from it too.

However, I’ve never taken an ad out on someone else’s website before. Heck, I only just heard about something called Google Base, which I haven’t figured out how to really use just yet. Learning all this online marketing stuff is sometimes a bit overwhelming. All too often I’d rather just pay for a show since I prefer talking to folks one on one and do my usual demos and help folks out. After all, that’s what got me into all this in the first place.

Still, I enjoy learning and playing around with digital work on Adobe. In fact, I did a much better job than I expected with our old wedding photos and my grandmother’s damaged old farm photos too. And I’ve some particular ideas about things.

The CraftCult ad space has to be 100px X 150px. So I’ve been working up an image to help promote my Halloween items, since they have a short shelf-life each year. I’m using the Spider Web Umbrella photo as the background.

I haven’t tweaked it all out quite yet, but so far – what do you think?