Major changes at Zazzle

Sorry I haven't posted in a couple of weeks, I've been very busy working on my three Zazzle stores.

My main store Wildmacnz which houses my clothing, household goods, greeting cards and poster designs etc. 

My business store Wildmacnzbusiness which is where I house all my business card, flexi magnets and other business related designs.

And lastly my Electronics store Wildmacnzelectronics which houses all my phone, laptop and tablet case designs.

I hadn't looked at any of these stores in nearly three years. With all the stuff going on in my personal life with my husband being laid off and then us moving house and town, I just ignored them and as is usually the way, life kept happening and things changed without me realizing. One of the major changes being that Zazzle had hidden a lot of my designs that hadn't sold, so they are no longer visible to the public. I never noticed anything as my sales were getting better over time so I just thought everything was as I left it. 

What a big surprise! But actually it was a good surprise. It took some of the pressure off me. How you ask?

Well, for a long while before my personal life took a sudden left turn, I was creating designs and then putting them on as many products as I could, that suited the design. I never used quick create, I didn't like the idea of my designs going on everything at once especially when not every image is suitable for every product. When new products were released I put all the existing images on the new products if they suited, however this didn't leave me much time for creating new designs. Just keeping up with the old ones was becoming a full time job! I started to slip further and further behind. It felt like I was trying to run up a downwards traveling escalator that was speeding up.  In short I put too much pressure on myself to create a large store, thinking that this was what I needed to do to get seen in the marketplace and get sales. I was wrong. My sales picked up even though a lot of my products were no longer visible for sale in the marketplace. I was focusing on the wrong things.

This reshuffle from Zazzle eased the pressure off me to create more and more and made me look at fine tuning what I already have. It allowed me to take a step back and really think about:

1. What I really wanted to sell in my stores. 
2. What I wanted my stores to look and feel like to a customer
3. What I enjoyed creating. I hate making some products so why am I making them?
4. Why have some of my products not sold? Wrong design for the product? Have I aimed at the wrong audience for a certain design? Is the design just old and outdated now, especially designs with the date on them?
5. Keywording and descriptions. Are they letting me down?
6. What have I sold? This was an eye opener. Some of the designs that hadn't sold were on on products I hated making. Could this be related? 
7. Do I really need three stores or should I condense down into just one or two?

These are all questions I've been slowly working through for the last few weeks as I delete crap/outdated designs and products I hate making, that haven't sold anyway, and rework my keywords and descriptions on designs I want to keep. It's a painstaking process, but one I'm very happy to do. I can see light at the end of the tunnel in the form of a lightweight streamlined store filled only with designs and products that I'm happy to make and are more likely to sell well.

This is my most popular tie. My watercolor painted scooter design on a yellow background. This scooter is also available on other colored backgrounds. My scooter sells well on multiple products so it makes the cut and will stay in my newly designed store.

The top picture is of a new wrapping paper design I created last week. Now I have time to create new designs which is the part I really enjoy doing. 

I love another new feature that Zazzle introduced whilst I wasn't looking, 

Collections. (see pic above)

Collections are a great way to showcase groups of products either by theme, product or by grouping useful things together, such as, matching birthday cards, gift wrap and envelopes for example, or matching designed cups and plates. I've only just started using this feature but I can see loads of possibilities with it.

All in all, although Zazzle has created lots of new work for me, I welcome the changes as a new beginning for my stores. As I try to simplify other areas of my life, be it creative or home life, it makes perfect sense for me to simplify my stores too. 

I hope you may find this post useful if you have a Zazzle store that you haven't looked at in a while. You may be surprised with the changes. It can be a shock, but I think it's good to take a step back from time to time and reassess what it is you really want to accomplish. Sometimes it's hard to see the wood for the trees.

Have a great week :) 

Uncovering the 'Fantasy' Me - To Make Space For The 'Real' Me

"I need to use my stuff - and if I don't, it's a sign that I'm not really the person that I think I am."

from The Simple Dollar - The Challenge Of Getting Rid Of Stuff by Trent Hamm

I read the quote above recently and it got me thinking about what items I've been holding onto over the years and why that might be. Up until now I thought most of my clutter consisted of 

1. Tools and things I might need in the future
2. Unwanted gifts I don't know how to part with without hurting people's feelings
3. Paper, paper everywhere. From schools, bills, receipts, junk mail, it goes on and on
4. Hobbies and crafts supplies
5. Sentimental items
6. Furniture that doesn't suit our needs anymore
7. Clothing that doesn't fit or might fit later or is worn out

Just stuff that's collected over the years by itself that I haven't sorted out. 

I certainly never thought that I might purposely be keeping clutter for my fantasy identity. I didn't even realize I had a fantasy identity, but as it turns out, I do and obviously have had for a lot of years judging by the amount of things I kept for it.

For example in 2011 I made a list of goals I thought I might like to accomplish and one of those was "to become more self-sufficient and grow most of my own food." A worthy goal you might say. 

At the time I planted fruit trees in my back garden and planted pots of vegetables and herbs on my front deck. The trees did okay but I have black thumbs and the pot plants died, well, all apart from the parsley which the dog ate. Who knew dogs like parsley? 

Anyway, gardening didn't take well then and after watching the cat pee all over the spinach that put me off growing vegetables again but I still thought of myself as becoming a self-sufficient home gardener someday and I kept a lot of plant books to feed that fantasy. 

Another fantasy linked with the gardening one is that one day we'd own our own lifestyle block with chickens and maybe a couple of cows or sheep. Generating our own power and with our own water source. I'd kept home farming magazines and books for this one. The thing is, after my husband ended up in hospital for a week with bad cellulitis in his leg from a spider bite, I realized that I don't want to live out in the country with no public transport to get to the hospital (I don't drive) and far away from family and friends. I like being able to walk to places in town, I like being close to family and friends. I get hay fever every year and it's exacerbated by the grass seed in the fields. I know that I'm always sneezing worse when I'm in the country, talk about a fantasy life! I don't eat meat so what do I need the sheep and cows for? I do like chickens and I could keep a few here in town but really, I know that I'm not really that interested and probably never will. So why keep books on animal husbandry and permaculture?

The same goes for my landscape design books. I took a course to help me plan out our previous garden. I don't regret it for a minute and will use the skills I learned to plan the landscaping of our new entertainment area and garden but I don't need lots of books on the subject. I'm not going to make a career out of this so if I need to know something I can either google it or borrow a book from the library. 

The same goes for scrap-booking. Fantasy me says I'm going to make this page and that page. I've collected paper and stamps and other things for this over the years but when I sit down to do it, meh. I have no real interest in this at all. Only fantasy me does. 

I'm sure there are other areas in my life that are also affected by fantasy me like the cake decorator me that hates baking but has the cake making/decorating equipment and the fantasy sewing me that owns a half share in a sewing machine but has never used it. Why? Because it doesn't really interest me. I'm not sure I can even really remember when it did. 

I'm never going to be a self-sufficient farmer type, landscape designing, scrap-booking, sewing and cake baking/decorating mum but that's okay. The real me has lots of real things going on. It's taken me a long time to find and acknowledge fantasy me but I think that once I remove all of her clutter I'll be able to clearly see what the real me enjoys doing in life and I might even have the space and time to find new things to try.

Decluttering my wardrobe

Recently I've been reading blogs by Courtney Carver over at  Be More With Less

specifically articles about Project 333 and creating capsule wardrobes. 

Now, I'm not any kind of fashionista and generally cruise through life in jeans and a tee shirt, but I felt that my wardrobe needed looking at. To me it seemed over full and uninteresting. 

The idea behind project 333 is that you dress with 33 items or less for 3 months. Creating seasonal wardrobes with mix and match clothes and storing the rest somewhere else. They don't include underwear, sleepwear or sports clothing in your 33 items. They also don't include wedding rings or other sentimental jewelry that you never take off, but all other clothing, accessories, footwear and jewelry are included in the 33 items.

The idea appealed but I wasn't looking forward to going through all of my clothes and sorting things out. I also thought that 33 items of clothing didn't sound like enough. 

Boy was I surprised when I went through my entire wardrobe and counted all my clothes and shoes. 

Not including underwear and socks, I had a total of 42 items of clothing including my shoes! 

This was for all seasons! 

It turns out that my husband's clothes were encroaching on my side of the wardrobe and I thought all the squish in there was caused by me.

Well, once the shock wore off I sorted everything out and created a list of what I have.

• 3x pairs of jeans 
• 2x pairs of shorts
• 2x 3/4 pants
• 10x tee shirts mostly blue, my fav color
• 2x long sleeve tees
• 5x sweatshirts
• 3x polar fleece tops
• 1x winter padded jacket
• 1x rain jacket
• 3x pjs
• 5x shoes
• 2x old cargo pants for painting the house
• 2x old shirts for painting the house
• 1x old polar fleece for painting

A total of 42 items!

Now I haven't included jewelry here up til now as I don't wear any apart from sleeper earrings that I never take off. I do own a watch but never wear it. I also have a Pounamu (Greenstone) pendant necklace that I wear sometimes when we go out but otherwise I have no interest in jewelry. I sold my engagement ring years ago when things were tight. I stopped wearing my wedding ring when it got damaged at work about 20 odd years ago and it doesn't fit now post kids, anyway. I hurt my finger (not seriously, luckily) when the ring got caught but that put me off wearing rings and I haven't worn one since. If I include all this that totals 45 items. 

Now you might be thinking that my hubby is a lucky man but what I don't spend in clothes, shoes and jewelry I could easily spend on bags and camera equipment.  I have my eye on a nice macro lens right now lol.

Anyway this exercise was good for me. It's made me realize that some of the clothes I was hanging onto weren't getting worn because they had worn out and for some reason I hadn't binned them. I also discovered where the holes are in my current wardrobe. Eg, I don't go out anywhere fancy but I don't really have anything to wear if I did want to. My warm winter jacket has seen better days since I bought it 15ish years ago so I'll start looking for it's replacement as we're coming into Autumn here now.

It's also made me realize that hubby's side of the wardrobe really needs looked at too. He's got a dirty job at the moment and he works with sharp metal so has been wearing layers of tee shirts to protect himself, hence why so many shirts and things. Recently he has also started working a bit more back in the office so that also explains the mixture of clothing he has. I'm hoping to put in a wardrobe system when we start redecorating our bedroom and hopefully then he'll be able to sort his clothes a bit better. Rough work clothes in one area and clean office clothes in another maybe.

Anyway, project 333 is totally worth a look, if only to help you see the gaps in your existing wardrobe.

Have a great week :)

Big Life Changes

The only way to make sense out of change is to plunge into it, 

move with it, and join the dance ~ Alan Watts

I can't believe how fast time has flown by since I last posted here in November 2013! Such a lot has happened in that time but I'm very glad it all has.

Shortly after my last blog post my husband was told that the company he had worked for, for the last 20 years was being sold. We were okay with that as it had been sold a couple of times before. However this time turned out to be different. Early in 2014 the company was sold to a group that only wanted the recipes and brands but not the buildings or the 120 odd people that worked there. My husband was okay with that at the time. He felt he was stuck in a rut and fancied a change of career. A couple of months down the road though it started to get difficult when Hubby still hadn't found work and we then decided to sell our house and move into the city as the commute from our small town was becoming too expensive. So we tided up our house and put some things in storage to make the house look more saleable and waited and house hunted. I was kind of excited, I'm a Gemini and love change, so the prospect of pastures new invigorated me. A few months later though the strain of keeping the house tidy for viewings and worrying about finding somewhere else to live for the 6 of us became very stressful. I couldn't focus on my art and I lost all enthusiasm for photography. I had a creative death. Nothing interested me and I just couldn't rekindle my creativity. So all posts stopped here. Thankfully Hubby had found work but he'd dropped a third of his pay in the process which made the new longer commute seem even more expensive. We needed to move and fast! As for house hunting, I hated it! The houses we liked sold before we could do anything and ours sat waiting for the right buyer. Looking back now I can see that I was depressed. I couldn't see a way forward at all but it worked out in the end. Our house finally sold and we moved on Halloween.

In the end we didn't buy in the city, we found a nice house in a bigger town with just a short drive to Hubby's new work. The house is old and needs updating but we've made a start and it's now feeling like home. The pic above is of my new work space in my dining room. The table we bought cheap and sanded it down and refinished it.

The corner desk was built by hubby and finished by me. I love it! I have loads of light but without direct sunlight shining on my workspace.

On the creative front, I bought a new camera, an Olympus OMD EM5 and I've started to come out of my creative slump. It has taken a while though. To further my recovery I've started a 365 photo project with a new theme each week. I'm in my 4th week and things are looking up.

A bright new future

Have nothing in your house that you do not know to be useful, or believe to be beautiful ~ William Morris

The image above was one of the break through moments I had recently while working in my pocket journal. I've been struggling for years with clutter and over the last couple of years I have really started to look at 'stuff ' in a different way. It took a long time though for me to realize that my stuff owned me more than I owned it. This may sound strange but I've found it to be true. My stuff rules my life. I have to pay for it when I buy it, then spend lots of time and/or money looking after it, and even then it's not finished with. I may have to pay someone to take it away, or spend time listing it to sell, or spend money dumping it or donating it. Then there is the inherited stuff that has the emotional ties to it, you can't just dump 'great whoevers' stuff can you? Not to mention wedding keepsakes, birthday presents and other gifts etc. Add being an artist into that mix and suddenly you have piles of art and craft stuff added to the house as well.  Don't get me wrong I'm not a hoarder like you see on tv with stuff piled to the ceiling and no room to walk around. We can see the floor in every room but the cupboards are full and there are lots of books, toys, art supplies etc stored in extra storage spaces around the house. The kitchen cupboards and drawers are full and I won't even mention the garage/workshop area.

I've had enough of clutter and I want to make some big changes starting from today. So from now on my blog is going to be a bit more of a mixture of topics. I hope you don't mind. I want this blog to be a record of my art learning and decluttering along with sharing some links to other interesting art and minimalism blogs and any tips and tricks I find along the way. I really enjoy these minimalism blogs Becoming Minimalist and Zen Habits and also Miss Minimalist and the art blogs that are listed here in the side bar in my favorite bloggers list. There are loads of other great blogs too but I haven't yet found an artist minimalist blog. I guess it is a hard niche to fill because you have this urge to declutter things but it can be hard not to collect things to add into your mixed media or other art works. I'm not sure if this will even work but I'm willing to give it a try. 

So I think with new beginnings should come a new blog title. Say goodbye to "My first artist's journal and blog" and say hello to "Simple Life, Simple Art"

Have a great week :)

Why I left microstock

For me, the camera is a sketch book, an instrument of intuition and spontaneity 

~ Henri Cartier-Bresson

I've recently pulled all of my images from a microstock site and a few people have asked me why. I hope this helps to explain my motivation behind my move.

Although I have only recently returned to drawing and painting as a way to express my creativity, I had, for the past three years, been learning about photography as an art form and trying to find ways to improve. I guess if you suppress your creativity in one area it will always find another way to come out. 

I had always thought that photography was going to be my creative outlet after I read a book about Robert Capa. It totally got me hooked on photography.

I bought my first 35 mm film camera in 1986, around the same time I gave up my painting, and a month later bought my first film SLR. I happily used these and captured many pleasing images, mostly on slide film until my first child was born in 1999, where I realized that it was getting really expensive to take so many pictures of my son and when money was especially tight one year I sold all my gear. A few months later I bought my first compact digital camera and used it for taking mostly family photos. 

Fast forward the next few years and several camera changes and in February 2009 I heard of microstock photography and bought a Canon Rebel digital SLR and uploaded a few shots. Most were rejected as non-stock worthy, hardly surprising as I hadn't researched what microstock agencies wanted before I uploaded. I laugh about it now but at the time it was rather soul crushing ;) I uploaded images for about a year before I realized that I'd totally lost my enthusiasm for photography. It had stopped being fun and started to become a rather boring chore, I'd even stopped taking my camera to family occasions which is a shame because I can never go back to take those missed family moments again. I stopped uploading then and did a lot of soul searching before I could decide what to do next. 

My problem? 

What I wanted to shoot wasn't what was selling well in microstock and what was selling well, I didn't want to shoot. I'm not into shooting models brushing their teeth etc or hammers and things isolated on white backgrounds. It's just not me and I'm guessing a lot of people out there feel the same. I think it comes down to this, I don't want to shoot an advertising shot to sell a product, I prefer my shot to be the end product, a piece of art I guess. I prefer the art side of the business to the commercial side and microstock is more on the commercial side so it wasn't for me. My art shots sold through the micros but not as well as they sold elsewhere as a finished product. 

Which brings me to my blog post here today.  I felt I had come to a crossroads and needed to make a final decision on which way to turn. One way would mean continuing as I am, creating images I want to using a mix of photography and painting and finding a market that appreciates them as they are or the other path which would mean investing in lighting and better equipment and sinking a lot of money into a direction I really didn't feel comfortable in. I chose the first one, I like to follow my own path through life I guess. The best part is that my 13 year old son also wants to join me on this path. We share a Zazzle store together. The polar bear fishing on the top left of the following image, and also the "Play hard" hippo on the bag 2nd from bottom on the right, are his creations. 

This is a link to our store http://www.zazzle.com/wildmacnz

I hope that you will be able to understand my reasons for leaving the micros and perhaps if you also feel that you have reached some sort of crossroads in your own work, this may give you the courage to try something new, to make your own path going forward because we all have our own unique gifts to share and should be able to share them in a way that makes sense to us.

Have a great week :)