~ Feature Friday: Seasons Come And Glow ~

TGIF! What a crazy week! Even though it's Friday, it just doesn't feel like it. Maybe it's because I am supposed to work tomorrow to make up for my sick days. But, it is Friday so let's get on to this week's featured Etsy shop: Seasons Come and Glow. Isn't it a cute name?? This is a pretty new shop, opened on April 25th and already has 2 sales. For a newbie, the pictures are very good! They are sharp, bright and interesting.


As you can see, Seasons Come and Glow is a bath and body shop. It's filled with nature and seasons inspired soaps. I love this lavender soap with real lavender on top. That's natural exfoliating power! The soaps mainly contain the following ingredients: propylene glycol, sorbitol, water, sodium stearate, sodium laureth, sulfate, sodium myristate, sodium cocoyl isethianate, glycerine, triethanolamine, aloe, vitamin E. I am not a beauty product expert, but aloe and vitamin E sounds good!


This is a fun soap! It has a loofah inside! I have seen similar items in other shops, but these are definitely the brightest and funnest looking ones! I just wish there's a rope on it so I can hang it in my shower.


This is a pretty small shop for now. Only 11 items, but there is a great variety that hints at the great products to come. There are sugar scrub, luxurious whipped body foam, bath fizz and lip balm. This one looks so sweet!


I hope you like what you see so far! Click on the pictures above to go to the specific listings and check out the shop!

~ Do you want to be featured? Leave a comment here and I will take a look at your shop. I will pick one to be featured every Friday! ~

~ Momo on a Swing ~

Over the weekend, it was sunny and so nice outside! So, I took Momo out to explore my neighborhood. Guess what? I found a little playground about 3 blocks away! They have a little baby swing. So, of course, I have to put Momo in it. Doesn't he look so excited? Maybe, it was the 90 degree weather....


Sitting there was no problem for him. But, I think he was a little apprehensive when I pushed the swing.


What's going on here??


I don't think he was scared though. He didn't make any noise.


It was so hot! I couldn't go any further so I just went home. It was nice though. So, hopefully, I will be taking more walks with Momo from now on. Look what I found along the little paths! It's so pretty even though it's starting to wilt. I love all the flowers in my neighborhood!

~ Cava's Harissa Sauce and Bouquets at Whole Foods ~

One reason I love Cava is their Harissa sauce. It's sad that they are really pricey now. But, I have found the Harissa sauce at Whole Foods in Kentlands!! Now, I just buy some pita bread, pop them into the toaster oven, put the sauce in a pretty white plate, turn down the lights at my house and pretend I am at Cava.


This container is pretty big. It's 8.5 oz for about $6. It may seem expensive, but it's cheaper than going to Cava! The sauce has a kick to it for sure. Even my fiance thinks it's spicy! I keep eating it and drinking water and I just can't stop!


Next time you stop by Whole Foods, grab one! Speaking of Whole Foods, I was actually pretty mad at them a little while ago. I went to Whole Foods at Kentlands to ask about it. The customer service person told me to call the next day to talk to the florals department manager. I called and the person I talked to told me to go in at any time to talk to someone from florals or the marketing department. I went in again and they said no one can help me there and I have to call them. So, I called them again and finally talked to a person in florals and she said "Sorry, one of us is going on maternity leave so we can't handle a wedding order right now." Thanks for wasting my time Whole Foods! I ended up calling the ones in Bethesda and Rockville. They both can do it, but basically, you are just buying flowers from them. Then, they wrap them with a ribbon for you. Their flowers are very pretty, but I just don't want to bother with it anymore. Oh well, I will just have to pay for a real florist.

~ I've Been Found by Etsy! ~

Every day, I look at the Etsy Finds email to check out all the cool products on Etsy. I was just skimming it today because it's a busy day. Guess what I saw???


OMG OMG OMG! My earrings are in the Etsy Finds!!! The theme today was Ivory and Ebony. What an awesome surprise! I almost didn't recognize it because I changed the pictures a few days ago for these earrings and it's still the old picture in the Etsy Finds. I was so excited! I told my fiance right away, but he....didn't get it.


I have personally purchased a few items from Etsy Finds. So, naturally, I wondered if I am going to get any sales. And the answer is...yes! I got 8 today! Happy dance time! I am actually out of the crystals, so I had to put a blurb in the listing about how they will be shipped later than usual. Out of the 5 colors of butterfly studs, black has the lowest stock and of course that's the one that makes it into Etsy Finds!


Look at this spike in my Googles Analytics. I have close to 500 visits today! That's about 10x my average number of visits! My day just didn't go very well today, but this helped a lot! Big thanks to Emily for "finding" my earrings!

~ Illusions, DIY Sneakers, and 3D Tetris ~

Check out what I read about this past week!

80 Rain Photographs I love pictures of water droplets! This is an awesome collection of photographs that uplifted my dreary spirits during this rainy week.

Funny and Artistic 404 pages on BitRebels I never thought I will smile when I see a 404 error page, but I did. Here are a few of my favorites from the article. I think this is from Spirited Away.

Please excuse the foul language, but this is funny :)

I saw a lot of amazing art this week, mostly from Bit Rebels! This one made me bust out my sketchpad. I was going to doodle too, but it looks so messy compared to these "doodles" by Irina Vinnik. I gave up.

I have seen some of the sidewalk chalk art illusions before through forwarded emails. Richard Darell put together a impressive list on Bit Rebels this week. Feast your eyes on these 76 awesome illusions.

I saw Amy Sol's magical work on Epheriell Designs. Wow! I love it. So soft and surreal! She makes stars look sophisticated!

Here's a cool DIY project: twig push-pins and wall hooks from Design*Sponge

If pins are not your thing, maybe you want to design your own sneakers. That's right, you can design and SELL sneakers through Zazzle!

Here's a fun game for you Tetris lovers: Torus by Ben Joffe. It's a 3D twist to the regular Tetris game. It has 3 modes for endless hours of fun! It takes a minute to get used to the 3D. My high score for traditional mode is 13575. Beat that! :)

~ Grand Opening! Artfire Supplies Shop ~

I took a look at my Etsy bill for my supplies shop and realized it's getting more and more expensive every month. That's good in a sense that I am selling more. But, I think this month was really bad because a bunch of my items were up for renewal. So my listing fees were off the charts. So, I decided to open an Artfire shop because of the flat monthly fees. I was thinking about Zibbet, but Artfire has "Item Importer" to import my 188 items from Etsy. That helps a lot. So in about 45 minutes, after Artfire forced me to put in my bio and such , I imported my items and my Artfire shop is up!


Now comes the fun part of recategorizing all the items and setting the primary colors and such. Thankfully, Artfire has global editor. I love how you can specify items by searching through the ones you already have. However, will it kill them to put an "Add All" button to this so I wouldn't have to sit there and click on +Add 30 times? I must say though, for this task, Etsy's batch sort may be faster because you just click on each item to sort. With global editor, you have to find the items for 1 category, click on each of them, submit the change and do the next category. But this global editor allow you to globally change the price on items. It's like one of the most asked for feature on Etsy.


One thing I noticed is how they imported the text of my listings. In all my Etsy listings I put this at the end:
.•:*¨¨*:•..•:*¨¨*:•..•:*¨¨*:•..•:*¨¨*:•..•:*¨¨*:•..•:*¨¨*:•..•:*¨¨*:•..•:*¨¨*:•..•:*¨¨*:•.

All Happy Cloud Supplies items will be shipped within 2 business days of payment through USPS First Class.

Take a look at my shop for special sales and announcements!
http://happycloudsupplies.etsy.com

.•:*¨¨*:•..•:*¨¨*:•..•:*¨¨*:•..•:*¨¨*:•..•:*¨¨*:•..•:*¨¨*:•..•:*¨¨*:•..•:*¨¨*:•..•:*¨¨*:•.

Bad thing is....all the pretty stars are gone. Good thing is that they replaced Etsy with Artfire. That's pretty smart and it shows how much care and thoughts they put into implementing their features. I appreciate it a lot as a user and as a developer. Though it was funny that it renamed "Betsy Bunny" to "BArtfire Bunny".


So here are the steps to move from Etsy to Artfire Pro account:

1. Sign up for an pro account.
2. Follow their steps to set up shop (upload avatar and banner, write bio and policies, set up payment methods...)
3. Import your Etsy items using their item importer.
4. Make categories for your studio.
5. Use the global editor to move the items into the right studio categories.
6. Use the global editor to move the items into the right categories. You can probably use the studio categories instead of specifying items here.
   
7. Use the global editor to set the item primary colors.
8. Rearrange your shop if you like.
9. Set up a coupon code for your Facebook fans or Twitter fans.

Now, I am just going to sit back, relax and wait for my first Artfire sale. I am going to give it 2 months. If sales are not good, then I am downgrading. Oh yeah, if you buy from my Artfire shop, use "happyart" when you check out for 15% off! Sale ends next Sunday!

~ Homemade Sushi Night ~

I used make sushi a lot. It's easy and it's fun to have your friends come over and hang out and make food together. But, it's been a while since I made sushi. Too much stuff going on and this and that but no more excuses! Tonight, we made sushi! Here are our ingredients: cucumbers, avocado, crab sticks, spicy smoked salmon, arctic surf clams, roasted eel, egg, and masago.


I don't remember having these arctic surf clams before. I see the commercials on Chinese TV channel a lot so I got some to try it. It was pretty good. It's a bit chewy though. I have a few of these left, so I have to make it for something later. I couldn't find any recipes though. Let me know if you have suggestions.


When I went to Hong Kong, I got these little things to help shape the rice into stars, hearts and balls. It's fun, but it takes a lot of rice. I had 1 star, 2 balls and 2 hand rolls and I was feeling pretty full.


Check out the first attempt with the star. Not bad :)


I like this one more though. My friend made it. Did you know that they have seaweed punchers like those craft hole punchers? Yes, you can make star and heart shape seaweed to decorate your star and heart shape rice balls.


This is my super rice ball! These are so easy to make with the mold. I love them. If you place the seaweed right, you can make eyeballs, soccer balls and more!


We used to make a lot of rolls, but this time we were all hungry so we just made hand rolls. But, we did make some rolls eventually. This was supposed to be a heart. But, someone wasn't strong enough to shape it correctly.


Now, this is more like it!


Aren't these cute? The orange stuff is spicy salmon. It's just smoked salmon, Japanese mayo and Srichacha hot sauce. This recipe is one of the best thing I learned in college.


This is all so healthy. Well, except for the mayo. That's like the fattiest mayo, but it's so good! Can't wait till the next sushi night!