Follow Your Heart

It almost seems trite to say it, but it's true.  Follow your heart, do what you love, live the life of your dreams!

Follow Your Heart Wire Sculpture by TheTinkaTree

I recently read a couple of books on creating crafty businesses and highly recommend them!  Both books have loads of inspiring profiles of people who created successful businesses by following their hearts :)

The first one is Craft, Inc. by Meg Mateo Ilasco.  This book has tons of practical advice for everything from naming your company to writing a business plan and paying taxes. Plus, the author asks really interesting questions in her interviews with people like Jonathan Adler, one of my faves.

Next is Crafting A Business by Kathie Fitzgerald.  This book focuses on female artisans and includes a nice cross-section of success stories, including Amy Butler.  Gorgeous photos of each woman at work too!  I believe Kathie is connected with Country Living magazine so you know the photos will be nice.  There's a brief section at the end about setting up a business, but it mostly profiles the women and their stories.  They each started with an idea and followed their dreams!

You can get these books on Amazon, or do what I did and grab a copy from your local library:)

.

Fun with Color

Here's a neat little optical trick from Before & After magazine, demonstrating how our eyes and minds interpret color.

When a shadow crosses the wall, what happens? Our minds compensate for the shifting light. Result: Circle B appears much lighter than circle A.

But...

Removing the shadow tells a very different story.  Below are swatches of the colors.  Color B is actually darker and grayer than Color A.

Hard to believe isn't it? I know!

Being the skeptic that I am, I did my own little experiment and cut circle A and circle B out of the original image, so I could look at them beside each other.

Hmm.  Well what do you know, it's true:)  

Have a fun day!

.

Friday's Forum Wrap-Up

My three favorite posts from Etsy Forums this week:

Great tagging ideas from SavoyFaire and other Etsians: 
Fall Clean Your Tags For Higher Views
by SavoyFaire
http://www.etsy.com/forums_thread.php?thread_id=6634176

Of course you couldn't miss this thread about the proposed new wider item pages.  There was quite a bit of concern about the layout design.  We'll have to see what happens.  If you don't have the wider page yet, you can preview the new design live by appending ?listing_wide=2 to any listing page URL.  
New Wide Listing Pages
Original Post by Sean11 (Etsy Admin)
http://www.etsy.com/forums_thread.php?thread_id=6640772

And finally, this thread is a couple months old, but one I found really amusing.  Sometimes it feels like we speak a different language! 
Important Product Words That Have Different Meanings In Different Countries
Original Post by Morphologica
http://www.etsy.com/forums_thread.php?thread_id=6579236

>