and promotion of one another's Etsy shops primarily through our
personal Blogs, and also through our Twitter Accounts and Facebook Fanpages.
Commitment to this common goal is what makes our team the BEST!
Right, that defines the objective - but even so, this is definitely an experimental blog. Hopefully there will be no major hiccups and what I'm trying to do - boost the Team's shops - actually works. So here goes.
My first contact with the BESTeam was a suggestion I join from Annie Oliverio, whose Etsy Shop is known as Empty On The Inside - describing her hand-painted, original Greetings Cards that she designs and sells (not only in her shop, but off line as well). I feel it fitting therefore that the first featured BESTeam Shop from this blog should be hers - especially as I've been lucky enough to receive two samples of her work myself.
The illustration below is one of her recent Christmas cards - send to my husband, Peter and myself;
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| Sprinkles |
It is such a lovely, festive picture and makes a great card for the Christmas season, and would have looked great alongside all the other cards Peter and I were fortunate enough to receive. Alas, thanks to the vagaries of the respective postal services on either side of the Atlantic Ocean, Annie's greetings only arrived last Thursday, January 5 - just the day I'd decided to take all the cards down! However, that did not detract from Peter's and my appreciation of the seasonal greetings from Annie, Kel and naturally, Ike - their wise dog!
Folks can see all the other cards she has designed recently at her Etsy Shop - http://www.etsy.com/shop /EmptyOnTheInside. She can also be contacted at http://www.facebook.com/EmptyOnTheInside and her regular postings on her blog http://doughdirtdye.blogspot.com/ are not to be missed. If she wasn't already a gifted artist, she really should be a writer!
Now you're in for a treat - because this is My SPECIAL card. Annie signed up for the Etsy Greetings Team Special Event - 52 weeks of Mail - whereby she committed herself to writing a traditional "snail mail" greeting every week to someone she knows for 52 weeks of the year, and I was honoured to be selected as one of the 52. Her note of friendship was very much appreciated and it was accompanied by my own EmptyOnTheInside Greeting Card - very appropriate one too, given my toy-making proclivities and actually rather prophetic as to how one of the recent patients in the ColdhamCuddlies Soft Toy Clinic actually turned out! Let me show you:
The title is "Teddy Bear" 2011 - has Annie's autograph as well (wonder how valuable it will become in future?) and is absolutely delightful, to my way of thinking. Sums up a Teddy Bear to a tee!
How here's the final picture of Tommy Teddy - my daughter Philippa's bear - as he appeared at the end of his treatment (which was covered in the post written by my co-author, Cy Bear: Official Mascot to ColdhamCuddlies on November 27, 2011 and entitled "Tommy Teddy's Rejuvenation Therapy").
Amazingly coincidental aren't they - and I promise, there was absolutely no collusion between Annie and Cy Bear and I! Her artistic production preceded Tommy Teddy's rejuvenation by several weeks!
Here's to the next time! Isobel
As part of my BESTeam commitment, throughout the coming months (provided they accept me as a full time member) I hope to be posting short features of each of the fabulous shops and talented craftspersons representing the team. What is BESTeam? It's The Boosting Etsy Shops Team and our goal is to give support to each other and to help promote each others' Etsy shops through blogging, Facebook and other social networks. If you are an Etsy shopowner and are interested in learning more about BESTeam, please visit the team page on Etsy or have a look at the BESTeam blog.
