Thursday, January 26, 2012

Those Molds, and What the Etsy Front Page Will Do For You

Remember my molds?  So they turned out rather well, but a couple did require a little bit of first aid.  What is that you say?  How does one apply first aid for silicone?  No doubt there's tons of demand for this tip (is there *any* demand for this tip?), so here you go:

First unwrap the mold.  Congratulate yourself - success!

Look closer.  Curse under your breath (not out loud only because your son is in the other room.)  See a thin spot on the inside that means the mold will definitely break when you try to use it.


That dark spot in the middle?  That's actually the bracelet itself showing through the mold.  Not good.

Remember the cure-all of mold problems - silicone putty!


  Roll some silicone putty up like you're playing with play-doh, patch it over the mold, and voila!  Problem solved!  I won't tell you how long it took me to figure that out.



In other news, something somewhat interesting happened the other night.  (Although, come to think of it, this post is mainly interesting only if you either make silicone molds or sell something on Etsy.  Or have an odd, latent curiosity about either topic.  I promise, back to the mainstream next post.)

So, anyway, I'm sitting around quasi-watching American Idol the other night (don't judge, ok?  It was totally Clark's idea), and answering Etsy convos on the iPad, and something unusual happened.  When you're looking at your Etsy shop the activity for the shop shows up in a little box at the top.  And being that January is kind of slow, and I was refreshing pretty often as I went through the convos, the number was 5, or 8, or 13 to show activity from the last time I refreshed.  And then all of the sudden the number was 248.  And I thought - huh?  And then I figured out that something must have shown up on Etsy's front page.  Indeed it had, this ring to be exact:


And here's what happens to the views for your shop when an item is featured on the front page:


Yep, traffic increases by some exponential number.  While the graph looks like no one had looked at my shop before 9pm, actually it had been holding steady around 50 or 100 views every hour.  Which is not so bad for a slow January day, unless you compare it to this:


Yes, that would be 2,532 total views in a one hour period.  Nice.



9 comments:

  1. Yeah Sumner! Although I didn't understand anything about the first part of that blog...I could totally read that graph!

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    1. Leslie - that's ok, if you ever decide you need to make silicone molds I'll walk you through it. ;)

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  2. That same thing happened to me when I had work in my shop- one of my sculptures had gotten hundreds of hearts - I never knew for sure but assumed it had made it to the front page. I was very excited :).

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    1. Exciting indeed! I wish there was some sort of Etsy time capsule so you could back and see the page. I looked through the traffic sources and there were lots of hits from the front page, so I could figure out what happened - but it would still be fun to see which treasury made it.

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  3. Oh- and the silicone mold info is very interesting- though I make molds a lot (plaster).........I wonder if there will be a mark or a ridge in your bracelet where you patched it?

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    1. There usually isn't a mark, as long as there's even a very thin layer of the original silicone over the spot. It's pretty great for patching!

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  4. Fascinating mold progress photos! And yay, congratulations on being featured on Etsy's front page. That ring is gorgeous.

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  5. We're do you get the pink putty make your molds. What's the name of it I have tried easy mold I like the pink color more but easy mold is purple

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  6. Hi Guerita - the Easy Mold I use as a patch if I have a thin spot on the molds. For making the molds (the pink silicone) I use silicone from smooth-on. www.smooth-on.com. I've used several different versions of their mold max - I think the chart at smooth on will list which is the pink one.

    Thanks,
    Sumner

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