The New Me

I spent a couple of hours this morning creating a second Etsy shop, called Twice Shy Restored. I have been mulling this move over for some months now -- basically as soon as Indulge Your Shelf grew to have more vintage than handmade items and the handmade items were getting lost in the clutter. (Wow, that's just like my house...)

Little did I know what I was getting into. First I had to create a new email address for the new store, because Etsy doesn't let two shops originate from the same email. Then I had to verify that new email. Then I had to configure my email account to have the new emails forward to my main email account. Then I had to create the new shop on Etsy.

That was where the fun began.

It took me a while to come up with a new name; being a "words" person I couldn't resist the imagery of "Twice Shy" for things made from antique and vintage materials. I also think "shy" connotes the tone of most of the antique stuff I work with. Of course, "twice" for the idea that the materials, be they linens, buttons, stitchery, whatever, are pre-owned.

But, I wanted there to be an element of the green notion of recycling, or upcycling. That's where "restored" came in. It's also a play on words with twice and the notion of re-store as in "put in the store again."

Making the new avatar was fun:This is one of my antique cut glass buttons. Isn't it pretty?

So was making the new banner:

I'm really into the collage look. Do you think it's too busy?

So, when I was getting ready to work on the new store itself, I thought I would just open two browsers - one where I was sign into my original shop and one where I was signed into my new shop - and cut and paste the specifics like shipping policies, descriptions, etc. so I didn't have to recreate it all in the new shop. Meanwhile, I was rewriting and updating the info on both of them. Do you follow?

Well, somewhere at Etsy a server is having a nervous breakdown, because what ended up happening is that whatever section I updated on Indulge Your Shelf came out on Twice Shy Restored, and vice versa. At first I thought I was losing my mind and posting it to the wrong place...then I realized it really was the poor Etsy site trying to keep up with me clicking back and forth!

Really, it was funny. Or it would have been if it wasn't so annoying.

I finally got it right.

I still need to move a lot of my handmade stuff over from Indulge to Twice, but I want to wait and do that as the listings in Indulge expire. There's no hurry. For now, I've just put in some of my (ironically) new, premade scrapbooking pages.