Now the work begins...

I officially opened my etsy on Monday and have since been overwhelmed with the amount of new things

I need and want to learn. There are a lot of things that go into making a good online presence and I'm trying to figure everything out at once. It doesn't make for a very efficient learning experience, though, so I'm trying to focus on one thing at once.

I started with making a banner. My brother got a copy of Photoshop version 5 at a garage sale that I've been working with and attempting to learn. After several hours of poking around in the tools and some serious head scratching, I came up with these:

I read an Etsy how-to for sellers and that pointed me towards a website that has fonts for free (though not all are free for anything except personal use, I opted to go for ones that didn't have limitations on the way they can be used). In downloading new fonts I also had to learn how to add them to the correct folder so they could be accessed by the programs I wanted to use them in. More head scratching and googling were to be had. So, it took a long time and I'm not sure how I feel about the banners I ended up with. The first banner uses a picture I took at Arches in Utah and the second is a cropping from a picture I took of my dad's truck that my sister had stuck flowers through the rusted bits on the bed. I guess I'm going for a western and natural feel. These will undoubtedly change as I figure out what I'm doing. I chose to go with the second one because my gut said so.

So far I have posted 7 rings of the 20 some I've made already. Since they're rings that I haven't seen anywhere else I'm not sure how to get them to show up in searches. I doubt anyone will be looking for them specifically.

Once I can find some lingerie laundry bags I bought at a dollar store a long time ago I'm going to put one of my rings through the washing machine and see how it does. The cotton should hold up just fine but I'm not sure about the metal crimps. But, they put metal zippers on things all the time so in theory....they might could be just fine. The main concern I've heard about these rings have all been from my mom. She keeps asking me how they'll be kept clean. Since I don't expect people to live in bubbles I'm going to look into ways to clean them. Metal rings are definitely more dirt resistant than these but, like I said before, I haven't seen their kin anywhere else. They're unique or, at the least, very limited in their production.