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Tuesday, May 18, 2010

First attempt at experimenting for a niche...

As you may know, I have a shop on Etsy (http://www.etsy.com/shop/Ashewelry) and all I hear about on the forums is how you need a niche to be sucessful. I realize that there are hundreds of others selling jewelry on Etsy, and so, I started to plan experiments for realizing a niche.

My first experiment: Preserving Fresh flowers in Polyresin as jewelry components. I have seen only two shops- Tropicalia Couture and Royal Princess on Etsy sucessfully do this, so I figured, why not give it a try? After researching the process, buying the supplies, and picking my flowers I began this process. About at this point is when it started going...downhill :(

I broke only two while removing them from silicia gel, broke off petals while appling several coats of polyresin...and when I finally was hopeful to be finished, I used 3 sucessful daffodils to make a necklace for mother's day (for a test-run). To my dismay, within five minutes, a jumpring tore a connected petal :( Turns out six layers of polyresin is NOT enough.

I hate to give up so soon, but with two batches of beautiful flowers gone to waste, (except for the grand total of 4 flowers shown at the top of the post) and many hours along with it. This would be different if I enjoyed smelling like resin and paint thinner, but this is not the case! So, I move on to my next experiment, have any ideas? :)

2 comments:

  1. I recall seeing some poly resin encased flower components in a catalog, it seems to me that they used orchids which have thicker fleshy type petals. I noticed that they all seemed to have a metal attachment glued on their back side where one could attach the jumpring to, rather than going through the actual petal. So you may wish to experiment along those lines. :)

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  2. Ooo! That's an idea! Thanks Almost Precious! It's a good thing too, because there are some gorgeous roses that are coming up that I wanted to try preserving as well!

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