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| The skeleton |
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| The Skin |
Once again, for Halloween, I decided to put something interesting in the front yard. I wanted to do a giant snake wrapping itself around the house, but my wife said I should do a shark. "A shark?" I thought would be a lot harder than a snake but I accepted the challenge just because its important to challenge yourself sometimes and level up . As luck would have it for me (and not very lucky for a local hardware store), they were going out of business and everything was on sale. This was lucky because I was able to score some really cheap wood and screws for the armature. As with all of my Halloween decorations, I wanted to make sure it was made completely out of recyclable material, otherwise, I wouldn't easily be able to get rid of a toxic,10 foot long shark.
The armature was put together with one thing in mind; When I finish it, it has to be strong enough to carry the weight of the cardboard and be transported from the back yard to the front, without falling apart. The armature was the easy part, the hard part was building up a relatively recognizable shark shape out of the cardboard, using a staple gun, screws and duct tape. The rain gods were on my side and it never soaked my creation as it did the giant Japanese robot I made last year.
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| Feeding the shark |
With less than a week to spare, I got it together and was able to spray paint it just in time for Halloween. It held together, when we carried it to the front, with a brief scare as it snagged on a telephone wire. I wanted the shark to face the arriving trick-or-treaters, but my wife persuaded me to point it in the direction of the street. This worked out a lot better because anybody who happened to walk by, took lots of pictures of themselves posing with it. It got tons of compliments and put a smile on many faces, and thats why I like to do these projects, it makes our neighborhood a cooler place to live and lets them tell their FaceBook buddies: "Check this out, this is in MY neighborhood."
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| Say Ahhh! |
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| Now on Etsy and Zibbet |
I'm diversifying my business and opening up another site on Zibbet, a competitor to Etsy. I'm curious to see if the sells will be better or the same. The thing I like about them is that they promise not to have sellers who aren't really independent and make things in factories and they don't charge anything if you have under 50 items for listings. We'll see how long that last, after all, every dot com is nice until they're making money. I did get a lot more hits on Etsy when I used their paid ads and I even had a near sale from somebody in Ireland that back out at the very last minute. Pretty cool to get international attention like that tough. Here's the link to the Zibbet site:
Rabbit Studios
Coming In December, I will be taking part in the Richmond Art Center's Holiday Arts fair.
This year Im going to be selling twice as many items than I did last year which creates more pressure to at least break even. After all, more items produced means more overhead. There are going to be a lot of things that haven't even made it on the Etsy site so I'm excited to get the reaction of the buying public. Another thing Im excited about is the fact that I can also accept credit cards this year. This means I won't have to hear the excuse: "I'd like to get it but I don't have any cash."
That's all for now, A
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