Another day at the beach!

Yesterday R. and I went to breakfast at Olde Tymes in Norwich and afterwards decided that despite the 18 degree weather, we were going to head to the beach anyway. What fun! Charleston and Scarborough were both bust, though both were lovely and not as cold as we thought they would be. Of course, the last beach, as usual, did not disappoint. Too bad I didn't hit it at low tide, and had some fun running from waves while trying to dig in the sand.I know the color balance is off in the photo above, but I got this piece of China (lol) and a piece of porcelain (Charlestown, 1 of only 2 pieces I found).

Odd embossing on a lime green piece. Not sure what pattern this is.

I discovered this thick clear piece was embossed when I got home, but it's awesome nevertheless! Wish I could ID the bottle this came from :). It would have been read while lying on its side, which is odd because it was a round bottle and not your typical medicine bottle (rectangular shape). Other round embossed bottles would be read while the bottle was standing up.

Best find of the day, olive green rounded lip. Wasn't quite expecting this when I picked it up. Wish I found it earlier as the breaks are pretty new, but after the stormy weekend I'm not too surprised.

All finds! Loving the pink lizard and the bullet shell. There's some kind of writing on the bullet shell but I can't read it :(.

Sooooo...there you have it. The vintage plug was also found at the last beach and will be turned into some kind of steampunk wire-wrapped pendant. Stay tuned!

Btw...Mannequin Reject Emporium can also be found at Artfire. I haven't yet decided if I'm going to pull all my jewelry off Etsy or list on both sites simultaneously.

Etsy is a toxic place.

I used to be an Etsy ra ra cheerleader. But going to Canada over Labor Day weekend had this funny effect.

See...I made the magical 100 Etsy sales a couple days before we left. And then sales dried up and DIED.

Upon my return from Canada, I couldn't figure out why my shop, which was almost at the 1-sale-a-day point had no sales in 2 1/2 weeks. Closer inspection revealed that there was a 15-60 second lag in the search results return and sub-category load in most of the saturated sub-categories. Jewerly>Earrings. Art>Prints. Supplies>Buttons. You get the idea.

Well over 2 months later these issues are not resolved and Etsy continues to roll out changes when search priority on any other e-commerce site with common sense would have been priority #1. We've gotten a poorly thoughtout Vacation Mode for sellers. We got the Dolls and Miniatures category. And now the front page design has changed in the middle of the holiday shopping season, and not for the better.

Meanwhile, Artfire.com looks promising. I haven't really set up shop there at all yet, but if there's any site that might be able to give Etsy a run for its money (Shophandmade, Ecrater are others) this one looks like the place I might run to. I'm going to bail out of Etsy. I'll leave whatever I've got up there, maybe keep vintage and supplies there, but for that to be my only shop...no. I'm sick of the perpetual bitch-slapping and fingers-in-the-ears policies around there.

The warm fuzziness of Etsy wore off a long time ago. At this point I have to stop caring because it's simply unhealthy to care this much about some place that obviously doesn't care about you.

New post coming soon about sea glass!