Thankful!

Well, the situation I spoke of in my previous blog is completely resolved - even better than I expected. Erny removed the corset pants from her ebay store (even though I told her it was fine to keep this one pair up - apparently she wasn't planning on making them permanently but just wanted to use up the last bit of fabric.) And she is changing the design of the headband to make it less like mine - the new design will be up once the old headbands are sold.

For everyone who didn't read the last blog, apparently someone ordered a macrame belt, corset pants, and a headband from my website, then came to Erny with the request to duplicate them for the troupe. Erny says she gets requests to duplicate stuff all the time, and has never questioned it, but she will be more wary in the future! And then my ex-customer apparently went on to suggest that she sell the designs on ebay!

I saw one of my jewelry pieces from a cascade in one of her headbands. I've only made a total of 3 cascades with that particular jewelry attached. Two of them were too recent to be the customer in question. So, assuming she didn't get the jewelry elsewhere (I order straight from the manufacturer in India so it's unlikely) I know exactly which customer this was! And if it is this customer, it would be the same person who bought pants from me, then went on to create flare pants (probably traced the pattern) and even talked of getting them for sale but had a hard time finding fabric - a headache of which I'm well aware having spent about 2 months just trying to locate good quality cotton lycra. And this would be the same customer I noticed trying to resell used hair clips from my website here on tribe for $50 when she paid $24.99. So it's very likely it's her who did this to me!

So I just wanted to let you all know that the problem is solved and Erny Sigurdsson of Enchanted Dream Wear is a very very sweet lady and not a copycat and should not be boycotted by any means!

I got copied!

*Ahem* I mean a crafter was perhaps inspired by my costumes and went off to design something similar... Or maybe it was just coincidence that she happened to design a headband, with cowrie shells, one of the exact India jewelry pieces I've put in a cascade before, and with flowers and hair falls positioned exactly where I position them on my headband hairpiece. Wait - WHAT?! I see corset pants in her ebay store. Oh my god - that's a macrame belt...

But *SNIFF!* She's selling it all way cheaper than me... and... I am terribly terribly sorry.

I'm sorry Melodia, for rolling my eyes at that post where someone was looking for melo-knockoffs and you posted with a link to the originals. I'm sorry Tempest, for the deepest darkest part of myself where I didn't sympathize with you for all the non-Tempest made corset belts on the market. I'm sorry Mom, remember the time I was out till 2 and I told you I was hanging out with a bunch of friends from church? Wait, I probably don't want to own up to that one quite yet...

Anyhoo, I just wanted to tell all of you knocked off designers out there that I now understand how you feel! I'm reading the description, and I see that she wraps her wire headband in satin ribbon (that would make it so much softer on the head) and it looks like she uses more kinds of yarn than me and more flowers, and the india jewelry dangling from the cowrie shells is really a great idea... And I almost want to buy it just so I can see if she wraps the stuff on with wire like me, or if the flowers are reinforced on their stems...

And the macrame belt is way better than mine - it's got 10 kinds of yarn and cowrie falls and better tassels... sniff sniff... And the corset pants - okay, nope, the corset pants don't compare to mine. Mine fit better and have bigger grommets and are fuller in the hem. Slight sigh of relief, but still, aaaaauuurrrrgh!!

So I'd like to give a shout out to anyone who creates or is thinking of creating a knock off design. Please know that somewhere in the belly dancing universe the designer you've ripped off is a person, and that person was much much happier when their designs were ORIGINAL!

I'm tempted to contact her and tell her I have plenty of designs I haven't made yet and probably will never have time to make - would she perhaps like to create some of them instead so that that way only her and I know that she is a sad individual with little creativity?

And now, as I can see this going downhill quickly, I shall sign my whiny self off to get some work done today!

btw, since I'm sure you're all curious:
stores.ebay.com/enchanted-dream-wear

I am SPAM

I live for my photo comments. :-) It's true I'm an artist, and I have the inherent desire to create things, but if no one ever noticed or liked my stuff, I'm afraid it'd take all the joy out of it for me. Today I logged on tribe to see I had a photo comment! I went to read it - it was a comment from someone asking that I not post any more thinny (sic) veiled spam.

Just for kicks I got a definition for spam online. It isn't an acronym, but apparently a slang term for the real acronym UCE - Unsolicited Commercial Email. Given that definition, I should just be able to go to bed and rest easy in the fact that my picture posts don't fit that definition, but sadly for me it doesn't work like that.

Every once in a while something like this happens to me. A while back I actually had the time to be on tribe more regularly. I hung out on DIY a lot. I could actually answer a lot of the questions on there, and I felt like I was a useful part of that community. I decided to clean out my closet and get rid of a bunch of my unfinished belly dance costumes. I thought, maybe some of the girls on DIY might like them - I was just going to sell for cost of materials to avoid a total loss - I thought that that way they might at least not go to waste! So with nothing more than a desire to give something to that community, I posted some pics on my website and posted a topic with a link to the pics. My post got deleted and a "no spam" post got bumped to the top. I thought - oops - and wasn't mad or vindictive, but totally lost my desire to answer any questions on that tribe.

I realize that we live in an ad-heavy culture. We are continually bombarded with advertising in the form of billboards, commercials, pop up ads, those annoying banner ads that make noise until you find the stop button. But to me there's a big difference between a large company doing mass emails to anyone advertising ringtones, or free ipod offers, or male enhancement supplements, and a real human being who creates pretty things and posts them to a select group of people who she (or he) thinks will like them!

I also think that most people can't see things from the point of view of a home business crafter. Big companies have advertising budgets and pay people in third world countries to create cheap merchandise. When you buy something from me you are paying materials, shop expenses, and my labor (which costs a lot more than labor overseas but remember I do have to eat) and you are getting something top quality, made by someone who cares about what they do. In order to sell my products on the internet, I need to get the word out about them on the internet. For handcrafted items, words just don't work. People need a picture. I could pay for banner ads on different belly dance themed sites. In order to afford it, considering I'd have to post enough ads to replace my exposure thru tribe, I'd have to increase my prices by about 25%. I choose to keep my prices down so more people can afford my pretties and deal with the occasional complaint about the pictures.

I also try to be as considerate as possible while posting pics - I delete all my old pictures and only post to tribes that are specifically related to tribal or belly dance costuming, and never in the "topics" section.

Internet sites like tribe.net have made it possible for single people to start selling their creations. Ebay is great too, but if you create something unusual enough it is unlikely that anyone will be searching for it. Eliminating the pics from small crafters means eliminating many of the small crafters. I don't know about everyone else, but I love being able to buy costume items that are handcrafted and produced in very limited quantities. Therefore I vote to keep the pictures! - though my vote probably shouldn't count since I'm a picture poster... :-P

What is everyone else's opinion on the subject?

Just one of those days

Tristan's teething, so I'm trying to work on the remaining orders, and deal with a fussy, drooling, not sure whether he'd rather suck on or chew on my hand, baby, and my sewing machine breaks! Not to fear, I have another one, but in order to finish the few pants I have remaining to make, I need a rolled hem foot for it. It's a Singer, so I would think that somewhere local would have one. Tristan has finally fallen asleep, so I decide to make some calls. I call JoAnn's and ask whether they have presser feet for singer sewing machines. The lady puts me on hold, I start hearing fussy sounds from the bedroom and groan, then she comes back on and tells me "No we don't have any presser feet, just about every other kind of sewing machine foot that exists but no presser feet."

Anybody else on here ever listen to Bill Engvall? I think she needs a sign. :-P

And I think I need an actual sewing store in my area. There's only one repair center anywhere nearby, and they don't sell presser feet. :-/ So I went on ebay and ordered it today. Maybe by the time it comes Tristan won't be teething as much and I'll have an easier time working on it. Not.

I popped!

Well, he's sitting in my lap sleeping and making funny baby noises as I type this - It'd be cute if I didn't know this means he's not gonna sleep tonight at all... We're trying to get him to sleep at night but it's difficult when nothing will wake him up during the day (including cold wet hands on his head)! But I'm very happy to have traded in the gigantic belly for a gigantic baby... :-D

I bellydanced my way thru most of my pregnancy (found it to be a cure for backache and swollen feet) and decided to try bellydancing thru labor too - managed to get all the way to 9.5 cm shimmying happily - even with back labor it decreased the pain of contractions to totally bearable. I only had to take something once I laid down and stopped dancing.

My Mom managed to come up and be in the delivery room with me. Thank heavens for her! She coached me thru it, and I had a totally natural delivery minus the pain relievers near the end.

And now Tristan is here, I'm a Mom (yikes!) and loving every minute of it. From what everyone tells me he is a really really good baby - doesn't cry unless he actually needs something. And I've discovered bellydance music makes him go out like a light!

Who peed in her cornflakes?

So I've been uploading pics on some other websites to try to make myself a bit more well known, and I upload a pic of me in the red bodice leaning against a tree and (among nice comments I must add) I get this:

"The costume looks great.
But you need a better model.
I'm sorry if that's you, but critique can hurt."

www.deviantart.com/deviation/60166772/

I think I'm coddled by the tribe community being nicer than most (why is that I wonder?) but it shocked me to the point that it was more amusing than anything. But...um... wow. I responded and I'm kind of curious as to what she'll say back!

Haunted Hike #1

Yesterday my friend Christine and I went on another haunted places hunt. That's what we've been into lately, looking for places that supposedly have paranormal activity and trying to hunt them down. Well, we've been looking for this place for a while. It was listed on the haunted places in CT website as being in "the woods west of Groton" - and it said it was a bunch of Native American ruins - sounded really cool, but there is no woods west of Groton - only the Thames River! We'd already consulted a map and driven around the west side of Groton with no luck finding any wooded areas. So we were at a loss until I accidentally discovered that the name of an archeological dig in CT was Gungywamp Complex. So I googled "gungywamp complex" and found a site talking about how hard it was to find since most websites listed the location as the "woods west of town" Ahah!

That website still didn't have any instructions on how to get there, other than that it was actually northeast of town, and 1.3 miles east of the Thames River. Since the Thames does a fair amount of winding, that didn't help too much. But looking on a map it looked like it might be near the area of navy housing where Christine lives - off of Gungywamp Rd - hmmmm? More extensive internet searching returned that it was near Latham Lake, which wasn't on any maps. Then on Mapquest (not on google maps) we found Latham Resevoir in the woods across the street from Christine's subdivision. Turned out the banks of Latham was less than half a mile from Christine's front doorstep!

It was a decent hike - short but not horribly easy. Possibly most difficult for us since we went straight into the woods and had to tangle our way through a bunch of thorny bushes before we got to less dense foresty area. Then we weren't quite in agreement on which way it was once we got away from the road, so we kept taking wrong turns on paths once we found them. Christine turned the GPS on in her phone and it saved us. It didn't have the name "Latham Resevoir" on the map but it showed the lake and our location in comparison.

We found it, and it was well worth both the hike and the detective work. Most of it didn't seem haunted for me. Christine kept feeling like she was being watched, but I am too much a believer in the power of suggestion. There were a couple of sites that looked like the remains of walls to houses, one with different rooms and (maybe?) a fireplace! The stone circle that all the internet sites claimed may have been an altar looked more like a firepit to me, so I stepped inside. No creepy feelings whatsoever. There were also two small underground chambers, one with a ventilation hole toward the back. Maybe a smokehouse and a winter food storage spot? Those did give me a decidedly creepy feeling upon crawling inside (with a flashlight after I checked for bugs and small animals with sharp teeth) but as I said, I am a believer in the power of suggestion, even in regards to myself!

Then there were a few that I have no explanation for. Flattish knee height stones standing on end in a row, the wrong direction to be tombstones unless the people buried were about 1 1/2 foot tall! A couple of big rocks with a lot of little rocks piled atop them with no discernable utiltiarian purpose (maybe someone 50 or 60 years ago came there and said 'ooo, this is a cool place - let's make our own woodland rock thingy near here to trick everybody out!')

On the way out we followed the path instead of going back thru the thorny bushes, and emerged a few feet down the road from where we'd come in. Whistling innocently, we climbed over an orange gate with "no trespassing, vehicles will be towed" written on it and made our way back to Christine's house.

Below are the pics Christine took while we were there. Some of them look to have orbs in them - maybe real - I won't believe in it 'till I go to a random wooded area somewhere and take a thousand pictures without looking at the camera, and none of them turn out weird. But I'm an extreme skeptic. Have a look at the pics yourself, and make your own decision!

picasaweb.google.com/Batwife...pComplex

I love tribe! ... a rant

So, no, I can find nothing to complain about with tribe - tribe is wonderful, in fact, so wonderful that every other networking site out there TICKS me off.

Yeah, myspace sucks, but at least it's a predictable kind of sucking - caused by waay too many 13 year olds posting bulletins like "100 things that I love about my sweetie hunny bunch" or equally ascinine... and too many profiles that consist mostly of "what flavor of underwear are you?" quiz results and width is about 4 normal computer page widths... and 80 percent of the friend requests I get are guys that say "ooh, she's hot" add to friends "click" and they totally ignore the big text I've got bold in yellow that says if anyone friends me with no introduction I will deny... And of course all the people that friend anyone and everyone whether they have anything in common or not because they think that having 20 million dork friends makes them cool... It's the only thing that can happen when you have a website that famous and that mainstream and give all the people on it the freedom to be just as dumb as they'd like to be... annoying but predictable.

I was on Wikipeda the other day and ran across an article on tribe.net which I read a little of and saw that according to technicalities tribe is just another website among many social networking sites, and I got to thinking. Much of my business comes from tribe and me posting photos on tribe, so I thought that maybe I ought to at least join some of the others - I don't spend a lot of time on myspace but I have a profile and a few friends (mostly family and my friends from florida and other navy wives.) It means I at least have a presence and a link to my website for a chance at getting my name out there more...

So I joined flickr and another photo based networking site and that worked alright outside of the normal how-the-heck-do-I create albums/upload photos to this album/create my profile, etc. But I figured it out eventually and managed to upload some very cute pics of renaissance costumes and belly dance costumes. That was yesterday.

Then today I decided to try some more of the general networking sites. I started with tagworld. It's a cool idea - everything on the site has tags, and that would theoretically mean that someone could find my photos/profile easily if they were searching for belly dance costumes, or renaissance, etc.

My first clue that the entire site was a bit too...um... mainstream for me should have been that the first thing I saw when I loaded the site was advertisements for a bunch of hip-hop artists, the kind that I avoid in the real world by not listening to the radio much. But am I that smart? Sadly, no.

So I join and start by trying to update my "web page" which is really just a profile. It's kind of like tribe, in that you have different "themes" to choose from but you can also customize each theme.

The themes don't work. Never to be daunted, I take the boring white and grey theme I wound up with for a default and try to customize it. I choose a black page blackground and wind up with purple instead. It won't go away no matter how many times I try to click black, or even change to white. So I give up and move on to the modules. When I try to change the module background to black, that doesn't work either, and I instead wind up with very dorky looking white modules with black stripes down the sides of each. With some choice spoken/shouted words, I give up and move on to trying to figure out why the photos I upload aren't appearing on my "web page." No such luck. Can't even find and manage to look at more than one of the 6 photos I uploaded. WTF?

I gave up on tagworld and moved on to the next promising looking site on my list, My Opera Community, which seems to have nothing to do with opera (at least, the style of music) and be geared toward artists and free thinkers. I went to sign up, filled in all the info and answered all the questions and clicked that I agreed with the terms... And got the message that I took a screenshot of above... and of course that was the last straw!

I may try the rest of the sites on my list...much...later, or I may give up and decide tribe is the only one worth the time...

I dunno... Any other crafter/designers out there like myself who have found other ways to gain recognition besides tribe and ebay?

Not exactly a calamity but in keeping with my blog so far...

I'm pregnant! And I think I'm having the devil's child...

Just kidding. I say that because I think it's trying to starve me to death. I know it's called morning sickness, but I think evil, pointless nausea is more accurate because it lasts all day and even wakes me up at night occasionally. Ugh. I take after my Mom. When she was pregnant with me she had Grandma cook all the meals and she cooked double for Mom, cause she could only keep it down the second time around. Whereas you have me, in CT with family all in FL, NC, or MT, and husband God knows where underneath the water...

On a more positive note, I did get my order of herbs today, and I'm drinking anise seed tea, and I think it's helping... At least I'm up on the computer instead of laying in bed.

Don't get me wrong, I am happy about it in an if-I-don't-starve-to-death-first kind of way. Not exactly on purpose, but good timing, for the first one, and for still being in the Navy so Uncle Sam pays the birth bill.

Well, I figured I'd let all you guys know, anyway! :-)