I was asked by a local "Curves" if I'd like to set up a little table at their open house this week. "Sure!" I replied enthusiastically, picturing myself surrounded by a hoard of women eagerly reaching for my jewellery and thrusting money into my hands.

There were no hoards.

No one was very eager.

There was definitely no money.

Ok, there was some money -- mine -- going into a tin to pay for a lovely handmade sparkly blue scarf.

Why a tin, you ask? Oh, simple. The woman selling the scarves just left them on a table, using the honour system. I'm sure she was probably pretty happy to eventually show up and find some cash in her tin. Weird, huh? I can sit there for over 4 hours and not sell anything and she can set up a table, leave and make sales invisibly. Maybe I should go that route tomorrow.

I'm going to give newsletters a try; perhaps a quarterly email about upcoming jewellery specials and new listings might be of interest.

Then again, maybe not.

However, since Constant Contact offers a 60-day free trial, it's worth a shot. See my nice little sign-up box to the right? I tried really hard to match the colours to the ones on the blog. That's gotta be worth at least a couple of subscriptions, right? I was going to try MailChimp, but I seem to have floundered on their website. Yeah, that made me feel good. Obviously their marketing must be something to the effect of, "so easy, even a monkey could do it", and here's me, lost. Nice.

Anyway, I promise not to bombard anyone with emails; I'm aiming to have the newsletter out once/quarter. I figure 3 months should give me lots of leeway to get it done the night before.

Okay, not really. What I mean is that I joined Style Hive, a sort of social, shopping, fashion-kind of networking site. See that little button to the right? The one that doesn't really look like anything? That's how you get to my "hive". I think the button is supposed to be a little more interactive; i.e., like it should show some pictures or something, but clearly I'm not using the right code.

Anyway, it's kind of interestingly annoyingly fun, I guess. I recently changed my avatar and now have some questionable "followers". It should get me some greater exposure with my jewellery so we'll see how it goes.

Of course, it helps if I actually get off the laptop and go make something to sell.