Another in-depth review for you today, or is it? Truth be told, the shop I’m reviewing today needs to do very little to improve, in my humble opinion. That shop, is Waterrose.

Right off the mark, I fell in love with the Waterrose banner. Very nice, appealing and shows the range of products without looking like an Etsy Mini. The shop announcement is short but inviting and the policies are in place on the profile page, which also adds warmth in it’s initial description of where the name of the shop comes from.

The item photography is nice and bright and shows off the cute little items very well. The colors are vivid, the backgrounds nice and basic so as not to clash with the items themselves, the descriptions are strong, and the shipping costs are reasonable. Truthfully, it’s hard to do an in-depth review/critique of this shop as I can’t find anything to really suggest for improvement! The ONLY suggestions I can come up with, and that’s after taking a break last night and looking at the shop again this morning, are firstly that the shop accepts money orders and checks so may want to add something into their policies to protect themselves regarding time for the payments to clear before shipping. Secondly, that the shop needs to fill those empty sections or remove them for now.

Truly, this is a very well-done shop and I enjoyed looking at it. Let’s see if anyone else can come up with some constructive commentary that i might have missed!

My rating: 5 out of 5 cherry blossoms!

Choosing this week’s subject of review turned out to be more difficult than I had expected. Both shops have lots of appeal to me and I see areas for improvement in both. In the end, I decided to review Sweet Tea Company, but will also be reviewing Waterrose later this week! Having said that, let’s just jump in, shall we?

The first thing I noticed about Sweet Tea Company is the vibrancy of the shop. The banner is bright and engaging and the design elements are very pleasing and suit the shop theme. The slogan, ‘refreshing designs for cool people’ is catchy and memorable. So memorable that I could have sworn I had heard it before but some intense Googling didn’t turn anything up so it’s just THAT memorable!

Read More

Today was supposed to feature a review of another Etsy seller. Unfortunately, while in the midst of transferring an oil painting today from my easel to the appropriate drying spot on the wall, I tripped over my cat, the painting fell out of my hands and you can guess what happened next. I have spent my day cleaning up the results and just have not had a chance to type of the review yet. As such, I’m going to skip the review for today and will post it instead on Tuesday, the next one after that on Thursday and then will be caught up next weekend!

As for the painting, it’s toast, which is really sad as it was my first oil painting but I’m going to work on another this week! I don’t give up that easily. Right now, though, I’m going to relax and try not to think about how much I spent cleaning my cream-colored carpet today. Thank goodness I have throw rugs everywhere!

Have you ever been looking at craft sites and come across a shop that was just filled with such potentially cute stuff but in the end you just couldn’t bring yourself to make a purchase? Sadly, there are a lot of sites out there that could do so much better in sales if only they took the same time that they use to make their creations so well and put it into their shops. I suffer from this as well and so in looking to write this review, a lot of what I am going to discuss applies to my shops as well. So let’s move on to the subject of today’s review: Bugs in Rugs on Etsy.com.

Read More

Quick Note: I apologize to those who have tried to comment but have not wanted to register. I had not realised that the need to register had been re-enabled after my last upgrade. I have corrected it and you no longer need to register to post a comment. My apologies for the inconvenience and hope you’ll try again!

Today begins a new and hopefully regular feature for my blog: reviewing other craft and art shops and products that are not mass-produced. To start with, I am going to review an easy target: Freshline Illustration and Design. Why do I say easy? Because for my first review, I’m choosing a seller and artisan that I really enjoy. Thus, it’s a pleasant review for me to write and I’ll admit up front that it is positive. I can’t promise that all reviews in the future will be positive but hopefully they will all be constructive, and artisans will need to request a review before they are featured. But for now, let’s discuss Freshline!

Read More