I made a sale!

I just made another sale on Monday, so now I'm at 12 sales! Woo-hoo! I sold my "Margarita" necklace to a lovely woman in Austin for her wedding - and she had me make a pair of matching earrings too. If only everyone was so willing to splurge! :)

Here's what I sold, in case you don't remember (I've got a lot of positive comments about it from friends as well as Etsians):
http://www.etsy.com/view_transaction.php?transaction_id=19865212

So, time for some new stock in the shop then! I have 3 items ready to list, I just keep getting distracted. I was taking pictures of my items when I decided the light was good enough to re-take pictures for some earrings that were about to expire and needed better images.

Imagine my non-surprise when those pictures didn't turn out well. *sigh* No need to discuss my failure at a photographer once again. Nope, let's take about photo manipulation software malfunctions and crappy screens, shall we?

I have a beautiful iMac upstairs with a 21" screen - running Gimp photo manipulation software. That kind of broke my computer every time I tried to start it. So now I use my laptop for almost everything, and it has Photoshop on it. Sweet! Yesterday I decided to check out my shop on the big screen upstairs, and it was a huge slap in the face - this laptop is about 50% darker than my iMac's screen. So all the photos I've thought are too dark or washed out, I've been making better to work on my screen. But for the rest of the world, the colors are contorted into something garish. OK, only the earrings that I worked so hard on yesterday looked really bad. But it was truly startling how different everything looked on the better screen.

So it's time to break down and buy Photoshop for my iMac. I am trying to download a trial version of Photoshop Elements 6.0 to see if it meets my needs. It's 1.3GB!! I was expecting it to take awhile, but this morning when I started, it was quoting between 13-17 hours to finish downloading! I checked on it tonight and despite changing my settings so the computer wouldn't go to sleep mid-download, the connection was interrupted and the whole thing had to start over from the beginning. I am currently not a fan of this house's wireless network. One positive: now that it's downloading again, it's quoting just over 2 hours. Woo-hoo!

Anyway, wish me luck!