Holiday Gift Guide 2015

Hi everyone! 

I hope you are having a wonderful week! As there is only a month left before Christmas, I thought I would share with you my favorite handmade picks for this year. Many shops are from Montreal, so you can also buy locally if you who are big on helping out our fellow crafters. But may they be from here or around the world, all those shops are fantastic in their own way! I can tell you that I have bought from many shops here and loved their creation, it's quality and their passion for their work. 

Without any further due, please enjoy this Handmade Gift Guide for 2015! :)

1. For your mother in Law - Hand painted silk scarf by HanaKratochvil

2. For your cat loving friend - Cat sleeping mask by JulienEmilyDesign

3. For your yogi bff - Vintage Floral Tatoo Sleeve Hoodie by Ahpeele 

4. For your vintage-loving friend - Magnolia Poster by MarcadeVintagePrints

5. For your beloved sister - Berry Necklace and Earrings Set by Kirameku

6. For your friend that just moved in - Salad Servers by BlisscraftandBrazen

7. Stocking stuffers for the entire family - Natural Lip Balm by PrettyMommaBeauty

8. For your beer-loving brother - Beer Soap by EntreBullesetMoi

9. For your friend that wants to save Earth one step at the time - Eco Sponges by ToriLynnes

10. For your couple friends that are expecting - Adopt a Monster Plushie by TabbynSkates

----------

If you'd like to shop local to meet those great sellers in person, some crafters will be busy with craft show just before the Holidays! You can catch them at :

JulienEmilyDesign
Marché Casse-Noisette (November 26 till December 6) - Montreal

BlisscraftandBrazen 

One of A Kind Show (November 26 till December 6) - Toronto

Puces Des Neiges (December 11 to 13) -  Montreal

TabbynSkates

Annual Holiday Craft Fair (November 28th and 29th) at the Hudson Community Centre

Annual St. Edmunds School Holiday Craft Fair (December 5th) 115 Beaconsfield Blvd. Beaconsfield 

On this everyone, happy shopping! :)
* M *

Kirameku's website - The Wix experience

Hi everyone! :)

As many of you already know, Kirameku has now it's very own website! dances in joy
It was a very dear project of mine and I'm so proud it is finally online! Between the craft shows and getting my Black Friday promo and the Gift Guide ready this week, it suddenly hit me : although I'm super excited about this project, I shared the good news very briefly here and on my social medias.

So, I thought I could let you know about my first experience with Wix, for those of you who are interested by this platform. Many of you might have seen their Facebook ads in their newsfeed and wondered what it was all about. Briefly, if you haven't heard of Wix just yet, it is a website building platform made for everyone, using a basic drag-and-drop design method.

So, very quickly, you might ask me why I  went with Wix since I know about both Dreamweaver and Wordpress, especially with the big success and many beautiful and responsive deigns in the Wordpress platform. Well, it is very simple actually. Dreamweaver is great, but starting a website from scratch is time consuming; plus you pretty much spend most of your time fixing your design instead of taking your design further. As for Wordpress, it is gorgeous, easy to work with and it is my first choice, however, the hosting fees can get pretty high pretty quick...

With all of this in mind, I decided try out Wix, mainly because they offered free hosting. My goal for this year was to create more brand awareness for my jewelry shop but still with a very limited budget as I left more space for giveaways and goodies for you instead of spending it on administration fees.

Overall, I'm pretty happy with the service. Wix makes it easy for you to design a website even if you have no web design knowledge. It's easy to pick up from the many free templates design to get you started and go from there, upload your pics and texts. They have a very accessible SEO tool that helps you make sure your website is relevant to Google and other search engine. And, did I already mentioned free hosting? Their free account options are impressive, diverse and and you can pull off something very professional despite not paying a cent.

But....! If you are a graphic designer like me, you like having control over everything. That means that you might loose a few hairs while trying to edit the background to make the different sections into full-screen colors (wich is not possible with my template), in trying to figure out at what size you are supposed to insert the images for the full-screen slider (which took sooooo many trials), or insert a few basic HTML codes here and there. Also, you are having a hard time of selecting many items at once, so dragging complex group of text, images and lines is pretty difficult.

For me, it was worth the extra time spent figuring out how it all worked and where I could take my template's designs. But it might not be the case for you. If you want to have control over everything, go with Wordpress. If you want a simple page to start off, go for it. If you wish to know more if Wix is the right platform for you, I recommend this great article by Jeremy Wong that points out all you need to know before jumping in.

So, with all of this, would you like to try out Wix? And what do you think about Kirameku's website?
Have a lovely weekend everyone! :D
* Maxime *

Good Shepherd Craft Show & November Blues

Well hello there!

I hope you all had a marvellous week! I took a bit of time off the blog to get the last things ready for the Good Shepherd Craft show last Saturday and filling up this week on the sold goodies.

I had a wonderful time at the fair and I hope I had the chance to meet many of you! It was a special fair for me as I usually have bigger tables, and I must say 6 feet long is a bit tiny for all that I have to offer, but I believe I made the most out of it. All of you who stopped by really enjoyed my display and I'm so happy about it!

For those of you who were a bit too far to get to the fair, no worries, here's a picture of my Holiday booth...! You can also meet me at my next show at Marie-Victorin's CEGEP on November 18th. And this one will be epic, it will be the biggest table I I've booked so far - I'm so excited! - 12 feet of pure goodies, it's going to be great!

But what if you are not in Canada? No worries, you can take part in my Flash Friday Sales till the end of November and enjoy my Holiday Specials there too.

Kirameku's booth at the Good Shepherd Craft show

But despite all of this exciting news, I have a little confession to make and apologize to you dear readers. I was very excited this summer and worked on a dear project of mine, I don't know if you remember the Bridal bouquet accessory? It was supposed to be listed in late-summer, but I wasn't able to do so.

The project turned out beautifully and I'm really proud of it, but it is a very time consuming project and I ran into some supplies problems (the beads are back-order at my supplier). I'm sorry to say I have to push back this lovely item for 2016.  I'm really looking forward on a making some pieces for your wedding that you can keep with you forever. But it is as important to me to make sure that you get your orders in as soon as possible, and between managing my Etsy shop, all the custom orders I had and fairs this year; topped with us moving out and settling in, there wasn't enough time for me to do that. So I prefer to push it back till next year and focus on bridesmaids gift sets first.

But, I don't have only bad news for you today. It may be Friday 13, but let's not be superstitious. So, on a more joyful note, I hope you are slowly getting in the mood for the Holidays. Here we don't have snow just yet, which is kind of odd, but I will post winter landscapes here as soon as we will have snow in Longueuil. Never the less, I'll be putting together a Handmade Gift Guide so I can share with you all my favorite items from Etsy sellers and inspire you! I discovered many great products this year and I want to share them with you. I'll be having 10 wonderful shops featured, so please stay tuned! :D

On this everyone, have a wonderful day and happy Friday 13th!
* M *