Canadian Rockies Art

Artfire’s “Etsy Listings Importer” ROCKS!!!

I am IN LOVE!!!! IN LOVE!!! IN LOVE!!!

Yes, I am screaming it out loud so you can all hear me!

I’m totally in love with the team of developers at Artfire! My gosh, these people are the best of the best!!!

Read on:

When I heard yesterday that Artfire’s brand new tool, the Etsy Listing Importer had launched, I had to try it immediately, and without a glitch, I have managed to import over 100 listings from my main Etsy shop into my Canadian Rockies Art Artfire Shop in less than 15 minutes in total.

I nearly fell off my chair!

Now, get this – In the past, I just didn't have the time or heart to manually copy-paste all my Etsy listings into my other online selling venues, but now that Artfire has come out with this super awesome "Item Importer" tool, they took all that tedious work away from me!

I just want to give one GIANT hug

to the Artfire team of developers!!!

Can you imagine the time saver that this is???

Have you stopped to think about this for a single minute? Time is money, you know!

It used to normally take me about 15 minutes to list ONE SINGLE ITEM or copy-paste it from one site to another site, multiply that by 114 items and we're looking at 28 1/2 HOURS at a minimum to manually copy over all my Etsy listings into Artfire or anywhere else online.... ouch!

Who has that kind of time?

I sure as heck don’t, and I’m sure you don’t either!

But this is just ONE of MANY super awesome tools that Artfire has been launching lately for their VERIFIED members (US$12.00 per month flat Pro membership rate, no listing fees, no commissions to pay, no selling fees, nothing!) - Look here:

Do you want to be able to offer Amazon Checkout, Google Checkout, and RME (Revolution Money Exchange) on top of Paypal as payment options for your buyers? All of these are INTEGRATED into ArtFire, no workarounds needed!

Do you want a very neat FaceBook Artfire Storefront Module for your FaceBook Page to promote your shop?

Do you want hassle-free coupon discount codes to give to your customers?

Do you want to offer gift certificates for the holidays?

You don’t want to have to send "revised invoices" to buyers to apply the discounts they are claiming from you, right?

Artfire gives you automatic coupon codes that buyers can use during the checkout process, and so your clients can checkout right away and pay right away, and there’s no need for “workarounds” (i.e. the buyer waiting for you to send them a revised invoice like we have to do on Etsy).

And that’s not all, on Artfire, if you sign up as a VERIFIED member ($12.00 per month), you get UNLIMITED listings, full custom Fusion Studio like mine (you can customize your storefront with your own colors and layout!), there’s more and more handmade buyers and sellers visiting ArtFire every month (if you look at traffic stats that some specialized traffic sites compile, Artfire is coming up VERY FAST), and they have really AWESOME STAFF and THE BEST CUSTOMER SERVICE. They really rock!

The Holiday Shopping Season is starting up now – What are you waiting for?

Get all of your items from Etsy uploaded into your brand new Artfire Shop in MINUTES by signing up right here! I’m so glad I did!!!

Discontinuing the Tuesday Video Breaks

Well folks, as much as I love listening to music and sharing some of my favorite videos here with you all, it's just too time consuming to try to find versions of my favorite videos that don't have the embedding disabled on YouTube.

I understand some of the reasoning behind blocking people from embedding music videos, but by enabling embedding of the videos, it also enables fans like me to spread the word about our favorite artists and favorite songs - that's advertising for those artists. If I really love someone's music, I want everybody to know about this person's music and help them make more sales, and help revive some of our old favorites, etc.

But I find it harder and harder to find videos that I can feature here, so I've decided to stop altogether. I don't have an hour to waste each week trying to find one that the coding is ok. Sad, but I've got better things to do.

Speaking of which, I have a long to-do list, so I better get to it. Have a super day everybody! Don't forget to listen to your favorite tunes :)

New Work

Happy Sunday!

I finally managed to get my pictures done for the new pieces I’ve been working on this past week. I will be listing these in my Etsy shop shortly. If you want one of these before I have time to list them all, just shoot me a convo!

I’ve had this design in my head for a year (yup!) and I had purchased these great rounded square copper blanks to stamp, and never took the time to actually put the design together until this past week. I’m happy to have finally freed up a few of my brain cells, since they won’t have to remember the design.

And, yes, I use a design journal, but I don’t have time to jot down all the ideas that scroll around in my head. Since that one was simple enough, I just held on to it in my coconut :)

OOAK Double chain links Copper Bracelet stamped with

the Chinese symbols "Family, Love, Happiness"

Soon to be listed in my Canadian Rockies Etsy Shop :)

I’ve had this gorgeous sort of grayish moss green huge Picture Jasper cab for about a year as well, and I knew what I wanted to do with it, but again, just never got around to doing it. So yesterday I made it, and I really love how the LOS Gel patina turned out on it.

I decided to leave the LOS Gel patina on it “as is” aside from just polishing off the 3 organic dots at the top-center. The patina took on some of the colors in the stone – some really beautiful greenish-blue and rustic gold-copper colors developed on the bezel and also along the chain as well, I had to leave it as is. It’s easier to see the patina colors in the picture here (look down from the top) – it’s really gorgeous in person. You can see some of the blues, greens and rust colors in the patina here:

And here’s the pendant from the front – it’s a big one - I sooo wanna keep it for myself:

Suspended on a heavy 22” sterling silver chain

(I can shorten it upon request)

Soon to be listed in my Canadian Rockies Etsy shop :)

I also worked on this rustic Unisex Necklace – perfect for guys and gals!

I have some really cool Rock Crystals that totally look like chunks of melting ice cubes. I really love these and so I made this necklace using a very cool (Vegan-friendly!) thick Neoprene 18” Mocha color sterling silver necklace and just did a rustic sterling silver wrap on it:

Soon to be listed in my Canadian Rockies Etsy shop :)

Then, I also worked on this new Copper Cuff bracelet. I’ve stamped a different phrase on it than on the other one I made the previous week (which sold quickly and I can do custom orders for it as well – the one that sold said in Latin “Love is the essence of Life”)…

This one here is stamped in English with my custom font and says:

“May Stars Always Guide Your Way”

Soon to be listed in my Canadian Rockies Etsy shop :)

 

And last, but certainly not least – I also made a rustic Turquoise ring in Sterling Silver with a Fine Silver bezel. I recently watched Lisa’s bezel settings tutorials on her blog and decided to give a shot to make this style of rustic rings. If you love Turquoise and Rustic, you will most likely be enjoying this beauty:

Size 7.25 (7 1/4) - Soon to be listed in my Canadian Rockies Etsy shop :)

Phew! That’s it for today my dears!

It’s almost time for me to do my pre-dinner Turbo Jam workout, but I want to set up at least one or two listings in my shop for now. I’ll do the rest later. Toodles!

Got my Food Dehydrator! Yahooo!

It’s Christmas for us today! This is my Christmas present – we decided to get our gifts now, and I’ll explain why in a minute.

Mine is one like this great Nesco Food Dehydrator – mine comes with 5 trays and I can add more, up to 12 trays, and it has a 700 watts motor on it:

 

As some of you may know by now, I’m extremely sensitive to certain things like chemicals and pesticides that are commonly used on fruits and vegetable crops, and I’m extremely allergic to Soy/soybeans and Tofu and all Soy by-products (such as Soy Lecithin, Soy Flour, Soybean Oil, Soy nuts, etc).

Unfortunately, soy and soy by-products are added into all sorts of commercial foods (from pasta sauce to deserts, chocolates, etc…) it’s really incredible to see where you can find this stuff when you start to read food labels. Having that stuff in about 90% of all commercial food products, means that I cannot eat those  things unless I’m in the mood to end up with an allergic reaction.

Allergic reactions to Soy and Soy by-products vary quite a bit, and go far beyond the intestinal troubles that one might think of when talking about food allergies. I’ve had everything from breaking out with hives, nausea, dizziness, rhinitis,  diarrhea, severe (very painful) stomach cramping,  etc. It’s really not pleasant and believe you me that I do everything in my power to avoid the stuff like the plague.

And since I’ve been avoiding the stuff, it’s funny how my “allergies” (seasonal stuff like Hay Fever, etc) have totally disappeared. If I eat something with soy lecithin in it, my nose starts to run within an hour and I start sneezing and blowing my nose, and I’m thinking that all these years of misery with “allergies” were in fact a problem pretty much with one single allergen: Soy.

How much money have I spent buying anti-histamines and taking them day in and day out for months at a time. I couldn’t function without the allergy meds, and I couldn’t function with them either (even non-drowsy allergy meds knock me out cold, they make me soooo sleepy it’s not funny).

I was miserable for ALL of my life, and earlier this year I successfully did the 30-day Go-Veg pledge from PETA for the month of January, and I was eating fresh foods and non of the usual commercial stuff and all my allergies totally VANISHED. Since then, I've remained about 70% octo-lavo vegetarian in my diet, and I really feel a difference (better) the less meat I eat (which, I'm sure also has to do with all the hormones, etc they pump into the poor animals).

I know for sure that I’m not the only person on this planet with allergies like this, and I’m wondering how many people think they have ‘indoor’ allergies (allergies to dust or pets, etc) or seasonal allergies, when they might be plagued with allergies to soy and soy by-products without even realising it!

It took me over 40 years to figure it out. That stuff is everywhere, it’s so hard to figure out what causes certain problems, and now I feel so much better from being rid of the stuff. It’s a definite improvement.

Anyway, wow, talk about taking the long way home to talk about my Christmas gift. I have a small organic garden in the backyard, and even with the nasty weather we’ve had this summer, I still managed to get a good amount of vegetables, including a few hundred tomatoes at least. And as nice as it is to make home made ketchup with them, it still doesn’t use up the bulk of the tomatoes mom and I collected a few days ago (some are ripening on our window sills and looking great.

So, I decided that a food dehydrator would be really nice to have – I can dehydrate my tomatoes, and then pulse some of it in my Magic Bullet to make a powder and use that as a base to make home made creamy tomato soup (the commercial tomato soups I can put my hands on all have soy lecithin, so I cannot eat them or cook with them). So now, I will be able to make my own fresh cream of tomato from scratch and not have allergic reactions.

I will also be able to dehydrate beautiful mushrooms and make home made cream of mushroom soup and use that to make dinner casseroles too (again, commercial canned cream of mushroom soups have soy lecithin in them so I haven’t been able to use that since the beginning of the year).

I also grow strawberries (I discovered I’m allergic to the chemicals and pesticides that they spray on strawberries – so my organic berries are safe for me to eat and I can dehydrate some of them and use them in muffins and cereals).

This food dehydrator will definitely be a great way for me to be able to by-pass the commercial food products and eat more safely and avoid the nasty allergic reactions I’ve been having in the past.

So, now you know why I am SO HAPPY and THRILLED to have this gift. We figured it would be kind of useless for me to get it in the middle of winter, at least by getting it now, I can process all my garden tomatoes and make all sorts of things, including some nice (different) home made soups, lentil stews,  and all sorts of sauces with my dried tomatoes.

So, “Merry Christmas to me” !!!!

(I’ll tell you about my husband’s gift in a separate post – this one is getting too long as it is!)

TGIF!!! Have a super evening everybody! I’ll be dehydrating a batch of tomatoes tomorrow. I’ll let you know how it goes :)

Love – A Poem by Nathalie Girard

 

Tranquility – Photography by Nathalie Girard

Love

by Nathalie Girard

Love…

Like a soft warm ocean breeze,

You gently whisper in my ear:

Open your heart…

Believe…

Embrace…

Let go…

Allow me to touch your soul,

Allow me to heal your pain,

Allow me to give you wings,

Allow me to bring you joy.

For I am love.

For I am yours.

Forever.

 

- Copyright 2009, All Rights Reserved Nathalie Girard

Tuesday Video Break – Perry Como & Dean Martin… Sway

I absolutely LOVE listening to “the famous crooners” of yesteryear. I grew up listening to them since my parents were big fans, and here’s two of my favorite guys, Perry Como & Dean Martin each singing their version of “Sway”… enjoy!

Which one do you prefer? Perry or Dino?

Let me know in your comments below!

Recipe – Homemade Fruit Ketchup

Good morning!

It’s a lovely bright warm summer (ok, Fall) day here in Calgary, and as promised on the weekend, I have taken pictures of some of my jars of homemade fruit ketchup and I’m going to share the recipe here today.

I was telling Lisa yesterday that she was brave to put up a picture of herself in her jammies first thing in the morning on her blog. I’m not quite that brave (and I don't want to blind anybody, really! hahaha), but here’s a picture of me first thing this morning (in the glaring sun) holding a few jars of my ketchup…  Hi Lisa! (I don’t think you’d want to see me in my jammies, but shorts and T-shirt will do I hope! LOL) – I’m awake, but the sun is really bright so I'm squinting...sorry! :

And here’s a picture of a few jars of that delicious ketchup and a few of my organic garden tomatoes… yummo!!!

Don’t these look delicious? :o)

Now, let me teach you how to make some… it’s easy! It’s a traditional fruit ketchup that we do in Quebec. You can’t buy this in stores, although there is a company that sells it in Quebec (Habitant ketchup - not sure if they still do or not) which is somewhat of a commercial version of this, but I’ve never seen it sold outside of Quebec, and really, there’s nothing better tasting than the “homemade” version anyway. This recipe is from one of my old Quebec recipe books that dates back to 1978, but it's the same recipe that my grand-ma used to make when my mom was little (so, over 70 years ago).

So get out your chopping block, and let’s make a batch!

HOMEMADE FRENCH CANADIAN FRUIT KETCHUP

Ingredients:

10 red tomatoes

3 ripe peaches (you can also used ‘canned’ in their own juice or water)

3 ripe pears (you can also used ‘canned’ in their own juice or water)

2 onions, medium to large size, or 3 medium size

6 red apples, peeled & core removed (any kind will do)

1 sweet green pepper, large size

1 sweet red pepper, large size

2 stalks of celery, no leaves

2 cups of white granulated sugar

2 Tablespoons of salt

1 cup of white vinegar

1/2 a teaspoon of “mixed spices” *

(Note*: Mixed spices = a pinch of “all spice” + a pinch of “cinnamon” + a pinch of “nutmeg”)

Instructions:

You will need the following:

1 large stockpot (to cook your ketchup in)

1 large pot with boiling water  to blanch your tomatoes in.

1 cutting knife

1 cutting board

1 large mixing bowl to put in your cut fruits and veggies

1 mixing bowl to put in ‘garbage’ (I’ll explain below).

1 measuring cup (for the sugar and vinegar)

Some small measuring spoons.

How to make the ketchup:

1) Blanch the tomatoes in hot water to remove the skin. While you wait for the water to boil on the stove before putting in your tomatoes, you can set up your cutting station at your kitchen table:

I take my cutting board, my small sharp knife, and my 2 mixing bowls to the table. I use the larger mixing bowl to put in all the fruits and veggies that I cut up in medium bite size pieces. The 2nd mixing bowl is for putting garbage in (skins of apples, seeds from the sweet peppers, etc… ). That keeps my cutting board clean and it’s easy to just get rid of the garbage when it’s all in a bowl – like Rachel Ray does on her 30-minutes meal show (she uses a mixing bowl as her temporary garbage bin on her kitchen counter).

Blanch your tomatoes (click on the link to see step-by-step pictures I found on a site, if you don’t know how to blanch tomatoes, but only remove the skin – don’t remove the seeds). Set aside in the big stock pot where we will cook the ketchup. Don’t start the cooking process yet. Blanching tomatoes is necessary to prevent botulism when canning tomatoes, and it’s the easiest way to remove the skin – but be careful not to burn yourself. Tomatoes get really hot inside when they’ve been in boiling water. Once your tomatoes are skinless, chop them up in bite size chunks.

2) Wash, then peel and seed your fruits and vegetables. Chop them up in nice bite size chunks, and accumulate them in your large mixing bowl. (I turn on the TV in the living room – I can watch it from the kitchen table while chopping away… it’s a lot of peeling and chopping, so might as well put on something to watch while I’m at it!). Add your prepared fruits and veggies to the large stockpot where the tomatoes are waiting for you.

3) Add in the rest of the ingredients (sugar, vinegar, salt, spices), stir with a wood or plastic spoon and start the cooking process on “Medium-Low” (once it start boiling a bit, you can put it down to “SIMMER/LOW”), uncovered (no lid), then from that time, let it cook very slowly, uncovered, on “simmer-low” for a good 2 hours… and stir occasionally.

Then you’re ready to can your fruit ketchup!

The above recipe makes around 4 “1 litre jars” (the tallest mason jars), or around 6 to 7 medium size jars (not sure on the actual size), all depending how much juice your fruits and vegetables have, and also the size of your fruits and vegetables. Things vary a bit, but any extra leftover that can’t fit in the jars will be eaten up quickly anyway :)

There’s a truckload of information online for safe canning procedures, but be mindful of where you get your information – some procedures aren’t safe and you could get very sick.

If you don’t know how to do canning, then I suggest you do a search online for SAFE CANNING procedures, or you can start by reading from this site here.

Alternatively, you can simply cut the above recipe to only do 1/3 of it, and that would give you a small enough batch that you can just store it in the fridge in a clean sterilized jar with a good sealing lid on it, and as long as you eat it fairly quickly, then you wouldn’t have to worry about having to do a bunch of canning, etc.

Just remember to really use ‘safe’ canning & storage techniques, or else you could end up being very ill, or worse.

Enjoy!

New work, news and “Ketching” up…

Good Sunday everyone! 

“Ketching up”:

Phew! It has been a very busy week for me, and I want to first apologize for not blogging for so long. I’ve been dealing with a few personal challenges (I won’t bore you with the details) and on top of that, I’ve been busy doing stuff that you might actually be interested in :)

My mother and I have been busy making homemade fruit ketchup all week, which is an old traditional Quebec French thing to do in the Fall. It's a kind of a fruit chutney which includes apples, peaches, pears, tomatoes, celery, onions, sweet green and red peppers, and it is absolutely delicious and sweet, and you can put it on top of pretty much anything.  YUMMO!

Since we have a truckload of tomatoes and sweet peppers in our organic garden, I'm very happy to see this beautiful homemade traditional ketchup come to life with the fruits of our labour.  I can tell you that the house has been smelling so good all week – I love Fall!

I will be taking pictures of some of the pretty mason jars, and I will also post the recipe (if anyone wants to make a batch) later on this week. It’s super easy to make and it’s soooooo yummy! Stay tuned for that recipe!

New Work / News:

I have also been extremely busy working on a new line of Sterling silver pendants for my Fall 2009 jewellery collection - Here's a few pictures of some that I have made and listed so far. You can find these in the Necklace/Pendants section of my Etsy shop:

I am really having a lot of fun making these new Sterling silver pendants completely from scratch - I cut out each heart totally free-form by hand, and I am using my own custom stylized alphabet font set on these. You won't find that font anywhere else.

I really love the pendant that I am wearing every single day (mine is the one that you can see in my blog and shop banners and avatars stamped with words in Latin which stands for "Love Conquers All" - more info to come on my new graphics later on this week). I have been getting a lot of nice compliments on the pendant and the new graphic designs :)

Each pendant is unique (one of a kind) and custom orders are also welcome. I can also switch out gemstones if you like a certain pendant that is up for sale, but would like a different set of gemstones to go with it. Just convo me for your special requests!

I also made a few smaller ones in solid copper using some very cute commercial heart shaped blanks, to offer my customers a variety of price points and styles, also listed in my shop... you can see some here:

These solid copper pendants can be customized to say whatever you want (a word or two - these are not very big), and I also have all of the zodiac signs available in my stamp sets, so I can make custom zodiac charms in copper or Sterling silver. Contact me via my Canadian Rockies Etsy shop for your own special order!

Enjoy the rest of the weekend!

Wordless Wednesday – My Etsy Art Treasury

Beach Stones

Art Photography by Bwana design and photography on Etsy.

 

Vanilla Dream

Art photography by Jennifer Squires on Etsy.

 

Bottle with feather

Art photography by Alterimage Design on Etsy.

 

Visit these fine Etsy shops

by clicking on the above images – support Etsy artisans!

Cheers!

Brought to you by:

Nathalie Girard from Canadian Rockies Art on Etsy :)

Score! I made the Front Page of Etsy!

This is my 2nd time making the front page of Etsy, and well, I’m just happy, beaming, giddy, so I had to celebrate and shout about it!

Cindylouwho2, a co-member of the Alberta Team on Etsy gave me a heads up in the middle of the night via convo… without her, I would not have known cuz I was in snoozy land. Thank you for taking a screen shot for me around 5:30 AM Etsy time!

See the lovely rustic hoops on the 3rd row, on the far left? Mine :)

It’s a very pretty front page, I gotta say. I love ‘rustic’ things…

I also made the front page earlier this year and I had posted about it on my old blogger blog. That time, my Fire Copper Bangles Trio made the front page, these ones here:

I know that there’s a Flickr group (or a few of them) that feature Etsy frontpagers but I totally forget to check those and so unless someone knocks me on the head and say “Hey Nat, you’re on the front page” chances are, I will totally miss it.

And today is our wedding anniversary on top of everything. Can this day get any better? Oh yes, I’m going to go continue re-organizing my beads cuz I can’t find myself in the mess after I took everything out of my studio and revamped the whole thing – it’s still a work in progress… :)

Happy Long Weekend everybody!