Newsletter May 15th 2009

[The House of Mouse]

Hi everyone and welcome to my very first newsletter!
I am looking forward to sharing my week with you.

This week has been very busy for me, it started with my brother coming
from England to visit me here in Amsterdam. Many cups of tea were
drunk and we had a lot of laughs! I miss spending time with my family
and it is a rare treat when they come to visit me.

On Tuesday we started work on refurbishing my crafting room. In fact
we are renovating the whole top floor of my home, which includes a
spare bedroom, store room, utility room and hallway. I found a
reliable builder to come and do the work for us and he has already
stripped the wallpaper, plastered the walls and repainted in both my
studio and the spare bedroom. He will be coming back next week to
finish plastering and painting the hallways and lay new flooring all
over. There are some progress photos on my blog
http://lifecraftinessandeverythingelse.blogspot.com/ I´ll be updating
it with more photos as we go.

I am also very excited to tell you that my independent website is
finally up and running. It has taken the best part of a year to
design, build and upload each listing, but I am very proud to show you
http://www.thehouseofmouse.co.uk in all it´s finished glory! I want to
say a big thank you to Ben at http://houseofben.net for all his
patience and expertise in building the site to my design. (Don´t
worry! I won´t be leaving Etsy, Dawanda, Artfire or any of my other
online homes)

On May 1st I announced on my blog that I would be giving readers the
chance to win a free mouse from my store every month for the next
year. I am totally astounded by how many entries there are already
(0ver 400 so far) that I am considering offering more than one prize
next month. If you haven´t entered yet now´s your chance
http://lifecraftinessandeverythingelse.blogspot.com/2009/05/may-giveaway.html

Finally I signed up to join Tim Adams Etsy Secrets site, because I
have learned a great deal from Tim already and I know I can learn
more. Tim has created his own website on creating a successful Etsy
store, it has forums, videos and how tos. He has also created books on
promoting your store and that all important traffic for more sales. If
you would like to learn about Etsy Secrets you can go here
http://www.etsysecrets.com/secrets.html

Thanks for reading! I wish you all a very good weekend and a
productive week to come!

Anna Greaves
The House of Mouse