Made With Love by Kat

Fabulous news came via email today - a gallery in Liverpool wants to stock my jewellery in the run up to Christmas... Hi Kat, My name is Jo Moore; I'm the Gallery Coordinator at the Bridewell Gallery in Liverpool. I found your work through my friend Dan (he joined your group on Facebook ). I'm currently putting together our successful annual Christmas show and have been desperately seeking high quality jewellery to include. I really like your work, and I wondered if you might be interested in participating? The exhibition itself runs from 6th - 19th December, opening on the 6th with a Christmas market. All pieces are for sale, and there is no charge for participation (although we do take 25% commission on sales). Let me know asap if you're interested. We're scheduling drop-offs for early next week, although there is some flexibility to that. Thanks, Jo Moore Gallery Coordinator, The Bridewell Gallery Very excited, now I'm just waiting to hear back about more detail...

Review: Guerrilla Marketing by Jay Conrad Levinson (Piatkus Books: Fourth Edition), £10.99 Jay Levinson is a marketing hero. His guerrilla marketing books and website have become a must-read for any small business owner hoping to boost sales. The latest edition of his classic guide is no different - the new section on e-marketing is particularly useful for anyone with a budget of zero pennies. The book is broken up into easy to understand sections, provides practical tips, and avoids that irritating "motivational" talk that mars so many business books. Whether you intend to read it cover-to-cover or just use it to dip in when you're boosting a particular area of your marketing strategy, the new edition of Guerrilla Marketing will maintain Levinson's reputation for some time to come. Unfortunately, it means my to do list is significantly longer... - Make signs for bulletin boards - Opt-in offers for mailing list - Find stuff for newsletter - Consider writing e-zine -D...

The blog, the Etsy shop , Flickr , Twitter and the Facebook group - I've been sat here for hours now obsessively joining groups, making contacts, blah blah blah. It's gone midnight in Bolton and time to go to bed. Unfortunately, bedtime reading is Jay Levinson's Guerrilla Marketing. Well I guess if you're going to do something, you might as well do it properly.

Like a vintage-obsessed Clark Kent, when I'm not indulging my ego as a jewellery-making entrepreneur, I'm a working journalist. Mostly I write about music and the arts, but at Uni I specialised in fashion journalism. Now I've been on the receiving end of a lot of press releases - good and bad. And now the shop is functioning, this weekend I need to get cracking on the Made With Love releases. But to be helpful, I thought I'd share some dos and dont's when it comes to writing your own press releases - from a journalist's perspective. This is the most important thing I can tell you - look for a news angle. Your mere existence does not constitute news and does not entitle you to a feature - you have to find a hook. Being local or new (or, better, local and new) is always a good start, but also look at how you fit in with current fashion trends, consider what makes your product unique or highlight something exciting you've done recently. Having a sale or speci...

Thanks for the lovely comments on Facebook guys (you know who you are). It's heartwarming to see blokes with such good taste in jewellery. My Etsy shop is now up and running! You can buy the "Autumn" necklace I posted a picture of yesterday, here . All the prices on there are in dollars, which I know is confusing if you're in the UK. The exchange rate today is 1.5 dollars to the pound, so $35 is £22.78. You can buy the "Sparkle" necklace here . Anyhow, a couple more wee pics I think, sorry if they're a bit fuzzy... Coming later: Press releases - a journalist's view

So it's only day two, and already I'm panicking. The stuff on Etsy looks so posh. I'm deliberately trying to keep costs down because I think people should be able to buy lovely, unusual things for less than eighty quid, but will the customers think the same? To add insult to injury, I'm so poor I can't even set up my Etsy seller account until tomorrow. Time to learn some patience I suppose, damn being part of the MTV generation. Anyway, in the meantime I'm going to set about drafting a press release for the local media - hopefully they'll be interested in writing something about this little project. Confession time - I do have a head start, being a journalist myself. But will that mean I manage to get any coverage? Must stop biting my nails. On the plus side, it's only two and a half days 'til I go to the Christmas market in Manchester...

"Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness" Here are a couple of the first necklaces I've made. I've gone for a "patchwork" effect on the chains, something which I intend to make a feature of all the forthcoming collections one way or another. A glance through the marvellous website Etsy suggests that romantic names for each design are smiled upon, so I've named these Sparkle (for obvious reasons) and Autumn (as an homage to the Keats poem). I'm going to be setting up my Etsy shop sometime later today, and adding to it as I get the proper photographs through. According to the marketing advice helpfully provided by Etsy's Storque magazine I need to get people interested in this blog - this is where you come in. It's a simple swap - link to me from your blog and I'll put a link to you on mine. And as a bit of an incentive to go a bit furtehr I'll offer a special 10% discount to anyone who gives me a good-sized mention through a blog, ne...

OK, so last year at the Edinburgh Festival I saw some really, really beautiful bracelets. They were made out of old vintage brooches, beads, pearls and various bits and bobs. They were also incredibly expensive. I thought to myself - how hard can it be? I bet I could do that. Then, like most ideas (at the time I also decided it would be a nice idea to write a stageplay, and the sketch show my friend Luke and I keep chatting about never seems to happen), it faded into the background. But there's a recession on, as we keep being told, and the idea of making pretty, unique jewellery as Christmas presents was very tempting. So a year and a half after the initial idea, I finally got hold of some vintage jewellery, dismantled some jewellery of my own, and fashioned a charm bracelet - I'll find a pic as soon as poss. Then I thought, I wonder if other people would like what I do? I wonder if other people are sick of paying bumped up prices just to have something that you can't buy ...