Howdy from HotTexas

I dont know about yall but I cannot handle the heat and the drought!  It makes me lazy and sweaty, two combinations that I cannot abide.  Only good thing is we havent had skeeters  down in Houston this summer.  Yea!

I m sure other parts of our glorious state are green and lush  ( or arid and dry) depending on if You are east or west Texan.    Our State has so many different geographic locales!  We are all gearing up for our fall shows in our local areas, you may get a chance to visit our booths in a nearby town.  We would love to meet ya and have a big iced tea! 

I know that I m doing Shows in Humble  at the Civic Center  Sept 15th weekend and New Caney 11/12th  this fall.  I d love it if our other members would post where they will be in the comment section for our readers to find us this fall.  We would love to meet you and show you our hand crafted items.  ( I bought a pen from Scott last year at one of the shows we did together, earrings from Heather  and I still love them!!)  Workmanship is even better in person. 

Come on yall post your shows!!

What good is a blog If we dont Update it???

I would like to say we are simply showing yall how not to do things in a funny offhand way, but honestly as a Texan, I cant lie to yall.

I been under the weather. Sick as a dog, my hand went kaput  and I had to have surgery to repair nerves in the wrist and hand.  and Dr Doofus left the stitches in on to of the nerves he pulled back so it took extra long to heal.  A month of  waiting to get worked on, a month of healing and two months of checking back of oopsy... I aint a happy camper.   So here I sit, voiceless, saleless, frustrated and unable to list, take pictures and motivate my guild into action.  What a spring!   I had to talk my Mr Man into vacumming or emptying the dishwasher LOL.


For those of you who sell online, you can imagine what not using your dominant hand for four months is like. No keyboard, no listing, emails, replies, packaging, creating, photographs, editing and so on.

 For those of you who buy online, you might think we just whip this stuff together and have it sitting in boxes around our houses or studios. Ready to go.  We have to carefully count, process, print, package your beautiful item and tote it off to the post office. 

(small part of studio)

 I have a studio of supplies ( 3000 jars and trays) all are very tightly sealed  and storage of my 300 pieces of made jewely In zippered bags no less, plus all my work benches and tools. ( ah the joy to create has come back even if I cant hold a hammer yet!!)


Thus endeth my blogger of the day... boring or not...

Cow Girl Up... Rodeo Time Who has a chili recipe??

It is Rodeo time down here in Houston.... in between freak outs because it got cold for a couple of days, we have chili cook offs for the Livestock show and rodeos in Humble and Houston. 

I Never Ever make my chili the same way twice so I couldnt say what mine is.. prolly boring.   But I d like to hear yalls ..even yall northern folks and especially the folks to the west of us.  I heard NM and AZ has  some special kind of heat in their chilis.

We have a winner!!

Our guild Contest has come to an end..


we had five entrants who answered the question of which six flags flew over the Great State of Texas over a Five hundred year period... and which shops were flying these flags.  It took some detective work...

Lisa P is our winner!

We want to thank the other entrants: AndreaTJewelry was the qucikest entrant, Glasstastic Treasures, ValDawn, Jitme, and of course Lisa.  Thank you all who took time to learn about our heritage and our arts in our studios!  Yall come back, now ya here?

Tutorial: Personalize Your ArtFire Collection Widget

The ArtFire Collection Widget is a great tool for embedding a collection on your web-site.

Have you ever noticed the link in the center of the Collection widget footer? If you click on the link, it returns a search of ArtFire items with that tag. Wouldn't it be great if you could relate that search to your Collection theme? Well, you can.

This example reads "Handmade Gifts" and clicking the link will take you to an ArtFire search for "Gifts".

But this collection happened to be a Texas ArtFire Guild collection and I prefer to have the link bring up a search of Texas ArtFire Guild Members items.

Instead of pasting the code directly to my blog post I paste it first to a NotePad document. Don't try to use a Word document because it will really mess things up.

This is what the last line of the original code for my collection widget looks like:

This is another example of what the last line of your widget code could look like:

All I need to do is replace the original search information: modules.php?name=gift_hub
with the search term I want to use which is:
texasartfire.

I also want to change the link title to display "More Selections from Texas ArtFire Guild". So I need to replace the words:
Handmade Gifts
with
More Selections from Texas ArtFire Guild . 

This is what the code looks like after I made my corrections:

And this is what the footer of the collection looks like.

If you want to see the link in action, check out my blog post "God Blessed Texas Collection".

I have several tutorials on my blog. Click here for the Tutorial list page.

I also take suggestions for Tutorial topics. You can leave your suggestion in the comments.

God Blessed Texas

Curated By: JewelrybyCher...

ArtFire.com

Handmade Gifts

Time is ...

Time is Running Out....to enter our contest.

You don't have to be an artfire member to participate in the contest.

Yee Haw Happy New Year Yall!! Its our Contest time!!!!

Rose Pen Hand Turned and carved From JmMCoy

Earrings from TheGemmedGiraffe



Individualized carved key chain from CNewcomb

 
Contest 

As yall know, our guild is becoming more vibrant and active, so we thought we would do a little contest to set things off for the New Year.


Our Guild Roster

 

Our members are participating in a scavenger hunt of sorts and we have fabulous prizes for the winner!   It's a collection of products from some our talented and generous Texans.

The way this works is YOU have to find the six flags that flew over Texas in our rebellious past.  They are flying as a widget/flag in the front page of 6 shops out of all of our guild members.  See roster here.    You have to submit your answers to us by January 31st.

BUT they have to be in order and which shop is flying that particular flag  (ie  cctexan3  _____flag) IN CHRONOLOGICAL ORDER.  So I reckon yall are going to learn a little Texas history while you are at it. 

Submissions should go to the Guildmaster in Artfire

We will keep them and  if there are more than one correct answer, we will randomize the submissions and let the computer draw the winner.

Please feel free to blog about this in your own blogs and twitters and facebook, we love attention!  let us know who you are and we will try to follow yall in kind.

We wish you a Happy and Prosperous New Year!  God Bless Texas!!







lampwork and black beaded cha cha bracelet from cctexan3

Hemp Dog Collar from SonoraKays

Update on our Texas Contest for January

Final touches are being made for the contest!!

we need a widget maker badly! I cannot do widgets for the studios.  please email me via my artfire studio
http://www.cctexan2.artfire.com/   if you can be our superhero! thanks