And WHY, after all these years, are animated GIFs still required to look like horrible cheesy relics of the 90s? You’d think they would have invented a GIF that can have over 256 colors… ah well. Yes, I know Flash exists, but Flash is for sissies. (Oh! Remember those random horrible “Under Construction” GIFs plastered all over every up-and-coming web site in the 90s? Including mine…)

Oh God.

I (Actually, my dad) did succeed in solving a long-time frustration regarding the name “Jadefrolics,” though! Years back I was dumb enough to let jadefrolics.com expire, after which a domain hoarding company immediately snatched it up and started using it for random ad garbage. Rather than going into the whole boring story, the good news is that my dad signed up for an expired domain-grabbing company himself and got it back! Now  jadefrolics.com is mine again (it will have to be pried form my cold, dead appendages) so I’d like to ask anyone who is linking to the site from jadefrolics.net / blog.jadefrolics.net to update their links to jadefrolics.com / blog.jadefrolics.com! Woohoo!

I also tweaked my logo a bit, just to make it a bit more polished. I didn’t like the irises and position of the eyes in the old logo, and I thought the eyelashes were too garbled when shrunk. I’ve given it some slight changes and just general editing.

Old Logo (Above)

New Logo (Above)

I’ve also been delighted with the shiny-candy icons the Mac uses, so for fun I decided to make a shiny cat in Illustrator. While looking for inspiration on logos I found this awesome tutorial on how to recreate the Firefox logo, which is really fun to read about– though it uses Photoshop rather than Illustrator.

My last update for the site so far was to create a commission request form, so potential clients could give good, organized information and also to weed out serious requests from, er, not so serious ones ;). I used JotForm.com for this and integrated it into the site. It was really easy to do, if anyone else is looking for a form builder to stop spam and keep organized!

I wanted on the bandwagon too, so I’m offering:

* Free shipping on all my dolls
* 20% off orders up to $25 and
* 30% off orders over $25.

At my Etsy Shop

Sweet! Let me know what sales you have going on too, and I’ll check them out!

Here’s some stuff I came up with when typing “Yart Sale Cat” into Etsy’s search. Weeee!

:) ;) :( :D :o

(I was hoping they would at least keep the samples…)

But seriously, the first rejection is a major achievment, since it means I actually sent something out to begin with. I just might frame this rejection letter as a sign that I am now an OFFICIAL aspiring-hopeful-wannabe children’s book Author/Illustrator. Woohoo!

I’m working on some dolls to get ready to open an Etsy shop… here’s a peek at my first one! Also I think I am going to start a series of posts about the journey to become an Etsy seller… where everyone can witness either the slow rise to success or the plunge into ceaseless obscurity! :}

I’ve also been trying to think of ways for this blog to be helpful to other people, so I’d like to start posting How-To guides, maybe starting with how to make a doll (my way, at least) in case anyone was interested.

That is all.

Hooray!

Check it out here.