Week 3: YouTube, Books, Earrings & An Ongoing Lack of Teeth

Bit of a weird week, this week. I recently bought a video camera for YouTubing. I saw the Sony ZV-1 recommended in a few places. It's several years old now but still a very popular choice, and I managed to get a second hand one in very good condition.
 I picked up a couple of very cheap tripods, a memory card, and a couple of spare batteries, and along with a lamp I bought several years ago (and basically never used, until recently, with a small tabletop tripod), I now have something approaching a usable setup that I can quickly move around, and that should allow me to film several hours of content.

I was planning to have a mid-week shop drop, for the second time ever. I've historically always done Saturday evenings. Given how busy I've seen the city on weekends lately, I thought this might be a poor choice, and wanted to experiment with a weekday evening. I picked Thursday: as late as possible in the week, before hitting Friday night party time.

Since I moved last year, I also stopped sending out advance notice for my shop drops. I don't like having a lot of email notifications. Buuuut when I conducted a poll a few years back, most people did want advance notice. So I decided to get back into that habit, and started my week by composing the mailing list email.

I wanted to get one more book finished for the drop. I also thought that I should definitely have a detailed book video on my channel, since that's where I started and they still represent my best work. So I spent the rest of my Monday learning a bit about how to setup the camera, customise the buttons, and also a little bit about shutter speed and exposure.

I had a bit of a crisis of confidence though. A book is a BIG build, and filming everything would slow me down a lot. And also I had to contend with the leafblower guy, and the maintenance lady vacuuming the hallways, so it didn't seem practical to film, when I had to work to the shop drop deadline.

SO. No film. But still, BOOK.

I had already done one classic style book the previous week. I wanted something big and bold, but relatively easy to execute. So I began preparing the Split Maw design. Two rows of teeth, as big as possible for the most outlandish appearance. I pulled out my collection of sorted teeth...

...and realised that I didn't have any big enough. Only one tub of 'large' and even those are of the size I would historically have classed as 'medium'. But they were the largest I had.

Those who follow my instagram closely might recognise this image from late last year:

Where I sorted through a huuuuge proportion of my stock of teeth, in order to find the biggest and best for a very interesting couple of commissions. Someone wanted me to make cases for a pair of sketchbooks, both of which were double the largest size to which I usually work. I've already posted one of the videos, but the second case and and associated photos still haven't been shared publicly.

As you can see, a LOT of teeth, and a lot of BIG teeth. Which left me rather lacking. Soooooooooooooo I had to spend the remainder of my Monday and the first half of Tuesday sorting through the remaining pile, removing any broken pieces, and trying to find all the biggest specimens for the new book.

And then of course, sorting those by size as well.

This left me with two and a half days to make the cover for the new book, finish off any remaining listings I wanted for the shop drop, and write the final drop shop email (to be sent at the moment of the drop). TOTALLY DOABLE AND NOT AT ALL STRESSFUL.

By the end of Wednesday I'd gotten this far:

While the start of this design is quite time consuming, the final enskinification usually goes pretty quick - it's just four horizontal pieces that overlap quite simply. But I'd unknowingly picked the toughest leather in my stock. It took the entire morning to skin the thing, plus a chunk of the afternoon to trim and wrap it.

As of writing, it's still unfinished. But I got it to the point where I could slip the pages in and pretend it was finished, for the photos.

I hastily wrote out my shop drop email, unpacked a new leather order, and cut a bunch of earrings in additional colours. I thought I might as well cut several while I had the laser cutter set up, but I was in such a rush that I left most of them on the bed.

I got them listed about 10 minutes past the official drop time. And no one bought any anyway! But, these were always intended to be simple items with higher profit margins (I barely make minimum wage on my complicated builds) that I could list on Etsy and hopefully generate some passive orders. So I'm happy to have them done, regardless.

I wanted to use Friday to pack orders and catch up on admin tasks - editing videos and reviving my Etsy - and get another earring design done. Foolish, to think I could do so much in one day.

I did get most of my videos done. No small task now: Tiktok requires 60+ seconds for monetisation, but shorter videos do better on Instagram, and Bluesky only accepts videos shorter than 60 seconds anyway. And has a different aspect ratio. So I have three versions of every video: long, short, and short landscape.

Posting orders was a bit of a nightmare. I have found UPS to be very reliable, but their website is always pretty janky. I couldn't get it to complete an order regardless of which browser I used, so I ended up booking with DHL. Which cost 50% extra, but I had to drop the parcel off myself. And when I got there, the clerk made me unwrap the whole thing right down to the book, ruining my pretty monster packaging. So I took it home again and I'm hoping UPS fix their website over the weekend.

And I guess I'll be spending Monday next week doing the admin.

In writing this out, I have of course realised that the evening for me is actually lunchtime for America, which is where the majority of my custom comes from. So what I actually did was move my shop drop from Saturday lunchtime, when most people will be free, to Thursday lunchtime, when most people will be at work. Good job, self.

At least writing this Patreon article has allowed me to reflect on this, and realise my mistake. I'm already a bit tired of writing for it, but it clearly has some benefit. This is all pretty experimental right now; in a month or two I'll assess and decide whether or not this is an acceptable timesink.