It's probably a good thing that I didn't figure out the whole "Etsy Treasury" thing until just recently. I've had my shop open on Etsy for six months now, but finally decided to "take the plunge" and start making treasuries only in the past month or so. And I've found that it is completely addictive! It's fun to search through all the wonderful handmade items on Etsy to find "just the right ones" that fit the theme I came up with. (At the end of this post, I will present a TON of screenshots from ones I've done recently.)
Maybe I need to back up a second, and try to explain Etsy treasuries for those that have never done or seen one before. A treasury is a user created gallery of 12 items (+4 alternates) that are listed on Etsy. The buyers and sellers of Etsy get to make the choices, not the "Powers That Be" at Etsy. We get to be creative and promote handmade and vintage items to the online community. Some people list things they would like to buy, some pick items from friends or team members, some choose items that match a theme, some people even search on keywords for items from total strangers that fit their theme. However you pick the items to list, it's fun to create them, fun to look at them, and even more fun to share them.
Once I made my first treasury, I immediately thought of another idea, and then another, and...I had to start writing a list! It's not complicated to get a treasury once you know the secrets of using sites like craftopolis for their countdown clock. See, Etsy only opens up Main Treasury when the number of treasuries drops below 333. And the magic number on Treasury West is 222. So you can't just go and create one whenever you feel like it. You have to wait until the exact moment the number of current treasuries drops below the magic number. There's still some amount of suspense involved.
You check the countdown clock throughtout the day. Or you just happen to get lucky and sit down at the computer and see that it's opening soon, which is a big rush if you don't have your Poster Sketch filled in--hurry, hurry, pick some items. What was my next theme again? Where's my list? (Now "soon" can be in an hour or two, because sometimes it takes me that long to find 12-16 items to include! We all know how easy it is to get lost looking at handmade items on Etsy.)
Then you sit there, looking at the bottom of the treasury screen, waiting for the box to pop up so you can enter the (hopefully creative) title you thought of for your next treasury. It's a little like waiting for an online auction to end. This is where the adrenaline rush really kicks in. "Did I get it? Am I too slow? Did I blink and miss the box?" Then you have to make sure you type the title correctly, because you can't fix it later. A moment of hesitation...
You click the button! Did it work? Yes! Then the watching and waiting pays off. It's time to enter the beautiful items and share your choices with the Rest of the World. The only downside is that your creations only last for 2-3 days until they, too, expire and decrease the number of live treasuries. But, hey, that just means it's time to make the next one!
And now, for you viewing pleasure, some of those expired treasuries, captured forever as screenshots. (You didn't think I'd let all that hard work just disappear, did you?)
"Finer Folks You Will Never Meet"
"The People That You Meet, When You're Sending Out a Tweet"
"Running in Circles...Can Sometimes Be a Good Thing"
"Pretty, Purple Please!"
"HAFTeam Treasures"
"Teal, or No Teal?"
"I'm Just Peachy! Orange You?"
"CMYK: Cyan, Magenta, Yellow, Black"
"Back to Basics: Red, Yellow, Blue"
Just wait until you see what I come up with next!
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