Where does the time go? I’ll tell you that the older I get, the faster time flies by. I’m getting older and find I can do less in a day than I could 10 years ago. I’m trying to balance work life with home life, and spending time on my hobbies which are many!
I love to garden, make wine, bake bread, ferment things, can food, paint, read, play video games… never a reason to be bored!!
It seems like its been forever since I posted here. Honestly, I’ve let the website slip… but I’m hoping to do a makeover here over the next couple of months. Check out my new GLOOT page!
It’s been hard finding time to get into the studio these last few months – I’ve been spending a lot of time opening a new artisan coop in Belfast, ME, I’ve been trying to get my garden/farm up and running, working in the coops, traveling to galleries to enter new pieces for shows etc… but finally I got an afternoon to work.
What to work on? hmmmm.. so much inventory is needed to keep going…. art pieces…. earrings.. etc… well I decided to pull out a stash of vintage dichroic glass I’ve been hoarding for about 20 years. I bought it from one of the pioneers in using dichro for jewelry and have been saving it, mostly because I just didn’t want to waste it! But today was the day (well last Thursday anyway.) Since I was using old dichro, I decided to create pieces in the style I first used 20+ years ago. Funky, chunky and bold pieces here we go…
I’ve been working hard to re-launch this website and finally got the shipping & shopping carts to work (I think). I’ve integrated this site with my Square account so you can pay for your orders and it all flows through one processor. This will make it much easier for me to manage customers, orders and finances. Currently I’m working to make navigation easier for shopping, adding more products and trying to get ranked in the search engines again. Thanks for bearing with me these last two years as the site has been going through growing pains. Last year about this time I got hacked multiple times and decided to move to a new host and convert to a WordPress design. I haven’t had enough time to really get it up and running and there has been a big learning curve.
Over the next week or so I’ll be adding SnapDragons(tm) – Interchangeable dichroic glass pendants, bracelets & rings along with the Snaps, and many other new products.
Relaunch of Glass Orchids – dichroic glass jewelry made by Maine Glass Artist, Nancy Tang
The Relaunch of Glass Orchids
….has been and ongoing task for about a year now, and I’m getting closer to really having GlassOrchids.Art up and running smoothly. Recently I’ve noticed a lot of new subscribers to my website. So many that it seemed suspicious. That’s the world we live in now isn’t it? But you know what? I was right. Checked out several of them and they were known spammers. So I’ve disabled subscriptions on the site, deleted them all and removed 100 spam comments that were waiting for me to review.
It is no small task to relaunch Glass Orchids, I’ve had to back up and migrate the entire site to a new host and then deal with all the little glitches that occur when plugins think it’s the old site. Having run GlassOrchids.com for over 20 years, I now have to try and regain search engine placement, and that’s a whole job unto itself! Learning all the SEO changes and how to make that work in WordPress vs. an HTML site is another whole ball of wax too. I’ve learned a whole lot though, and I do enjoy working on the site. I highly recommend a plug in called Wordfence.(and no I don’t get paid to say that, I just find the plugin really helpful.) Watching the live feed of website activity is both fascinating and terrifying; so many bots trying to login and take over!!
Now I can get back to working in the studio creating dichroic glass jewelry and art pieces. I’ve got a Bangor Art Society show coming up in a few weeks and need to make a fused glass wave artwork for it. I’ll post images when it’s complete!
