Friday, October 22, 2010

Blog Carnival: October 2010

"So what is a Blog Carnival you ask?”
It is EtsyMetal members who write an article on the same topic on the first Monday of each month.

October Topic: "EtsyMetal & I"
Hi, my name is Victoria Takahashi and I am an addict. OK I'll admit it! I love my street team and what it has done for me. This month's blog carnival for EtsyMetal is in celebration of our 4th anniversary.

 Below are 3 questions we were asked to reflect upon and share our thoughts.

When/Why did you join?
I am a founding member of EtsyMetal, I was invited in by Chuck Domitrovich in October of 2006. He actually convinced me to join persuading me with the thought of having a support system within an Etsy based online community of other metalsmiths. He was also the one who convinced me to join Etsy in the first place too! 

Is it what you expected?
Both yes and no. I'd have to say it's better than I had expected, I have gotten so much from this group in terms of emotional and technical support, comradery, friendship, accountability, resources, challenges and so much more. We have grown as a group and have had normal growing pains and an innumerable amount of great wonderful moments. We are a work in progress and are learning as we grow and I am honored to be a part of this community.

What does it mean to you to be a part of the team?
It means a lot. For reasons I have mentioned above. To reiterate a little bit deeper, I have met many of our team members in person. If I had not gotten the chance to talk and interact and get to know them in our forum beforehand I would probably never of even crossed paths with most of these people and therefore missed out on meeting some pretty special folks. A very important personal aspect of being on the team for me is I use it as my place to share thoughts and to ask questions and to answer them and help where I can. I also ran the EtsyMetal team challenges committee and that was a very inspiring project to be involved with. Currently I am on a bit of a hiatus from running the challenges committee, as I am trying to work out some time organizations problems, hee hee, so thanks Nina Gibson & Inbar Bareket for taking that on!  I have one more thing to add, I personally am not on this team for publicity or advertising, I believe there is a misconstrued public image that that is what the team is about. In my personal experience I find for me that we are more of a personal social network of metalsmiths.

If you want to find out more about EtsyMetal or how to sign up for the bi-annual jury please go to this link!
And please see some more team members' response to this months topic!  "Thank You!"