Pardon me while I indulge in a little shameless self-promo

So, as some of you already know, I have this Etsy shop under the name Arty Didact (see link at right; or just click on the name, since I turned it into a link too), a name I coined kind of on the fly when I was marketing some dice games I invented back when I was homeschooling my kids and I wanted to find a game that used multiplication in scoring, and I couldn't find one, so I got some dice and made one up. Since unschoolers are really autodidacts, the "arty" play on words seemed to fit, so I set up the shop without spending too much time thinking about the name. If I wanted to be taken just a little bit more seriously as an artist, I probably should have set it up in my name instead, but due to some odd bit of probably false humility, I felt uncomfortable using my own name as my shop name.

Speaking of false humility, I'm also rather ambivalent about promoting myself, and am not particularly comfortable with churning out the hype and doing the whole rah rah look at my stuff! spiel. I just like to create unique and useful objects that are attractive or at least interesting, and put them out there and see if anybody besides me values them. And sometimes somebody does value them enough to buy them and, really, I couldn't be more thrilled.

So when I learned that the HandmadeMN Etsy street team, of which I am a member, was looking for people to offer items to give away as a way of promoting both the team and participants' shops, I thought, um, yeah, OK, sure. Why not?


So, if you'd like a chance to get this useful and attractive little zipper pouch, click on over to here and follow the instructions, OK? I'll even cover the shipping cost if you win it, so what have you got to lose?




With that kind of enthusiasm, you're probably wondering why I didn't go into marketing, aren't you?