From the Library Mall to Etsy

Hand-coated cyanotype print available on Etsy

As part of an experiment for our Digital Processes course at Lawrence University, we set up an Etsy store to sell small items we make in our studio. We wanted to understand how it worked and wondered if our studio art students would find it useful. Kristin Boehm, a former student, has been selling her cool knitted technology cases for several years under the name Spinhandspundesigns and other friends had told us of their Etsy successes.  We put together DVDs of our rarely screened films, our out-of-print book Season's Gleamings and a series of cyanotype postcards of Lake Michigan and opened our store last week. We sold 26 individual items in the first few days and are getting to know our helpful postal staffers much better. The scale and intimacy of Etsy reminded us the early 1980s when we'd make cassettes of our band's music (packaged with miscellaneous objects we'd get cheap at thrift stores or the Kresege's in baggies) and zines with hand-silk screened covers to sell at record stores, shows and on the Library Mall in Madison as students at the UW. The immediacy and lack of censorship of the objects was a thrill and seems parallel in many ways to selling art on Etsy sans the pink hair and Aqua Net.