How-To: Create a Treasury

Treasuries are a great way to show your creativity by putting together collections of items. These collections can feature shops that you especially like, items that follow a particular theme or color, shops from a specific team...pretty much any reason you can think of is a reason to make a Treasury. But exactly HOW do you make one? Let's go through it step by step:

• Come up with a theme for your treasury: For this example we'll use "Summer with the LabRats", using just fellow LabRats shops in our treasury.
• Go to Etsy. On the front page, scroll down on the left-hand side until you see “Treasury"
• Click on “Treasury.” This will bring you to Treasury East, where new Treasuries are being accepted. On the right hand side of the page, you will see a box with a button in it saying “Create a List”. Go ahead and click on this button.

• Clicking on "Create a List" will take you to the main “creation” page. Here you can name your Treasury, write up a description for it, place the items that you want to include, decide if you want it to be private or public, and you can “tag” your Treasury just as you would an item listing to help it get found!
• After entering a title and description for our Treasury, it's time for the fun part - selecting items!

There are several ways to select items for a Treasury. You can use the Search function to search for items that are tagged or titled with certain colors (light blue, dark red), seasons, even other descriptive terms like "modern", "elegant", "romantic" or even "fun"!

• Note: It's often easier to have two or three tabs (or separate windows) open at a time when working on a Treasury: one for your actual treasury page, and the others to look for items.
  

Since the Treasury for this example is using just Lab Rats shops, the easiest way to find a list is right here on the blog, on the right hand side. I just started clicking on names at random and looking through shops. The first one I landed on was "Jungle Jewelry" by Brittany. She had a necklace called "Tropical Necklace" that I thought would go with our "Summer" theme. So now how to add that item to the treasury?

• First thing to do is click on the image of the item (in this case a necklace) that you want to include. This will bring you to the listing page.
• Since you need the listing # to add an item to the treasury, scroll down the page until you find this "Stats" box on the right-hand side. The number underlined in red is the number you need, so highlight it, right-click, and select "Copy"

• Then go back to the Treasury page and select the first open spot that says "Listing URL". Then right-click in the box, select "Paste" and the number that you copied will be pasted right in the box.

• After hitting "ok" the picture for the item that you wanted will appear in the box, along with the item name, shop name, and price of the item.

• The picture above also shows where I typed in the title of the Treasury "Summer With the Lab Rats" and the description. For this example, I then went ahead and repeated the same selection process for the rest of the 16 spots. It's always a good idea to fill all 16 slots. Only Treasuries that are full have a chance of being selected for the Front Page.

• So now all 16 slots are filled, each with a different item from a different shop. The last step is to "tag" the Treasury. Tagging a Treasury is similar to tagging an item; you want to use words that will help your Treasury be found by others. For this example, I chose to tag the treasury with the tags "labratsteam, summer, fun, bright, colors".
  
• Type your tags in the "Tags" box, separated by a comma, and then click "Add". This will add them to your Treasury.

There's only one final step, and that's to click the "Save" button at the bottom of all your listings. This will save your Treasury and make it available to be viewed by others!

Here is a link to the completed Treasury, "Summer With the Lab Rats"

Now that the mystery of how to create Treasuries is gone, go on out there and start creating. Keep your eye out for an upcoming team treasury challenge to put your treasury making skills to the test!

Blog Buttons, Tutorials and more!

Hello team! Hope you all are enjoying warm weather and left over Easter candy.

First things first, we need a blog button! I'm going to turn that over to you guys to create. I'll make a little contest of it, the winning creator of our blog button will get a feature on Facebook and an extended spotlight on the sidebar of our blog! The guidelines for creating our button:

• It should be relevant to "Lab Rats", whether it feature rats, science or the virtual labs - whatever the name means to you.
• It should be 200 pixels wide, and 150-200 tall.
• It needs to be turned in by Saturday, May 1st.
• To turn it in, leave a link to the photo in the comments section of THIS entry. I recommend uploading it to flickr or, if you don't have a flickr account, imgur.

Other than that, be creative and have fun! Once we have all the entries, we'll do a member poll to pick the winning design!

 Moving right along, I'd just like to let people know our little tags and stuff, in case you were new or not sure.

On etsy, use the tag labratsteam on a few items to be seen. I will tell you right now that I when I look for photos to feature on the blog, I search those pages!

On twitter, if you want the team to see something, use the hash tag #sqk. Stick it at the end of a tweet and we can find it!

And lastly, tutorials! If you can make something totally awesome, or feel like you are an absolute EXPERT on something (photos, utilizing social networking, how to approach blogs/boutiques, etc.) send itsastitch a conversation with your idea and we will work out the details!

You guys rock, keep making those treasuries and being awesome! Stay tuned for the next few weeks, we'll be announcing our SUMMER challenge and our next virtual  lab meeting.

Can't wait to see those blog buttons :-)