My plan backfired, but in a good way.

A couple weeks ago I started selling yarn that I'd hand dyed. Or more accurately, I began offering it for sale. No takers. I listed four skeins, and decided that I would not order any more yarn to dye until I had sold some of my current stock. I waited and waited, and still no takers.

So this afternoon I finaly said to hell with it, I'm ordering more yarn. Not two hours later, I finally sold a skein! And the kicker is that it's the green skein that I'd been secretly hoping would never sell so I could keep it for myself. Oh well, I can always make more for myself later!

Here's a picture of the skein that sold:

"Real jobs" give you a day off, so I'm taking one too.

From the beginning, I've tried to treat my Etsy shop as a real business. I've got a big file for all of my receipts, I track my sales, I registered my LLC, and am currently navigating the forms to get my Sales and Use Tax permits squared away.

But there is one aspect of "real jobs" that I have neglected. I've been working 7 days a week on this since November 2007, and have not taken a full day off for myself that entire time. Not even when I'm sick or hurting so bad from my fibromyalgia that I can barely move. Not even for the Daytona 500 (which is a high holy day in my house).

Today is the day. I'm not sick, I'm not hurting particularly bad, and i'm not ven particularly fed up or burned out on working on my shop. I do, however, want to prevent that from happening. So I'm going to do some laundry, maybe take a bubble bath with an Anne Rice book, and if I feel like it maybe I'll work on finishing my second sock. But I will not make items for my shop, I will not do a photo-shoot, and I will not spend half the day in the forums. Nor will I run up to check my email and shop counts every hour. In fact, I think once i've finished this post, I am going to turn my computer off for the rest of the day. I suppose I'll have to check for sales before I go to bed tonight, but that's okay.

So farewell for now, I'm off to make my toes pruney!

A New Venture

A while back I tried my hand at dyeing yarn. One skein and I was hooked. So, I ordered more yarn and bought more dye, and now I'm really addicted. I am, however, being at least partially rational and realizing that I have very little time to knit/crochet for myself right now, so I'd better sell this yarn, rather than keep it all. I listed one skein today, and more will be appearing in my shop in coming days, as soon as I get some good pictures taken.

I don't know how well I'm going to do with this. I've got this nagging suspicion that selling hand-dyed yarn on Etsy might be like selling jewelry; there's already a ton of more established, high-volume sellers, so it'll be hard for me to make the necessary splash and be seen. But then that questionably rational portion of my brain pipes up again and tells me that if I make a good effort and the yarns just don't sell, I can just let them quietly expire and put them into my own personal stash!

See? I made professional-type ball bands and everything! If you'd like to look, the listing is at http://www.etsy.com/view_listing.php?listing_id=10809278.