Friday, January 4, 2013

Question

I am absolutely knocking on wood as I write this, but I am feeling much better this morning, much better. I can feel a few remnants of the virus lurking about, but that seems to be about it. I was feeling mostly better yesterday, but still tired so I engaged in some serious stalling between projects throughout the day.

First, I did finally assemble the crystal necklace I've been working on remaking. You've probably seen it before, but because I was asked, here it is again. I failed, last time I made it to take a good photograph of it laying flat so assembling it was a bit of a chore than it should have been. The front was simple, but I couldn't remember the configuration around the sides and I had no pictures to help. I spent way more time than was necessary figuring out where all the motifs wanted to live. In the end I got it and I still haven't taken that laid flat picture. Remind me to do that today.

Once that was finished I had another custom length bracelet to make for an order I got in the morning. It was a simple piece so that was done fairly quickly and then while attempting to stall, I instead did my end of year etsy numbers. This is the point where I remind anyone out there casually thinking that selling your handmade wares online would be fun that while it can be satisfying, it is also a royal pain. This was just the first pass at the books in preparation for tax time. I still have receipts to gather and record as well as several online account records to comb through. Thankfully I don't have to do it all at once. I'll dole it out slowly over the next few months so I won't fly into an accounting driven rage and slaughter the innocent in my path. I'm a much calmer artisan than I am a businesswoman.

I do have a question to pose to you this morning as well. I have promised to do a tutorial on tatting to a jewelry base and that will be something I put up for free on Instructables, when I get it started anyway...hopefully soon. I also want to get a couple more patterns up for sale in my etsy shop, but I'm not sure which ones to do. I know I don't want to do any ankle corsets, but other than that I'm not sure what to go with, probably something small though. So if you have any opinions or requests, please let me know and I'll use the weekend to sort out what to offer. No promises of course, but I am at a loss so any direction would be helpful. I thank you in advance for your help and hopefully with the sickness at bay it will be a productive weekend as well.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Oh wow, it's beautiful. And definitely worth the price (and probably more). Thank you for posting the pic.

About running a business - you've been a really good teacher just with your posts on what you do for your shop. I have some things I've made that I'm going to try selling just because I'll never wear all of them, but after that - I'm not sure. There is definitely work involved in keeping a business running and I'm not sure how much of that I want to do. We'll see...

I'm glad you're feeling better. Have a great weekend.