1 post tagged “selling etsy craft art shop sell”
I recently began selling online. I recently picked up the pieces I left in what feels like another life.
I began sketching drawings of small things. Things I would be able to make in a cramped space. In a living room, where we ate, watched tv and hung out with friends. I looked to my online resources (like del.icio.us!) for ideas on what to make. I knew I wanted to sew. I always wanted to make my own clothes and even fantasized about being a fashion designer (i still do! :)
So I began the journey on the old Singer Athena 2000. It wasn't as sophisticated as it sounds and I had it "repaired" in Redwood City when we lived there. I even moved it to Seattle when we relocated, but eventually it gave up (problems with tension). Halfway down its demise, we thought we might move to London. That alone was another process and it put my plans of sewing or drawing or planning of anything at seize. I gave up on the machine and thought of other things I could make without it. I looked to sock monkeys and I sewed them by hand...*think small*. Eventually I became interested in making jewelery...*think small*. So I made a few monkeys. I made a few earrings. When that seemed to work, it came time to get down to another business. The business of selling all of our belongings to strangers (sales generated by online posts on craigslist). It was sad, but I kept my cloth, my knitting needles and notebooks of writings and illustrations. I realized that I felt more rewarded giving my things to friends than selling them to people I didn't know.
And now that I was here, in London, I had nothing but the plans I had created to make these things...patterns, ideas, some materials. But anything helped! And I'm glad I brought the most important things to me. It was my connection to a past I would never see again.
So I begin again to make the things that I was familiar with in the not-so-long-ago past. One month in after getting settled, I went to The Bead Shop in Covent Garden. I had yet to buy a sewing machine, so I looked to the small things once again. I also looked up yarn stores. And I bought and I made forty two pairs of earrings and four crocheted hats three weeks prior to an event I was planning to sell my made things at. I didn't have any success in selling anything. Instead I met many people much like myself...trying to stand out from the crowd, trying to get their made things noticed...people selling their belongings.
After that week of intense hand-making work, on January 24th, 08' I started a shop on etsy. I started networking online and what I found was overwhelming. Site after site of profiles and uploaders, and widgets, and friends, and comments and things...things people were making. Many, many beautiful things, things I could only dream about and sometimes i do.
"sell something to someone you love
not someone that you don't
even though..."
Maybe I'm with the pilots.
