I’ve been trying to leave the house more. I know it’s good for me, and I want to be out doing stuff. And then I do, and it takes three solid days of sleep to recover. This isn’t normal, but no one can agree what the problem is. I’ve been sleeping twelve hours at night, and then half the time I wind up taking a big nap in the middle of the day. And then because I’m so tired when I am awake, I have to spend that time doing everything I can while I can. Which does not include stitching, at all, because that makes me want to fall asleep.
I made some new paints the other night. I noticed that I’ve sold quite a lot of those to the point that what’s left is all kind of samey. I’ve got loads of new pigments and additives, so I’ve been having fun finding ways to blend them together. A lot of the ones I made blended natural and synthetic pigments to make something very weird. I love fluorescent paints, and use them quite a lot in my own work, so a lot of the paints I have on offer will have those pigments in there. So if you notice that your paints look a bit weird, you might want to check it under a black light.
Those are currently on my desk drying. Some will need to be re-poured because I used a new (to me) brand, and they all take water differently. Some didn’t take it at all, so I was left with a very wet mix. Now they’ve lost that moisture, they’re all collapsed in and ugly.
Anyway, those will be going up soon.
The fabric is selling out fast. I need to go through it all tonight, because the item counts are all broken somehow. They’ve actually broken a few times, at one point because I’d connected Etsy to my bookkeeping software, and that somehow deleted stock counts for everything. But I think what’s happened here was I needed to cut one piece of fabric into a smaller size for an order, and I didn’t properly adjust availability, so now every order since then has made the problem sort of snowball out of control.
I’ve been looking around town for a great bit stockpot so I can dye more. I had to do an emergency batch once already, but going forward that’s going to be a thing I only do when I’ve got help. I’ll probably make Scooter dry and press the fabric, and we can sort of go at it like an assembly line that way.
Some changes have been made to the shop itself, as well. I’ve been tweaking shipping this month, trying to find a good way to handle it. I did calculated shipping at first, and oh god, did that ever screw me up. Etsy never calculated it correctly, so I wound up taking up about half the cost for every single order. Right now, I’ve set it to $5 per order, and + 10¢ for each additional item. $5 still means I actively lose money on certain orders, but what you pay will better match the actual shipping cost. I’ve set it to increase by 10¢ each item because that scales better for the small items like paint and floss, which are the biggest sellers after the fabric. With the fabric, those orders can more easily absorb additional shipping charges on my end, since it’s usually an extra dollar or two above the shipping fee.
Basically, shipping fees are fucked across the board, and they’re likely to get worse. I already ship Ground to make them as cheap as possible, and I’d prefer to not have to raise prices on the actual items just to keep shipping fees low. I’ll probably continue to fiddle around with the additional item increase, but it will depend on how things look.
I’ve still got loads of beads and things I need to finish packaging. I’ve totally lost a roll of labels I was using to do this though, so who knows how long it’s going to take. Once I find those, I can start listing the rest of the stuff clogging up my workroom.
Next month, I’m also going to start looking at kits and floss sets. I’ll start with a small volume of each of them, just to see how it goes. But I want to be able to offer both the floss for the full-colour versions of patterns, as well as the colouring book versions. The full-colour ones will be your typical kits, with all the floss you need and maybe the fabric. Or I might make it an option. Idk, I’ll burn that bridge when I get to it. But for the colouring book versions, I want to do something a bit different. You’ll get the black floss as standard, but I also want to offer bundles of floss of various colours. Annoyingly, the one thing I can’t seem to find is the whole damn set of DMC floss. I can find the old full set of 447 colours, but I think the current set is like, 505 or something stupid. But what I can find is a random assortment of 100 colours, which is still about twice the amount of colours in a typical pattern. Again, no idea if that’s what I’ll do, or just go for one of the smaller packs. I’m also considering pre-gridded fabric as an option.
I do want to finish this damn frog so I can start another one, though. I may put it on the bench for a while and do another small one though. I’ve sort of half-started the bluebird, but I dislike everything about it at the moment. The clownfish looks fun, though. Maybe I’ll put that one up on a frame and get it done. Then I’ll have enough small little ones done to start piloting kits with.
Maybe I’ll go do that now, actually.
