Insight Handmade

Yesterday, I finally had the confidence to go to the Canberra Handmade shop to find out if my jewellery were good enough to be sold there- and they loved it! Thank goodness!!! But they recommend me to start selling in September when the weather is warmer. They think my jewellery is too summery for winter and won’t really go with the ‘scarf issue’. Well, it is 3 months away and even though it seem ages away, I was thinking that I probably wouldn’t want to start selling to the general public inside a busy shop 2 to 3 months from now anyway. I need to come up with more designs and built more stock.

It’s taking a lot of time for me to grow my business, but I guess that’s the catch with handmade, you have to allow a lot of time to built your collection in order to have a stall or whatever. I guess having ‘stock’ reminds people of buying stuff online in bulk arriving 2 weeks later and sell them the next week in a market. When I introduce to people what I do, I get asked, “So, how much do you contribute to the household per week?” or “how come you don’t have a stall in the market?” – I wish I have a magic wand that can stop time for awhile so I can get things done while the rest of the world is frozen.

Oh gosh, I have to HAND-make all my stock. I do everything from coming up with my own design, plan and think about them, and then I make them- and most of the time than not, at least one of my attempt will fail an hour or so into the making. And then I have to price them, do the photos and list them online. I’ve had so many people asking me if I’ve got any eyes left. Sometimes after sitting on my desk for hours and days at a time, I thought- ‘it is too late. I’m going to crazy-town and no one can stop me.’

Oh well, I don’t expect people here to know what handmade means let alone making wire jewellery. And it’s only the first year that I’m doing this so I shouldn’t let the ‘stock’ issue thing get inside my head.

So, I have 3 months left and a bit until September. Seeing how I’ve been going in the past couple of months, it will be a challenging 3 months. Here’s some of my personal challenges that I’ll be facing:

1.      On a normal ‘work’ day- I’m very easily distracted. I will caught myself day-dreaming or taking breaks longer than I should
Another completely different challenge is that most of the time I don’t know how to stop in order to go to the gym. I love the gym. I like jogging while watching tv and counting numbers while doing weights, but believe it or not my biggest challenge is to get dressed and walk out the door. 

3.Trying to keep the house clean is another challenge. By the end of the day, the last thing that I want to do is wash the dishes. But if I don’t I will be unhappy at myself on the next day.

These are the sort of things that gets me down. How can simple things be so hard to do??! Anyway, I’m going to improve on these points and all you bloggers (hello?) can be my witness!!!  

Unfortunately, aside from these news, I don’t have any new items to list today although today is Friday. And just for today, I didn’t make any jewellery either. Today I learnt how to use a sewing machine for the first time- using that singer sewing machine I found in the dumpster- we haven’t found anything wrong with it yet. My friend Hanna is a sewing teacher, and she helped me introduce this art- and I suddenly feel liberated from a certain mystery that is known as sewing.

This week however, I’ve been re-stocking items- which is good. It doesn’t show much in Etsy, but I have been getting some sales- simply out of me handing out name cards and word of mouth. In my old Etsy shop, I used to try to get people sign up on Etsy and buy my stuff online- even if they’re buying it off me face to face so that I can get the sales number up, keep my one-off jewelery pictures online and get feedback. But now I don’t really care about those things, I just want to build up stock.

Yes, stock , stock, stock... Ok, I’m falling asleep now. Gtg- good night peeps!