I know its been awhile. Please forgive.
Shortly after my last blog I successfully designed my Lil Pumpkin hat, and thought it would be the perfect item to promo for the Etsy weekend sale on October 2nd.
HOLY SMOKES. I had no idea it would be so popular. I sold 12 pumpkin hats that weekend, along with 8 other items. I was back-ordered for 2 weeks! And I am just started to get caught up from all that now. Thus the absence.
Sooooo... I think this experience taught a few things about how I want to run the shop from now on. Namely, I think I will try to avoid made-to-order as much as possible. It's too stressful trying to make and get orders out by promised dates. Custom orders would be the exception to this rule, of course. But in general, I think I will only list what I have in stock. I've seen shops do it both ways, and I think either is fine. But for me (with the baby, and limited free time to work) I need to be able to knit and sew at my leasure and not pile stuff on myself.
You should be glad you didn't have to witness the Chaos that was October. I had piles of yarn and shipping supplies to the ceiling. Frazzled hair. Unkept clothes. The baby would go back and forth between yelling at me for attention or watching too much PBS. I rarely left the apartment. I forgot what the sun felt like. I was pumping out two knit hats a day, sometimes more. I was embroidering eyes onto monkeys that had to be wrapped and shipped within the hour. I was overwhelmed...
By contrast, today, over the course of an afternoon and evening, I knit one knot hat in blue . And now, being quite relaxed, I will proceed to list it in my shop. And should it sell, I will gracefully bubble-wrap it and whistle a happy tune all the way down Mangrove Ave, where my son and I will dance it through the doors and rest it in the trusted hands of the United States Postal Service. La belle vie!
