This week’s update on my business

I’m progressing with my Etsy site: IrisBasinHomestead. Currently, I have digital downloads for cross stitch patterns. But, as you can tell from the photo above, I’m expanding. I bought my first pack of shipping bags. I really wanted my packaging to be something that would be eye-catching and set people up with happiness from the very start. I found holographic thank you stickers to place on the colored tissue paper I want to use for wrapping the items. And I picked up tea towels.

Yes. Tea towels.

I grew up with my grandmother teaching me to hand embroider tea towels as a way to keep me sitting still because of my high energy at that time. And I was kinda missing that fidget level in the last few weeks. However, I don’t have much good use for them at the moment. I have more than plenty of dish towels in excellent condition. But, it occurred to me that I could make them for other folk who grew up with these flour sack towels on their countertops.

But…I had wrist surgery a year and a half ago. Needlework is something I can handle for about 20 minutes at a whack. And hand embroidery takes quite a bit of time if done neatly – and I’m the perfectionist type that likes every stitch being exactly the same and tiny. That kind of time and neatness does not translate into a profit. There’s a limit to what a person is willing to pay on a tea towel. Accounting for my time spent on it would be cents for hours.

My birthday hit recently and I had a bit of money from that. So I did something big for me. I pulled a bit more money from my Substantive and Developmental Editing business (I still take private commissions for anyone who needs their fiction manuscript cleaned – just drop an email at chapelorahamm@gmail.com and I’ll get back with you). Then I put that money into expanding this Etsy business.

I bought an embroidery machine off Ebay. I thought it was going to be used. Nope. It came in mint condition still in the plastic bags and everything. Now I have to figure out these manuals, but still – I couldn’t ask for a better stroke of luck getting one of these for about a third of the cost of a new model. I think the machine I got was originally brought out in 2012 – so, there might be some hacking old software – but when you want to get into a business you can’t afford new in, you make the sacrifices.

Then I purchased flour sack tea towels, packaging, stickers, tissue paper, stabilizing fabric, and embroidery thread. Family asked why I would waste birthday money on an embroidery business. “You should buy something you actually want, like clothes or a book, or something.” Well, I really want at least one of my business ideas to come to fruition.

I tried with my Editing and Art commissions. I made a right go of it for two years. But AI and online editing software are stepping into my sphere. A lot of people assume they can run their manuscript through one of these and it will cover their plot holes and development issues. The thing is…there are a lot of self-pub and indie folk who are successfully releasing books that people really do enjoy that are full of plot holes, and that is killing the human editing industry.

I just have to shrug. Dev/Sub is expensive. It really is. Most people don’t want to drop $2K on a 100K word manuscript. I can’t fault them for that. I don’t want to drop that type of money on my writing. I just don’t have it to do that with. Let us be real here. Writers, most often, are just regular joes working regular jobs, and they don’t have the cash to drop on a vanity project. Most Americans don’t even have $1000 in their bank account to cover an emergency. Where are they going to find the money to have someone tell them their red dragon in chapter 4 is now a purple chimera in chapter 7, expand the book by 3 chapters to help round out a character arc, and delete 47 instances of ‘was’ in 2 pages?

Editing was something I did well. I worked on multiple anthologies and a play with other editors and a couple of stand-alone novels. This was something I knew I could do competently and proved it to myself and others. But life moves on. I don’t have much of a presence on social media anymore. That was where I could advertise my services and where I found my clients. Twitter failed and I just couldn’t bring myself to put the hours in again on building my presence back up to 8.5K followers. I don’t have that kind of time to spend on mental gymnastics, political finagaling, and dodging sad news. My mental health can’t do it anymore.

But I’m trying with Instagram again. This time I’m keeping it to other arts/crafts folk. Quilting, sewing, crochet, knitting, those things. I’m not following any other types of accounts. That’s going to have to work for me. I’m using it to promote my Etsy shop and share some of my craft projects.

This week I finished my Halloween pinwheel and 4 square quilt. I did it with spare fabric I had lying around to practice pinwheels. This was so I could move on to Beach Days by Satomi Quilts – I found it on Etsy if you think you want to work on the pattern too. The umbrellas use the pinwheel angle for the first stage of construction before moving on to another angle utilizing a template. I wanted to practice that pinwheel angle, seeing as up to now, I’ve only done layer cake square assembly.

This quilting practice is two-fold. I wanted to replace a couple of quilts that are falling apart – they’ve turned so threadbare that saving them is near next to impossible. I also want to quilt placemats, pot holders, bowl cozies, coasters, and tote bags for my Etsy shop. Now with this embroidery machine, I’m exploring so many other options to add to the shop.

I spent the day today cutting out most of the fabric for Beach Days before I went to the post office and picked up my embroidery machine (slamming my finger in the car door along the way – which has put a damper on getting work done). Now, having given up on getting all the sand rectangles cut out for Beach Days, I’m sitting down to read this manual and find the website it suggests for design downloads.

When will I get back to writing? Probably when I’ve got this thing off the ground.

What would you like to see in the Etsy shop?