it's a conspiracy

it's a conspiracy, a photo by connormarie on Flickr.

Even my Scrabble tiles are reminding me that Jan 31 is coming up, and procrastination doesn't pay.

a word about shop updates

During the last two weeks of December, while I was working on club orders and inventory for the St. Distaff's Day spin-in at Lake Stevens, my shop was pretty much cleaned out of fiber. I thought, no problem, I'll list my leftover inventory after the spin-in. My one caveat was that I must have at least two of each colorway to make photographing and listing it worth the work, because it does take quite a bit of time.

Happily for me, but unluckily for those of you who have to shop with me from a distance, I had a very successful show (thank you, local spinners!), so I have only two or three new fiber colorways to add. I'll try to replenish my Etsy next week with new fiber colorways.

I listed three new fiber club slots earlier this week, and they were gone in an hour. I miiiiiight have two more openings later this week (still waiting to hear back from current club members), and will post those in the evening, if they become available.

In the meantime, I'm adding in sock yarn and mawata (silk hankies), as I have time. Thanks for all your support!

Some photos from St. Distaff's. Two sides of my tower of fiber, and the yarn. Vendors only have an hour for setup, so I can't bring very much to this event.

my new love

I ordered a new-to-me sock yarn, a superwash merino singles yarn, to try out. It is 4 oz and 450 yards of pure sexy. I think I am in love.

I think its extra luster comes from being a singles yarn--there are no shadows from the plying to disrupt the glow. I have known many singles yarns in various weights and fiber blends, but I don't love any of them, not even the silk blends, the way I feel about this one.

I know this is just the honeymoon stage, after dyeing just two skeins of a new base yarn. But it's hard not to share my new infatuation.

why I sell on Etsy

For several months now, I've been running high monthly bills at my Etsy shop. Why, do you ask, do I continue to sell there? Especially when there is a perception among some that Etsy is so contaminated by amateurs that everyone who sells there is tainted?

Right now, it is about economics. Does a move away from Etsy to a standalone site pencil out? No, it doesn't for me, and here's why.

It is darned expensive to set up a standalone site, if you want a good design and a reliable cart. The firms I've  been checking out are $4000 - $6000 to set up a site. (Some also retain copyright and require you to pay a licensing fee to use their design work, which as a former communications consultant, I find absurd--this is a work-for-hire situation, and I should not be required to license work that I am already paying them to do.) I admit it, I'm a design snob, and I want a beautiful site, not something slapped together because I couldn't afford what I actually wanted.

Finding a cart whose software won't crash under a heavy load is no simple matter, either, if one's business is popular enough to need a server that can function under a crushing stampede of shoppers. I've noticed some well-known dyers use Shopify as their cart. Note their pricing: their cheapest option is $30/month plus a 2.0% transaction fee. At last month's sales level, which was my personal best to date, yes, I would have saved money. Other months, not so much.

Despite its problems (hello, resellers who undercut those who are truly making items by hand), Etsy really works well for my current situation. Their financial success is tied directly to their sellers' success (because they make money off of seller fees), so they have a powerful incentive to keep their site up and running. When there is downtime, they jump on it immediately and get it fixed, so top-notch technical support is included in my fees, and I don't have to nag them about it. The back end of the store is great--uploading listings is simple, the order history is well-organized and logical, and they even offer first-class international shipping at no charge other than postage.

Most importantly, the shoppers are there. If I took my shop off of Etsy, I would spend at least as much money on advertising to drive shoppers to my site. To say nothing of the design time that I would need to devote towards developing fresh ads. I am fortunate in that I have Adobe Creative Suite (the industry standard for graphic design) and know how to use it, and that I have experience with creative, copywriting, and ad buying. Even so, it takes me time to come up with a good ad and to design it--a minimum of two to three hours. Yes, I could outsource it, but even at an underpriced $50 design fee per ad, right there I am spending a substantial portion of my monthly Etsy bill.

I recently met someone whose mother sells on Etsy. In her biggest month this year, she spent $700 on Etsy fees. Steep? Oh, yes. But during that same time period, she had 10 sales on her standalone site.

When I hit 1000 sales on Etsy, I'll start looking at selling on my own more seriously. I think at that point, I'll be comfortable that I have a customer base that will follow me. For now, I'm happy to leave the admin side and much of the marketing to them, and focus on what I like to do best: dyeing.

quick update

Just a quick note to say that I was gone for a week (at Disneyland, more in a later post, I hope) and have spent this past week catching up. Pulling at Strings club has been dyed and shipped, I'm Your Huckleberry club orders are dyed and drying, and monthly fiber club is up next.

Also, I've released a couple of spots for the monthly fiber club, so if you've been waiting for a chance to get in, here it is!

I'm a winnah!

After seeing a Ravelry post, I entered a giveaway for the latest issue of Spin-off, Interweave's spinning magazine. It was at the blog of Joanna Johnson, author of Phoebe's Birthday.

Much to my astonishment, I won! That's Joanna's gorgeous handspun shawl, A Gift from Laurel, on the cover of Spin-off in the photo below. Joanna was kind enough to include a few other goodies, too, including some Phoebe cards and issues of Piecework and Knit Scene, neither of which I'd read before.

Thank you, Joanna!

back in the old days

Before I had a baby and got back into knitting and then started dyeing and had fiber devour my mind, house, and career, I did a lot of training with my dog, Connor.

He is some sort of sheepdog mix (Briard? bearded collie?) that we adopted from the pound. Best dog ever. Sweet, friendly, smart, and eager to please. And fast.

We did competition obedience for a while and earned our novice titles, in organizations that let All-American dogs compete (which reminds me of my Fourth of July post and how it's interesting that All-American is the term for mixed breeds, in counterpoint to how purists of every sort seem to be dominating the airwaves these days, but never mind that), but his true love is agility. We competed in a lot of trials and quite frankly, we were a sucky team. He would get so excited and his brain would turn off, and I would get completely frustrated because he wasn't listening to me. Coming home from our last trial in Canada, when I was seven months pregnant, the customs agent asked me how the trial had gone. I actually burst into tears.

So then I was busy with other things and honestly, the last summer of competition had been too frustrating for me to be very excited about trialing again. In agility, you either qualify or you don't, and we'd missed a lot of Qs by not very much. It was worse than blowing the runs entirely.

We still went out and did it for fun once in a while, and we did our local club's trial several years ago. But the dog is getting old now, and last summer we didn't do any agility at all because he was limping. I thought his competition days were long over. But this summer, I took him out a few times, and he was better than ever. A lot of it has to do with parenting--my style now is to adapt to the dog, instead of trying to force him to adapt to me.

So I entered my 12-year-old dog in a trial last weekend. Our old friends were delighted to see us. Connor was beyond thrilled to be back in the ring. And we were much better than we'd ever been before. Still not always clean--we missed the Q on this run by one fault--but our last run of the day (after my husband had taken the child and the camera home) was perfect. My elderly dog ran a jumpers course (all jumps, no other types of obstacles) with a standard course time of 32 seconds in 18.55 seconds. Old man still has it.