School is back and I have two taking exams so it's going to be a lot of work. As home educators it also costs us around £100 per exam, so it's going to be expensive too. I won't be able to spend hours in my work shop now. I'm glad I made my goal of making 50 items in August though! I think I made about 68 in the end.
Since the start of the month I've put snaps on a bunch of nappies and sewn a pocket nappy and an AIO. These are some pictures from earlier in the week before I sewed the elastics in, just because it's a bit boring to read a blog without any pictures! With the lilac one, I didn't have enough PUL left so I did a half and half thing. I quite like the way it looks (when it's finished at least). The cat one is an AIO. I still have some more of them to sew but I had this idea in the middle of the night that maybe it would be easier to sew the stay dry section in if you don't pin it? Surely that would make it easier to sew around the corners? I'm going to try that out with the next one I make.
I thought this month I'd set a goal of doing something sewing related for at least 30 minutes a day. I have quite a lot of odd bits and pieces cut out. There are nappy cuts, cloth pads and some baby trousers. Cut out pieces are pretty much useless and have no value so I really need to get them sewn up so I can sell them. I have a lot of money to pay back. There seems to be way more stuff than I remember cutting out. Maybe I've been cutting things out in my sleep?! I think there are 8 embroidered nappies, a few I abandoned because I wasn't happy with them but looking at them now, there's nothing much wrong with them. I can sell them as seconds and at least get some money out of them rather than wasting the fabric and all the time spent embroidering them.
Since the start of the month I've put snaps on a bunch of nappies and sewn a pocket nappy and an AIO. These are some pictures from earlier in the week before I sewed the elastics in, just because it's a bit boring to read a blog without any pictures! With the lilac one, I didn't have enough PUL left so I did a half and half thing. I quite like the way it looks (when it's finished at least). The cat one is an AIO. I still have some more of them to sew but I had this idea in the middle of the night that maybe it would be easier to sew the stay dry section in if you don't pin it? Surely that would make it easier to sew around the corners? I'm going to try that out with the next one I make.
I put snaps on these ones and I think I'm going to use black stay dry fabric for their inners.
With half an hour a day I should slowly get through everything I've cut out. The baby trousers should only take minutes to sew up too. Etsy is full of baby trousers but babies to need trousers! I'm sure there are more trouser wearing babies than cloth nappy wearing babies.
Things are also looking up in my shop. I've had three sales! I have enough money to cover my credit card bill next month, and I paid my Etsy bill. I wonder if Etsy rotates your shop's visibility or something, because I often seem to sell a few things at once and then nothing for ages.
I also set up a store on Hyenacart. I did briefly look at it when I was starting out, but it seemed very quiet there compared to how it used to be. I had another look at it and decided to give it a go. What do I have to lose? It seems like there is normally a $10 set up fee, but there was a special offer where sign up was only $0.01! I don't quite understand how it works though. I thought it was $7.50 a month, which at this point would make it almost more expensive than Etsy for me, but I think it's $7.50 per month only if you want to stock your store. So if you pay your $7.50 and stock your store once then I don't think you need to pay anything else the next month if you don't want to add any more stock. It looks like items expire after 6 months though.
I stocked my shop with nappies because it seems like it's a better place to sell them than Etsy. I set them to stock at a certain time and date and when I checked on it today my store was stuffed with shoppers right before the items were due to stock. At one point my store had the most shoppers in the whole site. About five minutes after the stocking time there was only one shopper in my store (and that was me!). I was excited for a few minutes! I was like, this is it! I'm going to sell all this stuff! It'll be just like the old days when people used to stalk stores and there were crazy auctions where people would bid $200 for a single nappy. But no.
It's a US based site so I think it'll put people off that I'm in the UK. I've got my currency set in pounds too. I'm only charging £2.50 for postage, which is about $3.50. I'm sure that's a pretty reasonable price for postage but it does often feel a bit risky to buy things from overseas and sometimes they take forever to arrive. I think I'll stock my shop with a few more things though. I haven't added all my nappies there and I'll have some new ones finished soon. I'll give it a month or so and see how it goes.
Comments