Resolutions

It is three days as my Etsy shop is officially open. As of today, it has got 27 items in it!

I hope that this signifies the beginning of the new stage in my random crafting activities.

Therefore, here are my 9^th of June 2012 resolutions:

1. To blog.

For the last few days I’ve been battling with myself. Isn’t blogging really like writing a diary – which is something really private, and then making it public? Br-r-r-r, this feels really uncomfortable, like stripping in public. On the other hand, I love making things with my hands, so why not write about it? No reason, my analytical abilities do not detect anything embarrassing here. So here it goes. My 9^th of June resolution regarding the blog is that I write here at least once a week, and that I don’t delete the entries fifteen minutes after posting just so that no one finds out!

2. To do business properly.

My dream is to have a profitable crafts business. Somehow, despite growing up in a communist country (and I was at my most impressionable while it was still on) and the Christian messages about the unimportance of material wealth, I really want to make money with my crafts. I believe that the money reflects value to the other people or society (within reason, of course), so I want to make something that other people will find valuable enough to pay money for.

To motivate myself, I use a book that my mother gave me: “Make your creative dreams real” by SARK. Highly recommend! I just pick it up once in a while, open at a random page, look at all the messy writing and think: if her book can be so messy, than I am not too bad either.

 
Several other books were also inspirational – I am a big fan of libraries and self-help literature! - such as “Handmade marketplace: how to sell your crafts locally, globally and online” by Kari Chapin, “The kitchen table enterpreneur: an inspirational guide to turning your hobby into a profitable business” by Paul Power (!), “Starting your own online business: all you need to know to start and run a successful business online” by Kim Benjamin and, importantly, “Teach yourself: Small business accounting” by Mike Truman and David Lloyd. Yesterday I took an A4 red lined book and made it into a cashbook! In June, nine entries for “Money out” and one entry for “Money in” – hmm, something to work on…

Also, I AM going to register my business. But I am still hesitant about spending a big chunk of my redundancy pay on registering the trademark. I'll give it another few weeks, I think.