Moving Day…

Moving day is fast approaching and my little bungalow is now a sea of boxes and bin bags!  Given the mess I am currently living in I’ve decided it would be best to put both my Etsy and Folksy shops on holiday.  This is something I’ve never done with my Etsy shop before – I’ve heard horror stories about it taking weeks or even months for traffic to pick up again once you reopen your shop.   However, this time of year is always quiet for me so this will give me the perfect opportunity to reopen once I’ve unpacked all of my boxes and take my time at streamlining things a bit.

I’m also planning to finally change my shop name at the beginning of May so maybe less traffic in the meantime isn’t the end of the world!

I’ll probably be off the radar for the next week – my internet doesn’t get connected until next Wednesday so I’ll be relying on my phone signal until then!  I will however be snapping away so that I can create those promised ‘before and after’ posts… so stay tuned!

Craft Fair Survival

I survived my first craft fair!

It was actually disappointingly quiet but that’s the risk you take with these one off events.  Despite the lack of patrons I learned a lot about not only selling in public but also about my business.

The great thing about selling online is that I can try out a couple of new products and post them in my shop for minimal cost.  As long as my photography is in keeping with the rest of the shop then things don’t look out of place.  What I discovered when I started to set up my table is that I have a lot of different products.  My scarves are made from a variety of different materials, in different patterns and at different price points.  This made my display look pretty disjointed.  It was the same with my range of jewellery and beanie hats.

I now have a plan to create a much more streamlined looking range of products.  I’m first going to implement this with my beanie hat range with the help of my latest wool order.  I really love the slouchy pom pom hat pattern that I’ve created so I’m going to knit a wide range of these in loud, funky colours.

I’m then going to apply the same strategy to my scarves – choosing one or two patterns that I enjoy to knit the most and then create a whole range of these scarves in different colours.  This will allow me to produce a series of scarves at the same price point and in the same good quality material.  I’ll still of course be open to custom orders if anyone had a specific style or pattern in mind.

I also want to concentrate on hammered jewellery and I’m going to be moving away from my beaded creations.

This is all going to take time but I just know it will be worth it.  I’m hoping that next year I will be ready to attend a proper full day craft fair with a very professional looking range of products.

I get the keys to my new house a week on Friday so I’m very excited but this probably means that my shop plans will take a little longer to implement!

Don’t forget that you can still get 15% off everything in my Etsy shop with Coupon Code MOVINGSALE!

My First Ever Craft Fair

Ok so it’s not a craft fair per se but I will be at my first event selling my goodies in public!

On 15th March a charity coffee morning will be held at Newhaven Church in Edinburgh to raise money for Whizz-Kidz which is a disabled children’s charity.  There will also be around 10 tables of crafty goodies for sale.  This is a great opportunity to help raise money for charity and pick up a unique gift – and just in time for Mother’s Day too!

I’m very excited and pretty nervous about it – I can be pretty shy!  Selling online has allowed me to market myself and my products from behind a computer screen but I can’t hide forever!  The event runs from 10am until 1pm so I’m sure I can but on a brave smiley face for three hours!

So if you’re in the area please come along to show your support and say hello!

That’s 10am to 1pm on 15th March at Newhaven Church in Edinburgh: 7 Craighall Crescent, Edinburgh, Midlothian EH6 4ND

I’ve just bought a house!

That’s right, after a pretty stressful couple of weeks we can finally relax and celebrate the fact that we are getting onto the property ladder!

This isn’t our house…

It all seemed to happen so quickly from realising that we had enough of a deposit to start looking, to finding a house we really liked.  It’s a two bedroomed house with a garage and box room that can be used for my crafting, and it’s near the train station so I can still commute to work easily enough.

We submitted our offer the morning after viewing the house (which sounds a bit mad but it ticked all the right boxes, so why hang around and potentially miss our chance?).  It was such an anxious wait and I couldn’t stop looking at my phone in case I missed the call from our solicitor but we heard back within a couple of hours.  It was such a lovely surprise to have our offer accepted without any negotiation involved (although in the back of my mind I’m now wondering if that meant we could have gone in at a lower price..!)

It was then a case of finding out if the bank would lend us the money we needed.  We didn’t get an appointment until a week later and I couldn’t stop thinking about it – I was starting to go slightly mad.  I wanted to celebrate the fact that our offer was accepted so badly but didn’t want to set myself up for a fall if the bank decided they wouldn’t approve a mortgage.  The appointment with our mortgage adviser finally happened and it seemed to go well.  We passed the all important credit check which was a huge relief, but after going through the rest of the paperwork our application was referred to the underwriters for approval.  I was back to the anxiety stage as we had to wait two more days to find out if we were going to get the funding for our house.

…and neither is this!

On the Saturday afternoon we got the phone call to say that our application had been approved by the underwriters, and exactly 10 minutes later Scotland scored the amazing dropkick that saw them win against Italy in the Six Nations, so it turned out to be a pretty good day in the end!

I’d already started to plan how I wanted to decorate our lounge/dining room so it was such a relief to know that this wasn’t in vain.

So now I’m thinking it would be a good idea to try to sell some stock before the big move!  We get our keys on 28 March so I’ll probably close shop for a couple of days seeing as things are going to be packed up in boxes.  Until then however I’m going to hold a 15% off sale!  Just use coupon code MOVINGSALE for 15% off everything in my Etsy shop!  Don’t forget that Mother’s Day is coming up too (30 March in the UK) so what a perfect opportunity to show how much you care with a handmade gift from The Candy Tree.

As we’re moving into a house that doesn’t seem to have been decorated for 20 years, I’m also planning on taking some before and after photos to show our progress in bringing it up to date – so stay tuned!