What I'm Working On Now

Wow, it’s  been a while since I checked in. All sorts of things have went on in my life. I did talk about moving to the country, but I didn’t get into detail on how losing unlimited internet has hurt my work. Being unable to work on content sites without eating through my data limit has change our finance situation considerably. The amount of data used by what most people consider normal use is insane. We’ve used the satellite internet providers and now Verizon wifi.

Instead of writing full time I now sell handmade goods andnature photography. Walking in the woods to find great pictures has been cleansing, while painting is just fun.  I also crochet, one of my most popular items has been amigurumi. If you’re not familiar with the term, it’s basically creating dolls or replicas of other things in the single crochet stitch. My daughters all loved the Elsa from Frozen replica.

Eventually I may branch out into selling herbs, but probably not until next year. There’s quite a bit of St. John’s Wort growing. My favorite discovery has been the staggering amount of Boneset growing a few miles from home. I gather it from where I get my elderberries. It goes right into my healing salve.

I have been selling most of my items through my store on ShopEnvy. Unlike Etsy I’m not charged to post anything. There are two formats of my store, one is in their marketplace and the other is my custom storefront. All sales made through the marketplace nets the ShopEnvy folks a small percentage.

Up until a few months ago I had been selling off some things through word of mouth because of needing to raise money for repairing the van we bought, but when I tried doing an auction nothing happened. I did find out about AuctionMobility, it’s a software that allows auctions to be livestreamed on mobile- phones or tablets. That seems like something that would be  beneficial, especially for people like me who don’t have reliable, unlimited connections at home. I don’t know of anyone who has integrated the same type of auction mobile software, but until I can access sites with a better mobile platform, I won’t be able to use auctions for my works.

Something else I found interesting when reading about Auction Mobility is that they just acquired a fine arts/collectible site, Lofty.com. So if I can get my work moving through such an auction, I will be in company with other artists. The neat way they have their bidding set is through swiping or sliding, not clicking. No fake bids or having kids just click away.

Anyone else still using Etsy? Would you be more into using auctions (if you don’t now) if you could put them on a mobile app? I really hate the way Ebay looked on mobile, but not using them these days, it’s too easy to get conned.