Overdue catchup

Hello dear friends and readers!

I've missed you all! I cant believe I haven't blogged since January, I really don't know where this year has gone. I've done a few crafty bits and pieces over the year, but I thought I'd just dive straight in with where I am now.

You may have seen over on my instagram (EmeraldCottage) I've been sharing photos of some of the things I created in the last couple of weeks ......

💚 Coin purses

💚 Dreamcatcher

💚 Owl keyrings

💚 Strawberry keyring

💚 Halloween badges

The badges are a new venture, I'll do a blog post on badge making at some point for you. I'm still working out how best to get the artwork onto the paper for the badge, and experimenting with different methods. Its good fun though!

Now, I have 2 quite big pieces of news to share with you.
Firstly, I'm setting up an Etsy shop to try and sell some of my makes. I've been thinking of doing this for a while, and have sold via craft fairs and facebook in the past. Each of these has negative sides - personally I find the commitment of a craft fair really hard to manage, weekends are for family time and I don't like disappearing off for a day too often, and selling via facebook is ok but very casual, and I've wanted something a bit more structured and professional-looking. Going down the Etsy line is quite daunting, I obviously want the "shopfront" to look good, and the photos of my stock need to be good, plus I need to decide upon things like policies, shipping, returns and so on. Also, with Etsy you pay to list your items, even if they don't sell, so you do have to be quite sure that this is the way to go. I've been putting it off really, it feels a bit scary. But I've decided that this week I'm going to crack on with it, and just get it done.

My other piece of news is that I have started a You-tube channel, and am vlogging there as well as blogging here. My channel is under my own name Jill Davidson and you can find it here. I have 2 videos uploaded so far (here and here) with another to be edited and uploaded over the next couple of days, if you want to watch them and give me any feedback (hopefully positive lol), that would be really lovely.

I'll leave it here for now , I'm trying to get better and more efficient at blogging and not spending hours and hours refining a massive post - that's what I have a habit of doing and it turns every blog post into a massive deal, which of course in turn means I don't blog as often as I'd like. So hopefully this way I will be a bit more regular on here!

Hope you all have a great week,
Jill