I love knitting toys. It gives me so much pleasure to make each one but whilst I'm immensely grateful that they are popular and that people want to buy them, the selling of them is a complicated and rather fraught activity. I've tried several different options in the past including supplying them to shops and more recently selling them myself through my little blog shop. I have an advance mailing list that I email just before I list toys in my shop but this is time consuming to maintain and now it's nearing 1,000 names so after each sale I get quite a number of frustrated emails from disappointed people. I'm coming to the conclusion that it's not working very well anymore and so I've decided to re-open my shop over at Etsy. This way I'll be able to pop toys in as and when I finish them which suits me very well but might not be so convenient for my customers as there will be no advance warning as in my little blog shop. Anyway, we'll give it a try and see how it works out.
I will be having one more timed sale of 10 toys in my blog shop before the start of the summer holidays (there is a preview of what's coming up here) and I will email the advance list before this goes live. Depending on how things go, I may continue to do occasional blog sales so as to give everyone as many options as possible.
I know that there are many, many people who think that I should just sell my patterns so that everyone can make them. I'm not going to go into my reasons for not currently doing so as that would be an open invitation for comment and further criticism. Let's just say that for now I just want to knit toys, so please don't hassle me! I am however thinking of writing up the pattern for the cakes and if I can get it into an easy-to-follow format then I will.
I know this post makes me sound like a moany old bag but in my defence I am now swamped with requests for patterns and special orders and I'm spending over an hour each day trying to keep up with emails and dismally failing. So if you've emailed me in the last month please don't give up on a reply - I hope to get to it soon!
