Hmm, I am wondering to myself what kind of schedule I'd be looking at when I start spinning regularly again. I could easily sell to Skeins as I did last summer, but the markup she placed on my product made it difficult for me to price my product well and still have inventory move (a 200 yard, 1 oz skein of handspun, hand-dyed yarn should net me $30, easily, if I paid myself what my time was worth, plus overhead and shipping costs. With Nancy's markup, that skein would cost $60 to a potential buyer, and while I feel handmade items are worth the cost of the artisan, that seems excessive to me!)

There are also yarn stores in town who sell to tourists like Nancy did in Juneau, but I imagine their markup would be much the same. And I could easily just sell on this website, with little problem, except that exposure would be an issue. In a stare with foot traffic a certain level of customer flow is expected, if I just ran off the website I would need to pay for advertising on places like Knitty, as well as aggressively market myself on the handspun webrings, to get reasonable sales. That's not a bad thing, but a lot more work for me than sending it off to someone else's store as secondary product and having them mark it up. So sales either go down because of lack of exposure, or they go down because of cost prohibitives.

Nice. I am feeling the decision getting easier by the minute.

Plus, hard-core production work is easily a 40-60 hour a week affair, and while I REALLY want to spin that much, as it is my passion, I have my family (which will only get bigger) to consider. Callie takes my spare moments and munches them with her gummy smile, and I am already finding it hard to get all the chores around the house done during the daytime, having to resort to doing them in the middle of the night when nobody will interrupt.

So figuring out what is realistic work load for my situation is proving much harder than I thought. It is hard to run a good business with hobby-level time input, if I do not provide lots of selection and consistent product I will be lessening my clientele anyway, but the time involved in keeping up good stock is just..... grr.

I am a stay at home mom. I will be a homeschooling mom. These are fulltime jobs during the day and after hours, and if I am going to take care of my family all day long with no help there just isn't time to do both as it stands now. I could spin MAYBE six or seven hours a day, and run dyepots all day long. SO I could reasonably clock 30 spinning hours and 40 or 50 hours dyeing weekly (which is maybe an hour or two of actual work, the rest is just letting them perc and reduce.) That assumes I am trying to set aside 12-14 hours daily, I can only get maybe half of those to spin because of Callie's nap schedule and inability to play by herself for any length of time.

And then there's bookkeeping, maintenance of equipment, time spent packing and shipping as well as advertising, and the cost of continued acquisition of materials (the overhead on getting going again, for real and full time, is a good $1000 or so, not including the wheel replacement I need to do. To get up a good solid stock of just fiber and dye is that much.... 50 pounds of various fibers to blend, another 20 dyes, and I need a hand carder badly, which is $700-$1000, itself. It is quite an investment and one I have been reluctant to make, but if I don't start working my own blended batts up as well and hand-dyed, hand-spun top I will be losing a lot of money.

Batts for sale, just dyed and blended, make VERY good money without the time drain of spinning them up myself. It's a good two hours of work with as good a payoff (for relative time) as handspinning as well. And it is an easy way to build solid inventory if I cannot spin myself. I could, easily, just sell batts and only a skein of yarn here and there if time didn't permit. That is my alternate solution.

It really is a conundrum, and not going ANYWHERE anytime soon as we are still divvying up funds rather strictly between home improvements, student loan payments, mortgage, and the bills., Until one of those (probably the home improvements) abate a little (in maybe a month) my hands are tied as far as getting any funding together to work towards this.

grrrr. Business junk sucks.