To Sell or Not To Sell....

That is the question I have been asking myself for quite some time now.  I have had a lot of people comment on my yarn over the years, and the most frequent comment  hear is "You should sell your yarn!"

I was very hesitant to even think about it at first, because I have had issues in the past with trying to do creative things for a living.  I was a cake decorator for a while, and as much as I love decorating cakes, I HATED being a commercial cake decorator. To me, it sucked all the fun out of a hobby I quite enjoy.  Same thing with photography. I want to be able to make photographs because I want to, not because someone else wants me to.

But the more I think about it, the more I have come to the realization that this could be different. I would not be dying yarn because someone asked me for something in particular.  I would be creating one of a kind skeins of yarn, in my trademark impatient, sometimes haphazard way, and then posting them to see if someone else there wants to give them a forever home.

If I wake up in the morning and feel like today I want to dye a bunch of neon yarn, I can do that.  And if tomorrow I decide that I fancy a nice brown and green combo with a shot of hunters orange, I can do that.  If I decide I don't want to dye anything for a week, or a month, then it would just mean I would not have anything new to sell.   And if I completely and totally fell in love with a yarn when it was done, then I wouldn't have to sell it, and I could keep it if I wanted to.

I don't think I would want to do this as a full time job, just because the fun might go out of it quickly... but I could set up an Etsy shop and maybe once a month add some new years and see how they sell.  If I start dyeing more yarn, then I could do more frequent updates, but I wouldn't be tied to any particular amount or timeframe.  It would make my yarns somewhat elusive... you would have to try to catch them in their natural habitat for a brief period of time if you wanted to own one :)

How many of my readers out there are doing this? Selling something they make online? And if you are doing it, do you enjoy doing it? What are the pros and cons of it?

And for those of you waiting for more How-To dyeing posts, I am hoping to have a couple more in the next week or so. I want to try an alternate way to speckle dye, and I am also playing with an alternate heat source. I tried combining both today, and while I did not quite get the outcome I was expecting, so far I love what I am seeing.  Not that I will ever be able to replicate it! Hard to make exactly the same mistakes a second time ;)