Monday, September 08, 2008

Folksy and 'freedom'

At 9am this morning I kissed my little people, I said bye-bye to them then walked home in the knowledge that I wouldn't see them until 3pm. 6hours to myself on a normal week day without my children for the first time in 5yrs.

Even though L doesn't start school until next year, I have decided to put her into Pre-school for a full day on a Monday. This has been met with a mixture of feelings from me, mainly, as with all Mums, guilt. I don't work full time, infact today I haven't left the house to work (even though I have done loads of sewing work) so I don't 'need' her in school but I think she is ready for a full day. I'm sure I will pick her up at 3pm and she will be so full of stories about what she has got up to and also be full of tired grumpiness but she will have had fun and want to know why she can't stay for the full day when I take her for her morning tomorrow.

From now on, I have decided that Mondays are going to be dedicated to sewing Nicsknots stuff days. I need to put time aside during the day and to stop feeling guilty about leaving the pots unwashed and the clothes unironed while I sew. I need to, if this is going to become a proper business that I so hope it is.

I've had a really productive morning, I've crossed lots of things of on my 'todo' list and am feeling more positive about most things than I have for a long time.

Last night I made myself a Folksy account. I had heard talk of it and decided that I would give it a go. Quite a lot of chatter about it has been around it being a British copy-cat of Etsy and it is very similar and then the name, hardly different but, I don't know, I think there does need to be a british version and if you are going to do something, why remake the wheel?

I'm not being flipant there, I know (from bitter personal experiance) that people copying your work is a bad thing (or the most sincere form of flattery if you beleive my Dad) but how many ways are there to make a site like Etsy without it loosing the appeal you are trying to acheive?

Sellers have, for a long time, asked Etsy to allow sales in £s as well as $s but its not forthcoming. I think if they did this, there wouldn't really be as great an appeal for Folksy. The main reason I joined was so that I could sell things in £s rather than (or rather as well as) $s.

To be honest, it didn't bother me that much to start with. Money that you have sitting in your paypal account in $s is like double free money....to start with any money in Paypal isn't real is it? and any money that you have in a foreign currency is like holiday money, right ;)
but you have to pay exchange rate fees every time you convert $s into 'real money' and with the $ becoming stronger over the past month, the prices I had on all of my items on Etsy, were overpriced when converted back to £s. A fact that I am sure would put my UK buyers off so I had to spend time converting and updating prices on my account on Saturday.

So anyway, I guess that is my justification for joining Folksy. Here is my shop, only one item in it so far but I will upload more in the week.

I'm keen to hear your views on Folksy....although am slightly worried that I might start a rather lively debate but we'll see ;)

1 comment:

Daisy said...

I hadn't even heard of Folksy but i'll look out for it from now on!