April's theme: "Recalculating"

 Well, I started out April frantically trying to finish items for a craft show on April 2nd. 

The show went fairly well (11th place out of the 101 shows I have done since 2013), about double my average... but bear in mind that over the years, I have had plenty of crummy shows to keep the average down. The worst was a show where I had a $40 table fee, and had $0 in sales! 

I'm done with shows until June now... but the June show is a venue that was in 2nd place when it occurred last year. A show later in the year bumped it down to third, but it was still a great show, with about 4x my average sales. 

I made up a spreadsheet of my best sellers (about twenty items) and set goals for how many of each I'd like to have ready for the June show. I had over 50 slots to fill.

Then, as I worked on items, I added another column to the spreadsheet, since I missed some best sellers! Then some of the lines that were already filled in got crossed off as items sold... I currently have over 70 blanks to fill in... 

It seems like every day I start out with a plan.... finish this project, start on that one... and by the end of the day, as my GPS says, "recalculating"... the plan changes! 

This week of April has been busy! Record-breaking busy! 

• I hit 600 Etsy sales! 
• I got a hat trick (three sales in one day... third time this year. For reference, I got hat tricks 3 times in 2021, and twice in 2020). 
• I broke the previous record of two days in a row with Etsy sales... at three today, will I make it to four? 
• As of April 7th, I already broke my record for April sales. And the month is only 1/4 over! 

I love it when I need to use a tote bag to carry my Etsy orders into the post office!

One day's orders, ready to go! 

Butter Lamb orders have been keeping me busy. I'm trying to keep a good selection in my Etsy shop, but quite often, new lambs will sell within 24 hours of listing! Right now, Etsy tells me that 7 customers have my butter lamb in their cart. So I will ride the Butter Lamb wave and keep churning them out! 

I'm hoping by the end of April to have a lot less spaces in my restocking spreadsheet... but if Etsy customers keep me busy with other custom orders, I'll just keep smiling and crocheting! 

Wow, April 26 already... orders have slowed, so I've been working on restocking items for an upcoming craft show. I have a bin with small items: 

Hamsters

Baby Octopus

Snails

Baby Axolotl

I've been working on restocking those... my scrap yarn bin is getting cleaned out nicely! In May, I will concentrate on making some bigger items for some large street fairs I'm doing this summer.