Gingerbread House Table Runner

Finally finished my Christmas table runner listing for my Etsy shop. 

The table runner measures 16-1/2in x 34-1/2in with just three stars, but I have also given the option of making it with four stars. Was easy to make and comes together very quickly. Took me a weekend to construct and another few days to quilt in the ditch around the seams. The hold up was writing it up and deciding to include another size. It got done though and now I am back to finishing off my snowman table runners.

Also a bit of bragging which does not come naturally to me

For this month I am a star seller on Etsy. It's a new program which has received a fair amount of criticism as it is very hard to achieve for some of the shops on there, me included. If you sell mainly digital items you are missing out on the benchmark of delivering on time as you do not actually ship a physical item. In addition you have to maintain around 10 orders (around (300 USD) in sales, which of course is a bit difficult if you are selling cheaper items and don't have the numbers of people buying that larger shops have.

Also with digital products you very rarely get messages from buyers as they will receive their item immediately...all in all very difficult and the concern amongst Etsy sellers is that it will be incorporated in their search algorithm with time.

I did achieve the badge for this month as I have had  some messages and lovely reviews (which was great) and also did happen to sell a quilt. I think I will keep the badge for another few months (3 month evaluation period) but then I will probably loose it, so I thought I do need to celebrate this a bit. 

It was exactly October last year that I did look at my Etsy shop and thought...either do something with it or close it! I have done an enormous amount of work on there, some days just living and breezing Etsy, researching, learning and increasing my inventory. It has been quite work intensive and along the way I have learnt quite a bit and have been able to increase my sales to the moderate amount that I was aiming for. Really happy how it is all going and at the moment very chuffed that I got that badge even though it is controversial and probably does not mean much for the people who are looking at items on Etsy. To me it almost felt like a bit of a personal reward for all the work that I did put in over the last year.

I will not be too concerned loosing it again as it would be incredibly difficult to maintain with just digital pattern sales...I can always look back at this blog post and have a bit  of a smile on my face seeing that star badge on here.

Karin