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A Handmade Business Recap: Looking back at 2025
I’ve spent part of this week wrapping up things from 2025 and looking back at the goals I set for the year. My theme for the year was a carry over from 2024: Use what you have. Do it better. I’d say overall, I did use what I have, but the year was really mixed as far as “do it better”.
Online & In Person Sales
It was a discouraging year for selling art. When I looked at the numbers, my non-Etsy income was almost exactly the same, within about $60. But my Etsy sales ended the year down 36%. And I [read more…]
A Nut Un-Cracked: What to do when a pattern flops
I’m going to start this post with a spoiler: I don’t actually know the answer to this one. But I wanted to tell you a story about my big pattern release of 2025.
In about August of 2025, I decided to design a big pattern for the holiday season. I design a lot of ornaments, but I thought it would be fun to do something a little more and a little bigger. I’ve always loved Tchaikovsky’s Nutcracker Suite. I’ve listened to the music probably hundreds of times and I’ve seen a handful of performances of the ballet. So I decided to [read more…]
New Cow and Highland Cow Embroidered Felt Ornament Patterns!
Today the blog has been invaded by a herd of cows! Cows and Highland Cows have been some of my most requested animal ornament designs. My grandparents had a dairy farm in upstate NY and I have a lot of fond memories of cows and visiting the farm when I was a kid. I decided that the shapes would be so similar that it would be easy to put both a holstein cow and a highland cow in the same pattern so you can make whichever version you love.
I started this design with a sketch. You can see I [read more…]
Halloween 2025: He Slobbered Me
Almost 20 years ago, I made some Halloween costumes and we staged a photo. We grew up with the tradition of everyone we knew sending holiday cards with a photo of the family with matching sweaters. It’s just what you did. So, I sent greetings to all of our friends and family, but I realized that staged holiday photo just wasn’t us.
So we put our Halloween photo in our holiday cards. People got such a kick out of it that we did it the next year. And soon it was a new family tradition. A few weekends before Halloween every [read more…]
Hi, I’m Becka.
Talking about fabric design, teaching, and the life and business of being an artist.
Teaching online and in person classes in embroidery, handcrafts, technology, fabric design and artist business skills. Co-author of The Spoonflower Handbook.
Making books, paper art and fiber art geekery.
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