A year and a day

How the furry boys spent the holiday:

Much like they spend every other day, really. (The photos are a bit fuzzy – flash might have disturbed the napping.)

How I spent the day:

Stringpage Supplies has been a going business for a year and a day, having started up on 1 September 2007 (legally, though nothing was visible to the public). First came an Etsy store (still the home of the sock yarn in the second photos), followed by a store of my own here at Stringpage.

Over the past year I’ve sold a few things, built up some inventory, developed some skills. (Alas, keeping up with the bookkeeping doesn’t seem to be one of them – sorry Mom!) I thought yesterday, the anniversary of the store, would be a good day to do inventory and take new photos for the web catalog. (The catalog isn’t updated yet; that’s tonight’s project.) So far, so good. This year I might even make money.

I also spent some time revising the format of the blog (see the shiny new sidebar). Leave me a comment and let me know what you think. You’ll notice there aren’t any ads there. I make enough money from the Google ads on the main pages to pay for the webhosting for all the instructional materials, which I hope you’ll agree is a good thing, but I wasn’t making any money from ads on the blog itself. I may put the ads back eventually, but for a while I’ll experiment with just having some fancier Amazon links in the sidebar, and no text ads. (Let me know what you think about that too.) Sure, getting rich from blogging would be quite fun, but that’s not why I do it, and let’s face it, the odds of getting rich from blogging about string are pretty darn small! “Self-supporting” is nice, and Stringpage has achieved that.

I admit I’d like to make a few bucks selling supplies, but that whole effort is more because I got tired of not being able to find the supplies and equipment I wanted, and I thought others might feel the same way. (See above, odds of getting rich.) The first year suggests that people do agree, and that this can be a successful small business, but will never be my sole source of income, and that’s fine. (It would be nice if it eventually subsidized my textile tool acquisitions and bookbuying, though! More money to buy string books… )