Sigh

Sales are slow on etsy-is it the economy or etsy's recent woes with newly listed items not showing up and the search working at a snail's pace or just too many sellers on etsy now? Who knows, but it's hard to get motivated to work on things when you wake up to an empty in box. I've got shops on two new sites that I'm hoping will eventually take off.

The first one is icraft, a Canadian site that has a really nice professional look, the listing is free right now, and I've made a couple of sales there. I like the one stop listing page where everything gets done at once, you can load up to 6 pictures all at one time, and it only takes a few minutes.

Another new site is madeitmyself, a site out of California but it's still in the beta not so nice looking stage. It's free to list and free to get your stuff 'featured' right now also. The listing is still easy but you have to go through 5 pages like on etsy, and the listing forms are something that appears to have been made from some sort of auction site template, as there is one space where you put in whether the item is 'new', 'like new', 'slightly used', etc. Since it's a handmade site, I would hope everything is new! I've made one sale on there, but I'm going to keep adding to both of these sites and hope that the word gets out about them.

On another note, do you ever just want to get rid of all your stuff and start over? We have so much stuff in this house, a closet full of books that we might read again, a closet full of clothes and shoes that we might wear again, a room full of craft supplies that I might use, drawers and cabinets full of cleaning and grooming supplies that I should use, but am usually too lazy. I'm doing good to brush my hair in the mornings, never mind some sort of face washing routine. And makeup? fuggedaboudit!

I'm talking about all the stuff that you accumulate throughout your life, knick knacks and dishes and wall art, and furniture, and books, and papers, and dvds and cds, and just a whole bunch of stuff! Sometimes I'd just like to rent a big dumpster, toss it all in there, and start over from scratch, hopefully with a more minimalistic zen approach to things.

When we moved almost five years ago, we got rid of tons of stuff and have never missed any of it, so it just makes me wonder how much stuff we really need in our daily lives. A bed to sleep on, a refrigerator and a stove and a microwave so we can eat, a dish to eat on and some silverware to eat with, a glass to drink out of, a table to eat at and a chair to sit on, a shower and soap and a toothbrush and toothpase, and a computer to mess around on, and a book to read, and a movie to watch, and a tv to watch that movie on, and a couch to sit on to watch that movie, and a coffee table to put your feet up on while sitting on that couch, and some nice pajamas to wear while watching that movie, and a washer and dryer to wash those pajamas, and I guess we do need some of all this stuff that fills up our houses and lives.