Etsy Shop + Cross Stitched Banner

I opened an Etsy shop! My store is called MMM, but because Etsy makes you have at least 4 characters in your shop name, it's officially called "theMMM". Check it out! Since I make a lot of my own jewelry and accessories and they're pretty eye-catching, people always always tell me I should open up a store. However, I'm lazy. And it's difficult to figure out how to price my work and how to take halfway decent photos, so I've been putting it off. Another important thing is that I don't make things to make money. I make things because I love doing it and feel a strong drive to. If I don't have at least three projects going at once, I'll die. But a member of my craft group challenged me to make a store by this Tuesday (or else be publicly shamed :) so I did it.

Right now, I've only got a few pieces posted - the more intricate stuff I want to post takes a lot longer to make and I have no idea how to price them. So I'll cross that hurdle when I get to it!

The most fun part of setting up a shop was designing the banner. I had ideas about using one of my tessellations as a background for the banner, and this was my initial design.

My tessellations are too large a scale for it to work well with the dimensions of the banner. My next idea was to cross stitch a banner. A banner of "M"s. My cross stitch (maybe still a work in progress?):

And the banner, a cropped version of that:

That also needs a little work. I love the feeling of it, because I think it's representative of the things I make, but I dislike how there's blank canvas on either side. I'm torn between cropping that out and adding another image on the end, and actually stitching something else on the sides (like hearts!). For now, it's fine, and the important thing is that a store exists.

I added a widget to my right sidebar which will showcase items from my shop. Click it to see more! You can also follow my page on facebook.