New Year, New Life, New Goals

January 29, 2020

That’s kind of how I’m looking at it, although now that I type that out, I should preface this with no, I’m not pregnant.

If you hadn’t noticed (and there’s no real reason for you to have noticed, honestly) I moved this blog over from a free WordPress account to an actual domain – SamInJapan.com (which is hopefully where you are now?) I was running out of space to upload things, and I wanted some more functionality…

I’ve been thinking a lot about all of the art I do, and I’ve actually had some of my stuff printed through a few different companies, and I’m really happy with how they’ve come out. My Christmas dress, and a sweater for Chris, especially.

So, I decided as a New Year’s resolution, to try to set up an online shop with these sorts of things. I am amazed and humbled with how well my RedBubble shop is doing (I just hit 100 sales, and I have only been doing it for 3-4 months?! How crazy!) but there are so many other things out there to print on!

Like this dress, for example. And I had a skirt made for Halloween that is the same fabric and shape but with the Halloween Teacup Cats on it that I love and wear even when it’s not Halloween because why not.

But, man, moving the site over has been a pain in the ass. I’m still not sure that everything works, but I’m kind of hoping so. And then, on top of that, I’ve been designing different products and trying to put together a semi-usable shop.

It’s been difficult, but a good learning exercise. Etsy was getting too expensive for basically no exposure, and having to pad up the cost of each item just to cover all of their ridiculous fees made it feel like eBay all over again, so I’ve just kind of given that up until they get themselves sorted or something better comes along. But for now, between RedBubble, Teepublic and here, I’m hoping my art makes it out to people who enjoy it.

I just have so much of it to work on!

Also, we went back to the US for the holidays. It was amazing, and so great to get to see people again, even if we did take it easy and use it more as relaxing time than we probably should have. I’ll try to write something about that some time, but suffice to say, it was awesome.