Store closing sale - It´s not really a retirement

On April´s Fool of last year, I was opening my first digital scrapbook store, because I love to design and I wanted to have some extra bucks, specially for the months where usually my craft business doesn´t have that much profit. I chosen to start at ScrappyBee when Charly made the first designer call for that store - the idea of starting together with the store was really attractive to me.

But since the beginning I struggled to keep up with all the store duties - bear with me, they´re very few, but I´m really perfecctionist and still a beginner designer. So, in the first months, doing the store colabs and other duties took up almost all my designing time. My first challenge was to start to design faster - and I just accomplished it around November of last year. So, in the end of the year I was planning to use the long gap that my craft business usually have in December, January and February to design kits to put at the store from there to August (the next gap) and do the store colabs and such in advance too - in a way the designing time from March to July could be used to blogtrains and eventual stuff... Seems a good plan, right? I was also planning to apply for at least 2 other stores during the year...

However, the 120-140 days with very slow moviment that I was predicting (because it happened in previous years) ended up being only 27 days - the store only got slowest after December 20th (and not November 25th, as usual) and was back in action on the third week of January. It´s profting around three times the same month last year and a month like Faburary, that used to be a very slow month, has a slightly bigger profit than a "ok" month from last year.

As I work only with help of my DH, that is involved in a medium-term really draining freelance job, I´m working 24/7 on my craft business! It´s been hard even to find time to relax in some weeks. I´m in fact working more than I used to do when I was a 44 hours/week employee - but my job now is for more pleasant!

So, I had to give up on something. I needed to chose between giving up on having one free weekend day a month to do something with my friends, quit my really relaxing and inspiring volunteer work on a cat shelter that I´m totally in love with or closing for a while my digiscrap store till I have around 4 new kits ready to go - well, it was really hard, but I deceided to quit the digiscrap store, because in my pause I could only work in two store duty kits, one blogtrain portion and I´m almost in the end of my next pack set...

So, I´m not retiring from design. I still design sometimes even in these very busy days - sometimes I simply feel the urge to do so - and you´ll always find me answering questions and chatting on Pixel Scrapper forums. But, for now, since I can´t furfill the store duties (of doing colabs, etc) and design my own kits at same time, I´ll be storeless till I have some kits ready to go. Desinging is way more relaxing when you´re doing something you´re really interested on, when you choose all the creation process (or are really engaged in a colaboration, which not always happen in duty kits - for example when they are about a date you don´t celebrate, or they´re about a season you´re not in - I´m a southern-hemispherer, remember?)

It´s possible that my Heart Rock Song kit is retiring forever - but not the template pack - because although I was completely passionate about this kit at the time, I´d have done it way better these days, The others will be back in my next store when I find one :)

Meanwhile, if you know a neat store, where all products are full sized and there´re no posers that could shelter my creations with no store duties, please let me know! I would also love to know of some people that would like to QC or make some sample layouts with my next kits even knowing that they´ll take some time to be released.

Even if I take some months to write again in this blog, feel free to contact me via e-mail (loriensworkshop at gmail.com), facebook and Pixel Scrapper.

Happy Scrapping!