Selling is so not me!

I hate selling my work, partly because I feel embarrassed asking people to pay for it, and partly because I get far more pleasure from giving it away. However, my sister says that my clay has to 'wash it's face', meaning pay for itself, and since I've retired I've found that I really do need to do something to pay for the clay.
I've explored selling on various sites, but kept coming back to Etsy as that is the place I go when I want to browse for nice craft things. I sell my tutorials to people in the UK from the Clayaround site, but its not possible for anyone other than people in the UK to buy from there so I bit the bullet and uploaded all my tutorials onto Etsy, I priced them as more expensive on Etsy, so the British people will buy from Clayaround, and I also cover the Etsy expenses.
I'm now looking into selling from my website, but for now will stick with Etsy. The link if anyone wants to have a look is ​https://helencpolymerclay.etsy.com, and the link to the tutorials on the Clayaround website is ​https://clayaround.co.uk/product-category/helen-cruickshank-tutorials/

I finally finished my hare, and made her a friend. The pink on the the right is the original hare, called Margarita (after the wonderful margarita's Debby Wakely made when we were in Margate). Then I made the green one on the left for my sister's birthday. Someone asked me how long it took me to make the hare and I said 7 days. It took five days to make all the canes, then reduce them and make them into strips, one day to make the armature, and one day to cover her. I couldn't put a price on a hare even if I wanted to, and to be honest, I would struggle to sell them. By the time I've spent a week on something, I feel we're friends!! And one doesn't sell friends :) 
I'm going to do a tutorial on one of the canes, the most popular one was the fish cane so in the next blog I'll post how to make that one.
With the remaining cane slices I made a gheko.

Finally, the remaining cane slices went towards a charity event I'm doing in July. It's a workshop for the brilliant charity Make 2nds Count, for secondary breast cancer. I had such fun last year teaching the ladies how to make fairy houses with little jars, that I was invited back. This year we're making brooches. Flower brooches, heart brooches and gnome brooches, they can make one or all three. 

You can see that the heart brooch is made up from strips of the canes left over from the hare, along with just a few others I prepared. I'm going to teach the gnome brooch to the British Polymer Clay guild virtual group next month. If you haven't joined the British Polymer Clay guild, I recommend you have a look at their website. For £20 a year you get loads of free tutorials, a members only facebook page with monthly prize draws, masses of tutorials, inspirational artists and clay techniques, and you can join the monthy virtual clay group, run mostly by myself, where we have a lot of fun claying and chatting. There are also face to face groups around the country. I love the guild and have made many friends in both the British Polymer Clay guild and the wider clay community, including America where I feel my second clay home is.
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