Where's the money?

I feel like the past month or so has been a huge one for my online card-making venture. I've had more sales in January than I have in the six months combined when I was just starting out. I've added more than ten items to my etsy repertoire and racked up some very favorable ratings from some very happy customers. A few of my sales have been more than $100 or so (for larger birthday party invitation orders). I've put in countless late nights and early mornings to work on new designs or update my blog postings.

So why did I have only $30 in my Paypal account this morning?

It's a good thing that I'm not in this to support the family, otherwise we wouldn't be able to afford ramen noodles at this point.

Happily, I'm in it for the love of the craft -- truly! There are times when I wake up at 3am, completely excited about trying a technique I've been thinking about or with the answer with a particularly vexing design question. 

One thing that my etsy sales have allowed me to do is to pay for my obsession. I would truly design cards for nothing (and, over the years, for our own parties, I have done just this). What the occasional etsy sale allows me to do is to put that money back into my supplies.

So, over the past month, I've been able to justify purchasing a huge bunch of beautiful stock imagery, reams of absolutely gorgeous card stock (I'm a big fan of quality paper), more envelopes (sad to say, even after my recent outting as an envelope hoarder, I still found it necessary to purchase a box of 250 envelopes) and a heck of a bunch of glues and accessories that I've been coveting at the paper store.

And I now have a bunch of fun designs that I'm very, very proud to call my own.

Since a lot of my costs are in creating the initial designs for my cards (the artwork is the most expensive part of equation), if I wanted to stop designing, I can, and I'll be able to continue to sell and make money off of my existing designs.

On the other hand, I'm having WAY too much fun right now!