Say I WAS to open an Etsy store . . .
what should I make? And how do I not rip off everyone else's creative ideas?
This has been my dilemma since I mused on this with a friend ages ago that I would like to open up a shop someday.
The other factors: money (investing in materials is quite an undertaking when you don't know if/when anything will sell) and time (as you'll recall I have 2 kids now and still work from home for ~15 hours a week at the moment, maybe trying to bump that up a bit more in the future as Kee-ku gets older).
I get a lot of enjoyment out of creating things, but I mostly get my ideas from scouring the web for inspiration and thinking to myself, "I could probably do that myself!" A lot of patterns (most, in fact) explicitly say something to the effect of, "Use this as much as you want for your personal/gift use, but do not sell anything made from this pattern." A real bummer since there are a lot of cute patterns out there that, were that stipulation not in place, I feel like I could crank out several of them and get some business (hello, that bunny?)
Anyway, I'm stumped. Someday I would like to open an Etsy shop for real and make creative things and get paid for it. But for now I don't know how to go about it at all. And there's the whole money and time thing.
Any ideas? It'd be really swell to get paid to do something so fun.
Oh, also I think I should probably be a bit better of a sewist before I attempt to sell stuff to unsuspecting strangers on the internet.