i'm 54. i live in arlington, between dallas and fort worth. both my kids are grown and out. tyler's in austin doing some tech thing i don't fully understand. lauren got married last spring, lives in fort worth, expecting in november which i still can't believe.
it's just me and my husband ray in the house now. and ray was gone all day at work.
i had so much time on my hands i didn't know what to do with myself. honest to god. i'd get up at 7, get the dishwasher going, run the vacuum, run a load of laundry, water the plants, and by 11 in the morning the whole house was done. spotless. and then i'd have nothing.
so i'd lay down on the couch with the tv on, just scrolling through reels. tiktok, facebook, whatever the algorithm wanted to show me. lord knows i wasn't following any plan. i'd doze off halfway through. wake up at 1, maybe 2, with the phone still in my hand and a crick in my neck. put my face back together. start dinner. tell ray about my "busy day." we'd watch the news. bed. and the next day was the same.
i wasn't depressed exactly. i was just bored. and lonely in a way i didn't really want to admit. when the kids were home i was so busy i used to dream about being bored. and now i finally was, and it turns out it's just as bad. maybe worse.
then ray got laid off in april.
he's been at the same regional sales job for almost twenty years. they "restructured." sixteen weeks severance, which sounds great until you remember he's 56 and the job market for guys his age is just brutal right now. he started applying and getting nothing back. not even rejection emails. silence.
and i thought to myself, you've been sitting on this couch for three years. you need to do something.
the cookies thing (it flopped)
first idea was cookies. everybody at church always says i make the best snickerdoodles. so i thought, fine, i'll sell snickerdoodles.
i went and bought all this fancy packaging from hobby lobby, baked all weekend, posted in the neighborhood facebook group. sold maybe fifty dollars worth. and then nothing. it turns out a lot of people will compliment your cookies and then go buy a tub of chips ahoy.
i had snickerdoodles going stale in my pantry and i felt like such a fool. went back to the couch. went back to the scrolling.
the reel
i was about to doze off. one of those naps where you're not even tired, you're just letting your brain check out.
then a reel came on. a young girl, probably twenty something, sitting cross-legged on a bed. she was holding up her phone and saying she made fifteen thousand dollars last month from crochet patterns. on etsy. she was selling pdf instructions, not the blankets themselves. just the patterns.
i sat up so fast i dropped my phone on my face.
because here's the thing. i used to crochet. like, a lot. when i was in my twenties and pregnant with tyler i made a whole stack of baby blankets to give to friends at church. i was actually pretty good. i had a half-dozen patterns memorized. i hadn't touched a hook in maybe ten years.
i got up, walked to the closet in tyler's old room, and dug through that bin. found the hooks at the bottom. the yarn was a little stiff but the hooks were fine. i sat down at the kitchen table and tried to do a granny square from memory. it took me maybe fifteen minutes to get my hands to remember but they did. fully. like riding a bike.
i thought, well, maybe.
youtube was a mess y'all
so naturally i opened up youtube. searched how to sell crochet patterns on etsy. there must've been a thousand videos.
every single one said something different. one girl said sell pdfs only, no videos. next girl said no honey, the money's in video tutorials, pdfs are dead. one said do free patterns first to build a following, another said skip free, charge from day one. then there was a whole other rabbit hole about using ai to make your shop look better, and half the videos said yes use ai, the other half said etsy will shut you down if you use ai.
i closed the laptop and went and folded towels because at least i knew how to do that.
the course (i felt funny paying for it)
i grew up in a house where you didn't pay for things you could get for free. and the internet's free. so paying for a course felt almost embarrassing. like ray was going to come in and ask why i bought another little thing on the credit card.
but i'd been at youtube for three weeks and i had nothing to show for it. ray's severance had a clock on it. and i was getting more and more desperate.
i looked around. a couple of those "mastermind" things on facebook were like five hundred dollars, no thank you. one of those skool community things was almost a hundred a month and you had to keep paying every month. another website had this big college-class style thing with a fourteen week syllabus which, no.
then i found a course called mindwand. honestly i wasn't sure i read the name right the first time. mind. wand. like a magic wand for your brain i guess. the reviews were the part that got me. people were leaving these really specific little stories about which lessons helped them. not just "great course" but stuff like "the part where they teach you how to make your listing pictures changed everything for me." that kind of thing.
and it was cheap. honestly cheaper than the cookie packaging i'd wasted money on. i went ahead and bought it. didn't tell ray. (told him later. he was fine.)
it actually worked
i was bracing for one of those bad courses where it's just a woman reading slides for six hours and you finish ten percent.
it wasn't that. it was broken into little days, maybe fifteen minutes each. they walk you through how to use ai for the parts of selling online that take forever. like writing your shop listings, making the little preview pictures for each pattern, replying to customer messages. all that stuff that used to take a whole afternoon, you can do in twenty minutes once you know how.
i finished the whole thing in about two weeks. i was doing it on the couch with the news on in the background. couple lessons in the morning with my coffee, couple at night after dinner. for what it's worth i don't think i've ever finished a course in my life. not even the watercolor thing i bought when lauren was in middle school.
nothing happened for a long time
i listed my first five patterns by the end of week three. and then. nothing.
i kept checking the etsy app. "visits today: 4." an hour later, "visits today: 4." day after day. i had used everything the course taught me. the pretty preview pictures, the descriptions, the right keywords. and still no sales.
one night ray was on his laptop filling out yet another application and i was at the kitchen table refreshing etsy. and i just felt so silly. like maybe this was another snickerdoodles situation and i should just give it up and go work at the hobby lobby.
then i remembered. ray's severance had four weeks left. four weeks. we couldn't afford for this not to work. not really.
i cried a little (not gonna lie) and got back to it.
then someone in ohio bought one
day thirty eight. ladies in a basket pattern, six dollars. somebody in ohio. i screamed and ray came running thinking i'd fallen.
then nothing for three days. then two sales. then four. it was slow at first and then less slow. i kept making more patterns. some did great, some did nothing. a leaf one took off, that one got picked up by a couple of pinterest crochet boards and my views jumped to over two hundred a day.
last month i did just under two thousand dollars in sales. after fees and the little bit i pay for the ai tools, i kept about seventeen hundred. it's not a fortune. but it's enough to cover our groceries and the electric and put a little back. and that has changed everything about how it feels in this house.
ray hasn't found a new job yet. but he's helping me now. he's better at writing the customer emails than i am. he's talking about starting his own little thing on etsy too. woodworking patterns maybe. he's been handy since i met him.
the only thing i can tell you
ladies in my church group keep asking me what the secret was. they want me to point at one thing.
i can't.
i made probably forty patterns to find the ones that work. the leaf one and the heart one are basically the same pattern in shape. one took off, the other didn't. i can't tell you why.
what i can tell you is i almost quit at week five. and if i had, i would have missed week six. the only reason i made it through was that ray's job situation made quitting scarier than continuing. but it worked out. you just have to be okay with nothing happening for a while.
if you're sitting on the couch like i was, kids gone, nothing to do all afternoon, husband off at work or laid off or whatever, i don't know your situation. but i'll tell you this. the boredom was the worst part. just having something to wake up for in the morning has been worth more than the money. the money is just the bonus.
okay i need to go. ray's calling me to help him fix the garbage disposal which is one of those marriage things. if you're trying to start something, i hope it works out for you. that's all i got.