By Tara, on July 1st, 2010% Today’s my anniversary!
I have been self-employed, making handspun yarn, full-time for one year!
Instead of writing about, let me tell you what it’s like:
But most importantly?
I want to say, THANK YOU!
Without you and your support at the Boutique, I wouldn’t be able to pay the bills. Without your delightful emails, I wouldn’t love what I do. Without your encouragement and sympathy during hard times, I wouldn’t be able to go back to the wheel each day.
Thanks for making this last year awesome.
Here’s to many more fabulous, yarny, colorful adventures!
PS. Completely unrelated but entirely serendiptously, I’m almost at 600 sales in my etsy shop. The person who buys the 600th item will get a free skein of yarn in their order! Get yours here.
. . . → Read More: Happy 1 year anniversary!
By Tara, on June 3rd, 2010% Today’s my birthday!
And it’s also the birth of a new project/home/excitement!
And you are invited to celebrate with me!
This is my new home on the web.
Oh, Blonde Chicken Boutique isn’t going anywhere! In fact, it is just growing and growing!
Blonde Chicken Boutique (where you are, right now) is my yarn line and my new home (still trying on names, it feels weird to keep calling it TaraSwiger.com…it’s like I’m being very formal with…myself)
What’s this mean for you?
If you come here for the yarny goodness: good news! You are going to get MORE of it! Every Thursday I’m going to share patterns, ideas, information about eco-friendly fiber and yarn. And this month, I’ll be rearranging stuff around here so the pattern ideas and contests are even easier to find.
If you don’t want to miss it, you can get it delivered right to your inbox, . . . → Read More: You’re Invited: Birthday Brunch
By Tara, on March 19th, 2010% Win a copy of Handmade Marketplace! . . . → Read More: Handmade Marketplace – book giveaway!
By Tara, on January 27th, 2010% Last week I listened to the BEST podcast I’ve ever heard about sharing-your-crafty-thing. It was Sister Diane’s CraftyPod show about Engagement Marketing.
If you sell your crafty thing (patterns, yarns, purses, whatever!) you really need to listen to this.
What’s Engagement Marketing?
Diane gives a great definition and explains why you’d want to use it, but I can’t resist putting it in my own words. It’s sharing your thing by connecting. By making relationships, by talking to your customers one-by-one. It’s what we (you and I) do here on the blog in the comments. It’s chatting on Twitter. It’s leaving comments on Flickr.
Ignore the word Marketing.
Because it’s so much more than that. (and I don’t like the word marketing)
It’s not just sharing my passion with you, even though that’s always fun.
In all of this connecting, sharing, chatting; I’ve gotten to know you. You share your yarn-ideas . . . → Read More: In which I gush about how much I love you…
By Tara, on January 6th, 2010% Do you make something awesome? Want to share it with the world? I want to help! . . . → Read More: Helping Yarnies Share Your Thing
By Tara, on August 27th, 2009% How the Blonde Chicken gets her name. Warning: Adorable Story Ahead . . . → Read More: How I came to be a Blonde Chicken
By Tara, on July 23rd, 2009% This week I’m celebrating the launching into my new life by sharing the path that led me here. Follow along all week!
The crafty-ness started at home, then I went to college and learned to knit. Yesterday, I ran a business, but today, I move and lose it.
After working at the Kil’n Time for 2 years, I wanted a change. Jay & I had always wanted to move to Tennessee and we decided now was the time. We were young, underemployed (neither of our jobs required the Bachelor’s degrees we had) and had few responsibilities. 2 weeks later, we lived in Johnson City, TN.
We launched BlondeChickenBoutique.com (it looked a bit different then) the week after we moved. I was selling my handdyed yarn straight from this website, not Etsy. I waited for the sales.
Nothing.
I imagined that my experience as a store manager of a pottery studio . . . → Read More: Path To Yarn – Moving into Cubicle-land
By Tara, on March 13th, 2008% I started blogging in 2001, when it wasn’t called a blog, but a “online journal”. All throughout college, I updated it with musings, lists and ideas. After I started knitting, I started a knitting blog, which also included bits of my life: pictures of family, grocery lists, etc. I maintained it until last fall, when I felt that it was important to have a separate business blog, one that didn’t include too much personal information; a place to fully discuss my materials and methods. I didn’t link to my old blog, but I feel that without that great big archive a big part of what BCB is and who I am as a knitter and dyer is lost. To remedy the situation, I’m now importing some of my old posts into this blog, mostly the posts about finished knitted things. At each year’s end, I’ve done a recap of . . . → Read More: Merging
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