PlanetJune Blog: Latest News, Patterns and Tutorials

Today’s PlanetJune Story shows how easily you can brighten someone’s day with crochet. When Nancy Smith, the chairman for the Crochet Guild of America’s Chapter Challenge, contacted me in February to ask for permission for the CGOA to use my Love Hearts pattern as a way for their members to give back to their communities, I never dreamt it would lead to such an amazing result!

Let’s hear from Nancy:

The Crochet Guild of America (CGOA) is a national organization of local crochet guilds located in almost all 50 states of USA. CGOA also hosts a national conference called Chain Link held in different locations each summer that includes classes of various skills, stitches, and techniques, a Design Contest, a fashion show and banquet, and a ‘Meet and Greet’ to possibly sell your designs to publishers, yarn companies and/or magazines. There is also a Masters Program which tests your skills in all aspects of crochet from stitches to gauge to finishing techniques. Be brave! Check it out!

Each year, CGOA challenges the chapters to give back to their local communities by participating in the CGOA Chapter Challenge which selects a project for all interested chapters to make.

Each project is selected with a particular need in mind. Past years have included chemo hats, preemie blankets, squares for afghans, and scarves. This year was a bit different since a lot of places were not accepting physical items due to COVID-19 protocols. But June Gilbank of Planet June came to our rescue by allowing us to use her Love Hearts pattern for the Challenge.

The hearts could be distributed as a group project if there were places near each chapter that were accepting items, along with individual members passing them out to total strangers, family, friends, neighbors, hospitals workers, doctor offices, fire houses, etc.

At first, members were kind of skeptical about the project, but some that handed the hearts out individually reported the results/reactions back to their chapters, and the interest really took off. The smiles and reactions from the recipients were well worth the work!

There were 12,798 hearts made for this Challenge! Besides being individually handed out, hearts were disbursed to an entire elementary school, to Meals on Wheels, to assisted living centers, nursing homes, animal shelters, special education centers, teachers for Teacher Appreciation Day, church meetings, and being attached to future donation projects each chapter makes.

June’s pattern was fast and easy to make, and the chapters were told to use whatever yarns and hook sizes they wanted, which created a variety of sizes and colors besides the three sizes June has in the pattern.

CGOA and its’ chapters send a big THANK YOU to June for so generously allowing us to use her pattern!

For more information about CGOA, and possibly starting your own local chapter, here are the links:

• Crochet Guild of America (CGOA)
• How to Start a CGOA Chapter – Crochet Guild of America (CGOA)
• CGOA Masters Programs – Crochet Guild of America (CGOA)

Nancy Smith
CGOA Chapter Challenge Chairman

A few more photos, shared with permission from the participating chapters:

New York City Crochet Guild, Manhattan NY

Northern Illinois Crochet Guild, Rolling Meadows (a suburb of Chicago) IL

Happily Hooked on Crochet Guild, Danbury CT

The Happy Hookers, Atlanta GA

Northern Kentucky Crochet Guild, Burlington KY

Ebenezer Angelic Crocheters, Washington DC

Crocheters of the Lakes, Lake County IL

New Mexico Crochet Guild, Albuquerque NM

Crochet Twin Cities, Minneapolis/St Paul MN

And here’s the video of the Challenge results:

(Back to me, June, again!)

Well over twelve thousand crocheted hearts – isn’t that incredible! Congratulations to all the participating CGOA chapters – your generosity and kindness has touched so many deserving people. I’m honoured that my Love Hearts pattern continues to be used in such meaningful ways.

Thank you so much, Nancy, for sharing your report – and for choosing to use my pattern for such a successful Chapter Challenge 🙂
Please leave Nancy and the CGOA members a comment if you’ve enjoyed this post!

Do you have a PlanetJune Story you’d like to share? I’d love to hear it! Please email your story to june@planetjune.com, together with one or more high quality photos showing what you’ve made from PlanetJune patterns. If I choose your story to feature here on the blog, I’ll send you your choice of pattern from my shop to say thank you!

PS – If you’re feeling inspired to bring some smiles to your community with crocheted hearts, you can find my Love Hearts crochet pattern here. 🙂

Ready for some cuteness? Fuzzy Hedgehog is a simple and adorable pattern that makes the most of a novelty textured yarn such as eyelash or fur! From realistic shades to bright and colourful options, there are no wrong choices to make – any novelty yarn looks good as hedgehog spines.

With just two pieces to stitch together, you’ll be able to whip up the sweetest little hedgehog buddy in no time, sized to fit perfectly in the palm of your hand. The ears are crocheted as you go, so all you need to do is stitch the head to the body and you’re done.

Please don’t be scared of eyelash-type yarn – with a simple pattern like this, it’s fine if you skip or add a stitch here or there! Using your start-of-round stitch marker means you can add a quick increase or decrease to get back to the right number of stitches at the end of each round, so no harm done – nobody will ever know! And the effect is absolutely perfect for hedgehog spines.

As I like to reward people who choose to donate for my donationware patterns, the PDF version of the Fuzzy Hedgehog pattern also includes additional instructional photos and my bonus ‘About Fuzzy Patterns’ PDF, which compiles all my tips on working with fuzzy yarns. As always, the pattern is free for you to use online, and you need only donate if you’d like to thank me for my time in creating it, or if you’d like the easy-to-print PDF version with the bonuses.

Go to the free Fuzzy Hedgehog pattern >>

Or jump straight to donate:

Order the Fuzzy Hedgehog pattern >>

Not ready to make one yet? Add this pattern to your Ravelry queue:

Join Team PlanetJune for the Ravellenic Games!

If you’re new to the Ravellenic Games, the idea is to challenge yourself by starting and finishing project(s) during the timeframe of a certain summer 2021 global sports event (July 23 – August 8). It’s just for fun, like a CAL but you get to choose your own projects, and you’ll be awarded virtual medals for projects you complete. Join Team PlanetJune and you can crochet anything PlanetJune during this timeframe – including a Fuzzy Hedgehog for the ‘Toy Toss’ event – and your teammates will cheer you on as you race to the finish!

For more info on how this all works, see the Team PlanetJune FAQ, or ask in the Team PJ thread on ravelry – my amazing co-Captains and I are standing by and waiting to help.

Please join us in the PlanetJune group on Ravelry and post to the Team PlanetJune thread to register as part of the team! The games begin on Friday (but latecomers are welcome too). I hope to see you there – it’ll be fun for us to all crochet together this summer 🙂

Some craft projects require concentration (like following an amigurumi pattern), while other projects are relaxing in their repetitive nature (like crocheting row after row of a simple afghan pattern). I find these more relaxing crafts and projects wonderful for the times when my brain is too tired to concentrate on something complicated, but my hands still want to stay busy.

I’ve started picking up craft kits so I can try different crafts and see what appeals to me. I thought it might be fun to do a series of posts on the crafts I’m dabbling in – maybe you’ll find something you’d like to try too! (And many of these simple crafts are kid-friendly, so these could also be family craft projects, or ideas for gifts for the crafty children in your life.)

So here’s the first post in my new Relaxing Crafts series…

Paint by Numbers

I haven’t painted anything for years, and I thought that a paint by numbers kit might be a good way to practice brush technique and ease me back into the feel of painting so I could try painting something from scratch in future.

I tried the Royal & Langnickel Dolphins Painting By Numbers kit. It looked like a cute picture, and at about the size of a sheet of printer paper, I thought it’d be a manageable size.

The design and the colour-coded numbers are pre-printed onto the canvas in pale blue, so all you need to do is grab a colour of paint and fill in all the indicated areas with that colour, then repeat for all the other colours, and you have a beautiful painting! Or do you…?

I found it more difficult than I’d expected, considering these kits are designed for kids 8 and older – surely, I should have more skill than an inexperienced 8-year old? For me, it was frustrating to have to follow the arbitrary lines separating the shading colours – for example, I think I’d have preferred to try shading the dolphins in my picture myself vs trying to follow all the jagged bands of shadow and light on the dolphins’ bodies.

There are lots of fiddly jagged lines to follow to form this shading.

I also assumed I’d be provided with all the paint colours I needed, but there were lots of mixed colours required:

All the areas with two numbers are colours you have to mix yourself, e.g. “10/20” means a mix of colour 10 and colour 20. It seemed like most of the colours were mixes!

The results of some of that fiddly colour mixing are disappointingly muddy…

Some of the provided paint colours were used a lot – in mixes as well as solo – and I was always scared I’d run out, especially if I mixed too much of a certain shade and had to waste some of it. This was not a very relaxing process! But I did complete the painting…

Finished!

The end result is okay, but I feel a bit misled by the box art, which shows a coloured picture of the design, not a completed painting (and now I know to look for that, it seems that’s a common trend in these kits). The provided paint colours aren’t the same as shown in the cover picture, and the result is much less subtle, so it’s a bit disappointing.

Where are my blue dolphins from the cover pic?!

Given all that, paint by numbers is not something I’d want to try again. If I do ever brave painting again, I’ll just sketch an outline and then attempt to paint it properly – I think I could do at least as well as following the kit!

The painting is still kind of cute though – especially once I added a glint to each dolphin’s eye (that’s not part of the design).

I did pick up a few painting tips from this experience:

• Low quality paint has terrible coverage – once I’d painted over each section, I could still see the numbers printed beneath the paler paint shades and had to give them a second coat (and the white paint took three coats to cover the numbers!)
• Acrylic paint dries much darker than the colour appears when the paint is wet.
• Painting accurate fine lines is difficult, especially at certain angles. I’m much more comfortable with a pencil than a brush.

Look carefully and you can still see the blue lines around the edges of the paler colours, despite my best efforts to hide them 🙁

Relaxing Craft Verdict

As a relaxing craft, I’m calling Paint by Numbers a fail – for me, anyway.

• If you’re inexperienced in painting, taking care not to stick your hand in the wet paint or paint over the lines requires a fair amount of concentration.
• If you’re already a painter, you really don’t need a paint by numbers kit – you’d do better without one!

Maybe I was just unlucky with my choice of kits and there are better ones out there. Have you (or your kids) had any success with paint by numbers kits, or do you agree with my assessment? Let me know in the comments!

And now, my search for relaxing crafts continues. I have quite a few lined up already, but I’d love to hear your suggestions for crafts I can try – and review here for you – too. Please leave your ideas below… 🙂

That’s right, it’s taken a while but I have a new pattern for you! It’s a Badger crochet pattern and I’m so happy to have finally brought this idea in my head to life! Badgers have such a distinctive shape with their stocky grey bodies, black and white striped faces, tiny ears, and cute upturned noses…

Looking back through my notes, I first started planning this design in March 2014… that’s over 7 years ago! So if I haven’t made your favourite animal yet, don’t think that means it’ll never get made – sometimes it just takes a while for the inspiration and available time to coincide…

Badger Fun Facts

• Badgers are members of the weasel family, Mustelidae.
• The variety of badger I’ve made for my pattern is the European badger, arguably the best-known and most beloved badger. You’ll find lots of European badgers as characters in classic children’s books like The Chronicles of Narnia, Fantastic Mr Fox and The Wind in the Willows – and of course, as the Hufflepuff emblem in the Harry Potter books!
• Other types of badger around the world include the American badger, the honey badger from Africa, and various Asian badgers. They all look somewhat similar, but aren’t very closely related.
• Badgers are masters of digging. They dig for food and live in family groups underground in burrows called setts.
• They are largely nocturnal and eat a variety of food including worms, fruit and eggs. European Badgers can eat hundreds of earthworms per night!

About the Pattern

As always, the pattern includes full instructions and detailed step-by-step photographs for assembly and all special techniques used, so you can follow along and make a perfect badger.

You can’t have a badger without those unmistakable black and white face stripes, but there are only 12 rounds of follow-carefully colour changes, and the pattern includes lots of tips – specific to this pattern – to make the colour changing easier and ensure you’ll get a beautifully tidy result.

After you’ve finished the colourwork on the head and chest, it’s all plain sailing and you’ll be able to enjoy watching the rounded body of your badger take shape as you crochet! The head and body is all worked as one piece and there are only 3 pieces (plus the tiny ears) to sew onto the body, so the final finishing stage is quick and simple.

Colourwork Magic!

You’ll often see photos of amigurumi designs with colourwork that only show you one side of the completed item, because the colourwork on the other side looks much worse. There’s a good reason for that – amigurumi stitches don’t stack exactly on top of each other, so there’s a built-in slant, which makes symmetrical colourwork essentially impossible.

I’ve been working for years on techniques to make paired vertical or slanting stripes at various angles for my amigurumi (and I still haven’t mastered every effect I’m looking for – there’s lots more research for me to do for future designs!) but I never release a design without getting everything to match as closely as I can.

So here, for your viewing pleasure, are close-ups of both sides of my badger’s head and chest, so you can see how the colourwork looks good, with smooth black face stripes with matching angles and no awkward jagged transitions, from either side 🙂

Just follow the pattern and you’ll be able to achieve the same effect!

Buy Now & Launch Discount

Ready to get started? Pick up my Badger crochet pattern from my shop right now. Or, if you’re not ready to make it just yet, add it to your Ravelry queue or favourites so you don’t forget about it:

And for one week only, you can take an extra 50c off the price: add the Badger pattern to your shopping cart, and enter the discount code TRUFFLEHUNTER at checkout! (Offer ends Tuesday 6 July, 2021.)

Badgers play an essential part in popular culture, and their real-life counterparts are just adorable. I’ve never had the pleasure of seeing one in real life, but I always enjoy watching them on wildlife documentaries, and now I can see a (crocheted) badger whenever I want!

I really hope you’ll enjoy my Badger pattern. Don’t forget to share photos with me when you’ve made one:

• Post in the PlanetJune Ravelry group
• Tag me (@PlanetJune) on any social media
• Email me a pic to june@planetjune.com

…I always love to hear from you, and to see what you’ve been making from my patterns. 🙂

Greetings from the new PlanetJune studio!

As you can see, I have a brand new home for all my giant amigurumi – yay!

My new studio is still very much a work in progress. My vision is to set up different stations for all the aspects of PlanetJune – business and crafting – as I have a large space here, and I want to be able to get down to work on whatever I need to do without too much setup.

So far, my sewing station is set up (that was the first priority – sooo many curtains to hem for a brand new house!) and the photography station is just about ready to go:

My computer station is ready to process new patterns into pretty PDFs:

(Of course nothing goes as smoothly as planned; I was just about to get back to work when I discovered that the latest Windows update had broken something in my workflow and I can no longer lay out patterns any more using my old software.

This is a good thing really – I’ve been meaning to upgrade to better desktop publishing software for a long time, and this has given me the push to make it happen, so I’m working on developing a new template for PlanetJune patterns. Once it’s ready and I get up to speed with my new software, laying out new patterns and making edits and improvements should be much smoother in future.)

Now, back to today: I’ll give you a proper studio tour at a later date, once all the remaining boxes and piles of stuff have homes and I’ve decorated a bit, but these pics are a little preview of my beautiful space.

As you can see, I have lots of natural light in my studio (there are 6 windows!) which is going to come in very handy.

Hang on, is that a PlanetJune hoodie you’re wearing there, June? Why yes, it is! Isn’t it cool?

Rush Order Tees offered to send me a custom hoodie of my own design. I chose a dark grey men’s size small hoodie so I can wear it as a jacket, and I thought that printing my logo in white would look good against the dark grey.

The process was seamless: they have their own designers who optimize your logo or artwork for printing and check that the colours, alignment, etc are perfect. I approved the proof they sent me and they printed and shipped my hoodie within a couple of days.

Can you see, their designers actually optimized my logo so the ring around my yarn planet is actually a very pale grey instead of the white I originally asked for? It’s a nice touch (and of course I could have requested they change it back to white if I hadn’t liked it).

If you’d like to order some custom apparel too, Rush Order Tees offer t-shirts, hoodies, hats and more. I’m very happy with my hoodie – the quality of the Hanes Ultimate Cotton zip up hoodie is good, and the printing of my logo is clear and crisp. Plus it’s fun to walk around the neighbourhood (the only place I ever go these days…) wearing my own merch 😀

Now, back to setting up my new pattern template, and then I’ll finally be ready to publish a new pattern – it feels like it’s been forever since I was able to do that!

Hope you’ve enjoyed this glimpse into my new studio… More to come 🙂

We’ve moved into our new house! After a stressful and incredibly exhausting couple of weeks getting everything done, we’re all starting to settle in, and it’s wonderful to see design decisions we made months (and years!) ago for our home finally come to life.

Our new house is truly lovely, and I’ve been working hard getting it set up in a way that’ll make sense for the way we live, so we can hopefully stay more organised and really enjoy living here 🙂

There’s been the odd unexpected flaw in my endless plans, such as discovering that almost all my pots and pans didn’t work with my new induction stove (oops…)

I’ve had to give away all the pans in this photo and buy new ones, but I’m looking on the bright side – this is an opportunity to re-buy just the pans I need for the way I cook, instead of having a cluttered cupboard full of pans that are rarely used.

It’s a challenge to play food tetris every day (trying to fit things into the mini fridges!) and figuring out which groceries I have fridge/freezer space to buy, but it’s all part of the new house fun, and at least this is only temporary.

My PlanetJune work is still on the back burner, for the time being. Although I’ve set up most of my office and studio, there’s a layer of random clutter everywhere that’s waiting to find a new home, and pretty much all my creative energy is going into sewing curtains…

…and organising my pantry…

…and baking bread…

…and walking for an hour or two every day with Maggie (usually with her best friend Echo)…

…and enjoying the springtime, like this very Canadian sight of a goose family stopping the traffic while they cross the road 🙂

We have ponds and a forest close to our home, so I’m enjoying watching the birds and turtles (and this loopy garter snake I managed to catch with Dave’s phone camera, below).

I’m starting to learn a little about our native flora too, and I’ve even picked up my long-neglected camera once or twice – there’s wildlife everywhere at this time of year, so lots of opportunity for nature photos. (Hmmm, maybe I should resume my occasional nature blog posts?)

This ‘homey’ phase I’m in won’t last forever, and once all the curtains are sewn and the house is mostly organised, I should be ready to jump back into some of the pattern ideas I have for PlanetJune.

But, for now, please bear with me as I allow myself to enjoy this time. It feels amazing to have found a real home and to be putting down roots. I finally feel like I’m part of a community, and knowing I have no plans to ever leave here makes it all seem so real, unlike anywhere else I’ve ever lived before.

This is where I belong. 🙂

Summary: I’m moving house next week, and I’ll be mostly offline for the rest of the month (apart from answering customer support emails).

We closed on our new house in January, but haven’t been able to move in yet due to covid-related manufacture/supply delays in our new appliances (something we weren’t informed of until we’d already paid for them in full… )

I was told we’d have our appliances by the start of April, so I gave notice to our landlord and planned for an April move.

The Appliance Saga

This situation has been a comedy of errors. I was notified in March that the fridge we ordered in January was now discontinued, so they offered us the upgraded model instead. It was only two weeks later that they bothered to mention that our new fridge wouldn’t be in stock until… wait for it… August!

What to do?! We couldn’t keep paying for two houses for another four months (assuming the promised August delivery date even happens…), so I decided to proceed with the move and persuaded the appliance company to deliver and install everything else in the meantime.

Ooh, shiny! Don’t they look fancy?

And, as for the fridge, I’ve bought a mini fridge in the meantime to tide us over:

Don’t laugh – my poor little fridge already has an inferiority complex from being in such a large space!

Living like this is going to be a ‘fun’ challenge for the next few months… We’re trying to eat as much fridge and freezer food as we can before we move, to minimise waste. And I’m looking forward to how luxurious it’ll feel when the new full size fridge/freezer finally arrives 😀

COVID Scare Update

Things were moving forwards, until I got an email warning me that I may have been exposed to COVID by one of the appliance installers..! We were all wearing masks, of course, and I tried to stay as far from them as possible in the house while they worked, but it was still a scary prospect. I had to get tested and faced the possibility of having to isolate and postpone the move if I tested positive.

Thank goodness, I dodged the bullet and my test came back negative, so we were back on track…

Move Update

Moving house is exhausting. I thought that a local move would be simple, but I still have to organise and pack, load and unload my little car hundreds of times, and unpack it all at the other end.

My bad knee means that carrying heavy things is not an option, and carrying even light things up and down stairs is a problem for me. (We’re hiring movers for the big things, but we want to get all our personal stuff moved over and organised before move day so we can enjoy living in our new house instead of being surrounded by boxes for weeks…)

It’s coming along, slowly but surely…

Half of the contents of the PlanetJune office/studio – including my full yarn stash – has already left here for the new house 🙂

PlanetJune Update

I have four (or more?) patterns in various stages of completion, but I don’t have the brainspace to finish any of them to my standards right now. So I’m officially taking the rest of April away from PlanetJune to concentrate on getting our forever home set up, and getting our rental home ready to return to the landlord.

(I’ll still be doing my daily tech and admin tasks and responding to customer support emails, of course – running a one-person business means there’s no such thing as true “time off”. So if you need me for anything, don’t worry – I’ll still be here for you, within a day or two.)

And now, I’d better get back to prepping for the move – wish me luck!

I’ll see you on the other side…

Have you ever wondered about Etsy advertising? I’ve been selling on Etsy for 14 years, but I’ve never looked into paying for Etsy ads until now. Read on to hear about my Etsy advertising experiment (and maybe save yourself some money on Etsy ads…)

I’m testing out a few new automated marketing options this year, in an attempt to make it easier for people to find PlanetJune and discover all the patterns and tutorials I have to offer. And in case this is useful for you too, I’ll share some of what I discover here.

About Etsy Ads

It’s important to realise that there are two types of Etsy ads – those that are internal and external to Etsy. I’ll briefly explain both so you know what we’re dealing with here.

External Etsy Ads: “Offsite Ads”

These are the ads you see if you search for a crochet pattern on e.g. Google. Lots of patterns sold on Etsy will come up in your Google results, and the pattern seller will pay Etsy a 12-15% commission on top of the usual Etsy fees if you click on the ad for their pattern and then buy it within the next 30 days.

As an Etsy seller, you can opt out of appearing in these ads if you make under $10,000/year via Etsy. I’m over that threshold so I have to participate, but I’ll show you my stats for 2021 (so far) so you can see how it’s working out for me:

It has actually proven worthwhile to me: yes, I’ve paid Etsy over $100 CAD already this year for the ads (that’s in addition to the usual listing fees, 5% sales commission, and payment processing fees), but I only pay when people actually buy something, and I sold an extra $880 CAD (about $700 USD) of patterns because of those ads, so I can’t complain.

Internal Etsy Ads: “Etsy Ads”

Internal Etsy Ads are the subject of my test. These are the adverts you see if you go to Etsy.com and search for something. The first row of results will show the seller’s name as “Ad by PlanetJune” instead of just “PlanetJune”, and the seller will pay for that prime placement if you click into one of those listings (whether or not you go on to buy the item).

The ads are run by Etsy using a bidding system, so the price the seller pays for that click depends on how much competition there was for that search term, up to a limit of the seller’s maximum remaining daily budget.

My Experiment

I’d read that you should setup your Etsy Ads and then leave them running for at least 30 days before making any changes, so you can monitor what’s effective.

So I decided to run a 30-day experiment, for a budget of $1 per day (the minimum amount you can set), and featuring a mix of my most popular patterns (Succulent Collections 1 & 2, Bearded Dragon, and my Turtle Beach Blanket & Baby Sea Turtle Collection bundle):

With 30 days, 3 pattern options, and $30 worth of data, this should give me enough of an idea to see what’s working, what’s not, and what I could try for my next test.

Results

As the days progressed, I kept watching my ads to see what was happening. And it didn’t look good. Halfway through the experiment, my results looked like this:

As shown above, after spending $15 on Etsy ads, I had over 5000 views of my ads, and only 69 clicks. But, of those 69, not even one person went on to buy the pattern.

That’s not a good return, given that it had already cost me $15 in advertising – I’d need to sell at 2-3 items to cover that cost, let alone make a profit.

Before flushing another $15 down the toilet, I thought I’d dig a little deeper into what was going on, and what I found made me give up on the rest of the experiment!

What Went Wrong?

Almost all of my advertising budget was spent on my Succulent Collections listing (that’s not something I had any control over – it’s automated by Etsy), so I just looked at the results from that ad, as it had the most data.

Here’s what buyers were searching for, when Etsy showed my succulent pattern to them:

The top two results were by far the highest performing in terms of views and clicks, but look what those people were actually searching for:

• crochet patterns: that’s such a generic term, it’s no surprise that most of the people searching for ‘crochet patterns’ weren’t looking for potted realistic succulent patterns – they could have been looking for blanket patterns, or clothing, or dishcloths…
• flower pot kit: I’m pretty sure that nobody searching for a flower pot kit was actually looking for a succulent crochet pattern – or anything related to crochet whatsoever.

It’s no wonder that none of these people went on to buy my pattern – Etsy’s targeting for these ads is woefully inadequate, and most of my budget was blown on showing my ads to people who weren’t at all interested in buying my patterns.

After seeing this, I decided to stop my experiment early. Spending another $15 wouldn’t make a difference to my conclusions. My adverts aren’t being shown to the right people, so I’d just be another $15 out of pocket.

(There is still a chance that one of the 69 people who clicked on one of my ads will return and buy the pattern, but it’s been several more days since I stopped the experiment and that hasn’t happened yet – I’m not holding my breath.)

Conclusions

Yes, this was only a small experiment, but I can confidently say that I doubt Etsy ads are a useful marketing tool for most people selling relatively low-priced items such as patterns and other digital downloads, or handmade toys (where the profit margin is already slim, as they are so time-consuming to make).

Not being able to customize your ads at all beyond selecting which items to advertise is a real problem. Your budget can disappear very quickly on people who like your photo but aren’t actually searching for the thing you’re selling, so you pay for their click but there’s no way they’re going to buy your item.

If we could target only specific search terms, or only a specific demographic, or only people who have bought items from a specific category in the past, I might give Etsy ads another go. But, unless Etsy significantly improves the customizability and targeting of their internal ads, I can’t recommend it for anyone with a business remotely similar to mine.

Of course, your results could be different from mine, but I’d recommend you save your hard-earned money for something more likely to pay off!

Have you had any success with Etsy ads? I’d love to know! Please share your experience and tips below 🙂