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I had a woman contact me last month about a commissioned still life. Small, maybe 40x50cm. We went back and forth on composition. She wanted a particular arrangement with her grandmother's blue vase and some dried flowers. I gave her a price, €1,200, which is already low for my work and I know it. She wrote back saying she'd found something "similar" on Etsy for eighty euros and could I match that. I told her I couldn't, and that she should buy the Etsy one. She seemed genuinely surprised. I think she expected me to negotiate, or to explain myself, justify my materials, my hours, my training. But I've done that dance before and it never ends well. You explain your process to someone who thinks paint comes out of a tube and onto the canvas in twenty minutes, and they still think you're ripping them off. So I just said no, politely, and wished her well. She came back three days later and agreed to the €1,200. I almost didn't take the commission. Part of me wishes I hadn't. But the work itself is interesting, the vase really is beautiful, and the dried flowers have this warm ocher colour I want to paint. So I said yes. I'll do the painting. But I'm still annoyed at myself for feeling like I have to be grateful that she "chose" me after pricing me against a mass-produced thing on the internet.

So I did a little market in this old garage space in El Cabanyal last weekend. Thought it'd be quiet, maybe sell a few small pieces, cover the table fee. I brought a box of seconds, things with cracks, glaze drips, a little jug that leaned so far it looked drunk. I almost didn't unpack them. Put them at the edge of the table for 10€ each, basically clay cost. They went first. People loved them more than the "good" pieces. One woman said the crack in a little cup looked like a lightning bolt and she wanted to drink her morning coffee from it. I had to stop myself from explaining it was a kiln failure. Meanwhile on Etsy I'm fighting the algorithm, paying for ads, packing things in bubble wrap like a warehouse robot. And I made more in four hours sitting in a chair drinking terrible coffee from a thermos, telling people yes that cup is supposed to look like that. I'm not saying markets are the answer for everyone. But I'm starting to think the friction of selling online is getting ridiculous for small makers. You spend more time managing the store than making the thing. At the market you just... show up. Talk to people. Hand them a wonky cup and they love it. Maybe the real hack is just lowering your standards and letting people see the ugly ones lol

I don't know that I'm doing any of this right, so I'll just tell it plain. My granddaughter set me up a shop back in the fall. Said folks would buy my work online. So I put up four pieces, took the pictures on my kitchen table with a dish towel behind them for a background, and then I sat there and waited like a hen on a nest. March I sold one potholder. Five dollars. But here's the thing that's got me thinking. The quilts I post on here, the big ones, the ones I spent a year on? People look but they don't buy, and I understand it, you don't buy a quilt off a phone from a stranger in Alabama. What sold was the little thing. Something small enough to hold in your hand and cheap enough not to think too hard about. Then last month a lady in Seattle bought a quilt. Said she saw it on here and went and found the shop herself. I never once mentioned the shop on my page. Not one time. So I don't know what to make of that. I put the sign out front and nobody came in. I hung the quilt on the line and somebody knocked on the door. Maybe that's just how it works and nobody told me. Or maybe I'm still fooling with it wrong. I'm 63 years old and I've been sewing since I was seven. I know cloth. I do not know this. 🙂

Client saw a photo of the piece in progress, called me up, very cheerful, "Dimitra, why does it take you so long? Just fill the gaps quicker, nobody's going to look that close." That's the thing. They never look that close. That's exactly why they end up with a mosaic that's held together by hope and a prayer, lifting off the wall in three years, and then they call me back to fix it and act shocked at the price. No. I don't rush the setting. The gaps are the work, actually. The gaps are where the whole thing holds or falls. You want quick, buy a printed tile, it's thirty euros on Etsy. You want a mosaic that'll outlive your grandchildren, I place every piece and I don't rush a single one. He went quiet. I think he gets it now. Or he's off finding someone who'll give him quick. Either way, not my problem. My hands don't move faster for anyone, not even for money. Especially not for money, actually, I've learned that the hard way. 🙂

I turned off my Instagram and the other one for all of January. Just to see. Had 2,400 followers, which I'd been half-maintaining for years out of some sense that I had to. Nobody noticed. Not one message. My Etsy orders didn't change. The gallery that carries my work emailed about something else entirely. Two things came out of it. One, I'm not going back to posting three times a week for an audience that wasn't there. Two, it cost me nothing, and that's both freeing and a bit humbling. The people who actually buy my work found me through the gallery, through word of mouth, through a craft fair in November. Not through my hashtags. I'm not saying online doesn't work. It clearly does for plenty of people. But I'd built my whole week around a platform that didn't care whether I was on it or not. That's a strange thing to have done for a decade.