An Arts and Crafts Home Based Business

Some people start businesses at home and want them to become serious enterprises for making a serious living.

Others want to work out of their homes more as a part-time thing, perhaps making a little money to cover materials and some of their labor, but primarily doing what they enjoy.

A home based business selling arts and crafts can swing either way, being a serious enterprise, a bit of a hobby, or a little of both.

The term "arts and crafts," of course, can cover a very wide range of endeavors. You may be a wonderful knitter and make custom-designed sweaters for people. Perhaps you are a real expert at creating beaded jewelry. But you may also be a painter or photographer, a maker of clay pots, or even a glass blower.

Any work of your hands can be considered either a work of art or a useful object, or both. And all of these things can be sold or commissioned as part of a business you run from your home.

Naturally, the first things you need will be the crafts themselves. You either need a good stock of these prepared ahead of time, to have items ready to deliver as people request them, or you need beautiful samples of each type of craft to display on a website, so that people can at least know what to ask you to make for them.

And that means that you will indeed need a website, because if this is going to be any kind of viable business, you probably can't rely just on word of mouth. There is only so much volume you can sell to your siblings, cousins, and good friends.

And they can only give so many gifts at showers and birthdays. Sooner or later you'll need to widen your reach, or the business will collapse as soon as you've exhausted your base of acquaintances.

However, you don't necessarily need to be a web designer to have a web presence. A website like Etsy.com, for example, was created especially as a site where people could display their handmade crafts and sell them.

Creating an account is free, and you can list your wares in categories such as Jewelry, Housewares, Candles, Pets, Knitting, Woodworking, Glass, and many others. You may not be a photographer, but you will still need good photographs of your crafts to upload here, so people can see just how well made they are.

Photographers can upload their work to a site like Flickr.com and use their account for display purposes, but they'd still need a separate site where people could place orders for prints, or hire the services of the photographer.

However, those who paint, draw, are photographers, or are any combination thereof can also use other sites to get some of their work out there. A site like CafePress.com, for example, allows you to upload a photographic image and sell t-shirts, mugs, cards, and other things that have that image on them.

DeviantArt.com is another site that allows you to display your work and sell it if you wish. This site accepts not just drawn and painted art, but has sections for photographs, digital art, animation, writing, textiles, crafts, and many other things. You can sell individual craft pieces and photo prints or posters, or bundle prints of your photographs into calendars or card sets.

You can run a home based arts and crafts business at any level you wish. You can commission your own professional website if you are at that level. But if you don't have the means for that just yet, or want to be more low key, there are many other options for creating and running your business.

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