Rummaging and Rediscovering. . . And the Cut Off Point

Well, I've been rummaging through some things I made a few months ago, that I wasn't quite sure what to do with at the time. It's a quite useful thing to do, to assess your not so recent work through the prism of your current set of criteria, if that makes sense. I mean, look at it in the light of your current creative confidence and with the benefit of your subsequently gained experience and see what you make of it.

My rummaging turned up a few worthwhile things, amongst the stuff that was justifiably not worth bothering with.

Such rummaging and re-assessing is a useful exercise because it can reveal how your attitude to the medium and to your process might have changed in the intervening period, in ways you hadn't actually noticed owing to the gradual nature of said changes. For instance, I found that my work of a few months ago tended to be looser and more free than my recent work, which is something that, it having come to light, I can consider and act on. Basically I need to loosen up ;-)

The things I found were a bunch of thin, textured spikes. Only just thick enough to be drilled through without breaking. I remember a few did break when I drilled them. These ones were the thicker, more robust survivors. The current incarnation of my creative sense decided they would look good as earring beads, so I paired them up and got my trusty camera and tripod out.

Which brings me to part two of this post. Something about a cut off point.
You see, for each item you need at least four photos, an intro shot, a close up, a scale shot and another variation on the intro shot, each of which you have to set up, take, load into your computer, run through Photoshop to resize, adjust colour/levels etc, sharpen and save as a .jpg. Times that by seven for the seven sets of spikes, then add the time it takes to upload to Etsy, write a title, paying attention to likely Keyword Phrases, a description, match your tags to your title, add some more useful tags to make up the 13, preview and finally list.

The trouble is, if the item is only selling for five quid, which is probably about right for these, is it really worth all that time and effort?
I am slowly streamlining the process, but long term I might have to reconsider whether to sell pairs of beads for instance at all. Maybe sets of six is a better way. . . That or charge more for pairs of beads and run the risk of never selling them. .
Bah, economics! Who needs it? 'I just wanna make stuff'.