Garden, Masks, Fundraising, Business

[helwen]

Ah. It's decided to be sunny this morning... strange weather these days...

I haven't watered anything yet today but what I checked quickly the plants near the greenhouse when I opened the door for the day and they looked pretty good. The peas will need water though - always do. Going to try to do a few transplants today -- yesterday I was just too tired. And maybe work on clearing the designated spot for the Ginger plants, most of which are waiting in a crate in the basement. I left some in the greenhouse last year and just lay a bunch of stuff on them and surrounded the spot with some of the water buckets, so who knows what's under there. Will find out this week.

Did some more mask sewing yesterday and this morning. More to come. Thinking about how to do a small fundraiser maybe, as I have some star fabric and some red & white stripe fabric, and July is coming. I'll bounce an idea or two off of a local friend and see if she has ideas on how to get the word out. Maybe I could sell them at the farmers market... one of the library roofs needs repair, so a few hundred dollars might be helpful.

I don't have experience with selling online. I've received payments through Paypal but generally leave the money there for future purchases. I suppose eventually I need to read up on that... connect my acct. to a bank acct. so I can do a transfer, maybe. If I'm going to have an online presence for my art stuff, have to get that part of the act together. Hm. Maybe open a separate bank acct....

I'm working on cranking out a bunch of masks for the fundraiser and the town, so doing some work on them every day this week. A few are going to me and Fitzw. I should try to do a couple of specialty ones for myself next week, and then I plan on putting away mask stuff for a while. In the beginning there was the panic and nobody could get anything so we were all making masks like crazy for friends, family, the town, local hospitals and other care facilities, etc. But the supply stream seems to be doing better now in that regard, and everyone should have a few masks, so if they want more I kind of feel like they should be buying them. I'm not even one of the major producers, but really, we have other things to do with our lives too.

Still. I want to try an experiment with silk, so that I know if it will work on a practical level for regular folks, and then I can report on it to the sewing group and on FB so folks have that knowledge.

Comments

[inamellowmood]

Re: linking Paypal to a bank account, I strongly advise opening a new account, not connected to your other accounts*, to link to Paypal. That way if Paypal takes it into their heads that something you're doing is wonky, and they come and take money back from you, they can only take what's in the specific linked account. Meanwhile, you can transfer funds regularly from the Paypal-linked account to the other, non-linked account(s), leaving little or no money in the linked account, so Paypal can't actually hurt you that way.

(I've seen this happen to two different businesses, both legitimate, so even though many businesses never have a problem with Paypal, I think it's best to take precauutions. We handle our own Paypal account this way, FWIW.)

*If your Paypal-linked account requires manual funds transfers to your other account, rather than being set up for money to move automatically between it and your other accounts (such as an automatic funds transfer to prevent overdrafts), you're safe from Paypal being able to take advantage of said automatic funds transfers to take as much money as they want.

[loosecanon]

I agree with these thoughts. Paypal has done this with some frequency. Leave nothing for them to scrape.

[helwen]

Thanks!

[helwen]

Thanks!