3 ways to make money for fabrics

Would you like to make some extra pocket money to buy fabrics?

I have always been interested in such thing. You know, knowing that my hobby can support itself. It is sort of like a less guilty kind of feeling, if you get what I mean.. not that you should be guilty of buying fabrics though. Just so you know. I am with you.

This post contains affiliate links for your convenience at no extra cost to you. Please find my full disclosure here.

Now before we go into the depth on how you can make extra money to feed your fabric needs,

Let’s first be honest.

I AM a fabric addict.

I have been one for so quite some time now. Ever since I learned how to sew, fabric and sewing notion shops, seems to be like one of those heavenly place for me to spend my dollars and time.

I am not regretting it though, as this is where my passion lies.

THIS is where part of my happiness is. Buying fabrics, patting fabrics, displaying fabrics, sewing fabrics, using the finished sewn item…an it goes on. One fabric goes a long way doesn’t it?

I realized that everyone spends differently. They spend on things that makes them happy. So don’t judge me that I spent a whole lot on fabrics. Some may spend a whole lot on handbags, perfumes and all, but I spend a whole lot on fabrics. Yes, yup, yes, I do. My husband has already caved into that justification right there. He is the best at supporting me and my hobby 🙂

How about you? Are you ready to confess?

Are you a fabric addict?

I think I am going to do a whole post on this specific topic later. So, we’ll see if you are a fabric addict even if you don’t want to confess now, *wink* 😉

Fabrics for patchwork

When I ventured to this world of patchwork and quilting, I have found that my love for fabric has been a little different than it used to be. I use to sew garments and buy yards and yards of fabrics with a vision of what I’d sew and what I’m going wear. These days, I no longer buy yardage of the same fabrics. Rather, I buy smaller pieces here and there allowing me to feed my need to have varieties.

Plus, buying smaller pieces of fabrics seems to be a lot cheaper. Well, at least it seems to be cheaper before you start adding them all up 😉

I even love the fact that these smaller pieces of fabrics add up to a beautiful stash that I can display in my sewing room and play around with. The possibilities with them are so much more than a single yardage.

So, in conclusion of that, I became to enjoy buying fabrics even more, when I started my quilting hobby. So, making money for that would be something that interests me. And maybe you too.

Making money for your hobby

You can of course, work full-time or any part-time job outside to feed your crafty hobby. Everyone spend on their hobby. So there is no need to justify if you spend on fabrics if your hobby is sewing or quilting right?

Having a hobby means you are much less stress than people who don’t have a hobby or don’t have time for a hobby.

This fact is backed by science AND… it is said that the effect is actually just as good as doing exercises!

[bctt tweet=”sewing is as good as exercises when it comes to treating stress at bay” username=”amira_lilmushroomcap”]

Wow, how awesome is that. Do you need more any more reasons? LOL. We always need more reason to buy more fabrics, don’t we?

However, it can be quite costly sometime to have a hobby. Be it quilting, golfing or fishing right? Therefore, an extra money allocated for your hobby would be kind of awesome wouldn’t it?

Especially if you can spend time sewing while getting the money. In this post, I am going to list down the top 3 ways to make money for fabrics while still enjoying your sewing time.

Top 3 ways to make money for fabrics while still enjoying sewing time

1. Selling handmade items

Obviously this, right?

This is most common. In fact, you may already have people around you saying you should totally sell what you’re making.

However, if you are still not interested in selling what you make, I totally get you. I admit that I am one of those people who can’t really make to sell. I hate sewing things to sell. They became like an obligation and chores to me. So, I have been avoiding this route. I do occasionally sell some of my handmade items though. Especially if they were already in-stock items that I have made without any intention of using or giving.

Nonetheless, they are people out there who are winging this way of making an income. Some are even making it their full time income.

I do think that the key here, would be to provide varieties. People tend to buy when they have choices. If you want to gain it the right way, take time to learn from the experts and implement them in your small business.

If you are looking just to make a small income to support your fabric need, I don’t think you’ll need to sweat up too much unless your ideal pocket money for fabrics is quite big 🙂

Here is a list of resources to get you started on the right track selling handmade:

Resources for making money selling handmade

How to start an Etsy Shop
How to price handmade goods
Spreadsheets for handmade businesses. Keeps you on the right track to make more money not spend more 😛
Take courses to excel your handmade business. Learn the very basic of setting up an Etsy shop to marketing here.

Products from Amazon.com

2. Selling patterns and digital products

This one has always been something I would love to be doing and maintain doing it someday. (psst: I have an inactive pattern here and here because I haven’t made any new one since!)

The greatest thing about selling patterns and digital products is that its production cost is minimal and it creates a passive income (meaning that you can enjoy the income rolling in even after quite some time you worked hard on it).

However, you will have to do some work on the promotional side quite often to ensure that the patterns are given a wider chance of views. Plus, you will have to keep making new patterns to keep everything fresh and provide more varieties. Yes, and THIS is where I failed. Maybe I’ll try again someday.

Making patterns isn’t easy I’d say. All those math, diagram making, and editing is a lot of work. It may not be a fun job for some people but may just be the opposite for others. Whatever it is, it is surely one way to make money while sewing and quilting. Well…not necessarily 100% true, but at least part of the pattern writing would require you to do the sewing work. (But not going to lie, you may spend more hours editing on the screen than sewing).

(caption: My only one quilt Pattern. I no longer promote them, but they ocassionally bring small income)

I guess, it wasnt’ that I didn’t like the pattern making, it was just really time consuming. Hence, I wasn’t all that ready yet to be consistently making quilt patterns.

Here are some quilters that I look up to that are making some income from selling awesome patterns or digital products. Thanks to them, we get to forget about the maths and just do the sewing! See what they have to say about making money through patterns and digital products:

Link to Alyce’s —Instagram—Blog—Shop—

Link to Emily’s —Instagram—Blog—Shop—

3. Blog

Did you know you can actually earn enough money from blogging to even quit a full time job? Yes. It is totally true. Not many bloggers can do that, but it is possible with hard work and determination.

However, I am not to talk into making money blogging for a living just yet. I want to talk about earning just enough to have a pocket money for fabrics. That seems to be fairly less intimidating. And, less stressful too.. as we are not talking about money for food or living here.

Although, without fabrics, we may suffocate of boredom (hehe, just kidding).

I have been blogging for more than 5 years now, but not until recently that I have started to think about earning a consistent pocket money income from the blog. So in the last several months, I have been digging deep into blogging business and happy to say that I have been earning quite well in the last couple of month after implementing several tricks I learned. At least, they are enough for my fabric money, for the time being.

If you are interested to learn more about how to blog and start earning pocket money, I will be happy to guide you through! I am obsessed with learning new things. Hence, this blogging thing continues to amaze me. I am not going to elaborate on that here since it is itself a topic on its own. So if you interested to learn more, drop your email and I’ll post updates to you on how to make money blogging.

Resources for making money blogging

If you are already a blogger and interested to know and learn how to make money blogging, I’d like to share some of these resources that I particularly loved and used to quickly gain income from my blog:

Shareasale: I am a part of Shareasale Affiliate program, where they’ll pay you a commission for promoting businesses working with them. I love this for the fact that I love promoting businesses I used and loved so making some cash out of them at no cost to my reader is absolutely a great option.
Amazon affiliate: I am also a part of Amazon associates where I do most of my book shopping and sometimes fabrics and notions too. Therefore, putting a link to my readers where they can get similar items will not only help them but allow me to earn a tiny bit of commission at no cost to them at all. Small commissions adds up, you just have to be patient enough.
Affiliate Courses. I had to learn how to start making money through affiliate, so I took a few courses. Here is a great course regarding affiliate marketing that I have personally took and implemented successfully. I find that it is just perfect enough to start earning extra pocket money from my blog. The course pays for itself – after implementing it, I manage to get back my money within a month. It is a very reasonable (cheap) price.
However, if you are a total beginner and don’t know how to even put an affiliate link up, here is another course I recommend. I went through this course too, and I’ll tell you that, it is very detailed on the step-by-step how to. The course only opens twice a year, start with a free ebook here.

There is a bit of a learning curve but I’ll tell you it has been worth it for me. So if you are keen to make some money from blogging, go ahead, learn and implement strategies from these experts, and you’ll be on your way.

If you are not yet a blogger, I recommend you get started with a self-hosted blog, using Bluehost. I am still using them and find that it is the cheapest option to start earning from your blog with a self-hosted blog.