My time is worth more than bamboo (even velour)

So the thing you have to understand is that I'm mean. Not nasty, and I contribute to various charities, but scrape the last smidgen out of the Homebrand margarine type of mean.

It's one reason I make OSFM nappies - I can't handle the thought of them growing out of them, and my poor little baby is in her sister's hand me downs. (Although the fact that they're going strong after 2 years is good.) She is getting some new ones now, and not only because she's a guinea pig for side snaps.

So making the most use of my fabric is important to me and I keep just about all the scraps, even the tiny ones. That's been good, because several times I've thought of something to use them for later. Unfortunately it can be a false economy too. When I make inserts I've been cutting them all to the same size and trying to overlock around them. It doesn't work, not only are there different thicknesses at different places, some of the fabrics are stretch and some are woven. I always end up with bits that overlapped wrong or bits that didn't get caught, then spend way too much time trying to fix them because I don't want to waste them. I know there is a simple solution, I just haven't brought myself to do it before.

So this time I cut the microfibre layer slightly smaller. Rather than trying to line everything up I just put that one in the middle so there was hemp and bamboo sticking out all around it. Then all I had to do was overlock around the microfibre and all the rest is trimmed. Voila! Everything is caught properly, no fiddly trying to line it all up, no having to redo bits, only one set of threads to weave back in.

Of course next time I'll cut the microfibre bigger (because it's cheaper :)) but this time it was already cut so I couldn't. But saving so much time and hassle was definitely worth a bit of double sided bamboo terry.

Oops

I did an interesting training session today on Search Engine Optimisation (SEO). I'd heard about it a lot, but didn't realise how exactly search engines work. Afterwards I did a search for pocket nappy, because that's what I sell. Well 12 pages later and I still hadn't come up.

I've been checking, but for the wrong things. I've been looking for things like my brand and snappi, rather than the standard searches new customers who might be interested in my nappies but who didn't know me would use. While I have Pocket Nappies on my site, the button is an image, so not searched, and it's not used in my title descriptions. Ironically I've recently been making it worse, because I stopped doing detailed descriptions of each item. I thought that seeing there is a picture right there people didn't need me to tell them that it was green, or purple, or had flowers on it. And they don't. But Mr Google does.

Luckily the store manager has a quick way to change titles so all of my products have just been renamed to reflect what they are, not just the different fabric outers. It will be interesting to see how quickly, or if, it works.