About Me and Rawcraft – a journey into craft

About me / RawCraft: this is me, Simone Balman. I am a serial crafter, a web developer, eCommerce guru and the author of 2 recipe books: Cupcakes with a Kick: More Than 50 Sweet Temptations with a Boozy Twist and Sweet Memories. With all this under my belt you’d think that setting up a craft blog would be a walk in the park? Well you’d be WRONG!

The RawCraft concept has gone through many iterations.

Rawcraft was originally intended to be a multi-vendor marketplace but the difficulty, and catch-22, of “How do we control QUALITY?” was always an issue. Did we go the route of just providing a platform and letting vendors just “get on with it”, or did we nurture and coach vendors especially assisting them with building their businesses and taking the most difficult aspect of the sale (in our eyes) – the setting up of dispatch and shipping off their hands so that they could focus on promoting their businesses? This idea was shelved.

I then focused on just a pure eCommerce craft shop with free patterns and “How-To” articles. The stress and cost of holding stock of all the craft supplies was HUGELY prohibitive and there was no way I could compete with our local wool and art stores so Rawcraft floundered yet again. As an alternative, I attempted to create a “Craft Club” – a membership site offering member discounts and other benefits. This element has remained intact as I believe that as a community we can all help each other and the benefits and information that you receive as a member of the club are invaluable. The overwhelming cost of holding stock made us pack RawCraft up and put in a box for over a year.

Trying again:

The passion of being able to share my experiences and ideas with fellow crafters still smoldered quietly in the background. People trying to sell me their personal “secret” inundated me with emails. I signed up (of course). I received “blueprints” which were astonishingly thin on ANY information. All of this information was seriously lacking in substance and took up the challenge of sharing my knowledge, experiences and lessons learned with my craft sisters who may have more questions than there are available answers to at the moment.

No stranger to WordPress, Woocommerce and websites in general, there were still huge gaps in my education: how do I accomplish what all of these full-time craft bloggers were promising – how do I make a living writing and sharing my passions in a craft blog? Well this is my journey. No frills, fluff or hidden agendas. Enough about me / Rawcraft – I would love to connect with you as well an hear your stories!

Besides sharing my own patterns that I’ve listed for sale on Lovecrafts, I’m happy to share my collection of the best patterns on the web!

RawCraft is an affiliate website. This means that we earn some commission income if you click the links. Of course it will not interfere with any of the information provided.

Our aim is to provide a whole world of craft ideas, free patterns and tutorials in a easy-to-read format. Of course we’d welcome any submissions from other designers and bloggers who would like to share their patterns with us!