Sorry for Radio Silence!

I don’t know how this winter has been for you, but for me 2021 carried on where 2020 left off!

On 1^st January Brexit happened.  No problem.  I had looked everything up, and I didn’t need to change anything.  Just before Christmas I had contacted Business Gateway to check.

What I didn’t know (like a huge percentage of the business population in the UK) was that at 6 pm on 31^st December, the Government uploaded a raft of new instructions, changing exporting rules.  As a result of this I had a choice of either registering for VAT in the UK, or in all the EU countries, or I had to stop exporting.  The rules for non-EU countries were unclear.  Over the next couple of weeks things became clearer:  I had to stop selling from my own website.  After 2 years of sweating blood building up my non-Ravelry and Etsy sales I had no choice but to only use them.

The next big blow was the increase in postage costs.  I was ready to start selling physical books again, so I started looking up postage prices.  UK prices had gone up a bit, the EU a bigger bit, but the Rest of the World prices had almost doubled.  As things stand, my £15 books will cost £19 to post.  In addition, postage prices are going up again in April, and again in June.

I will not bore you with my social media problems, but another new one has cropped up weekly.  Add the problems Microsoft updates have caused, and the ones Ravelry will start causing at the end of March, and I lost the will to live!

However, I am now hoping to get back to normal.  I have several new patterns in the pipeline and I hope to have my Northern Lace Press website up and running again soon.

Watch this space….

(Unusually, I am putting up this same post on both my Northern Lace and God and Dog blogs.)