If you're crafty and wondering whether you could turn it into an income, you're not alone. It's one of the most common questions among people looking to make money from home, and I can answer it honestly because I've actually done it, made some money, and eventually stopped.

The short answer is yes, you can make money selling crafts from home, but whether it's actually worth your time depends entirely on what you make and your profit margin. I'll share exactly what happened when I tried it, what my husband does differently that actually works, and tips from an expert who's built a genuine income from it.

Things to Make and Sell From Home

If you're looking for ideas, here's a broad range of what people successfully make and sell from home, from low cost and low skill through to higher skill and higher value.

• Handmade cards and personalised stationery
• Jewellery, whether that's assembling components or working with metal
• Candles and wax melts
• Soap and skincare products
• Canvases, wall art and home decor
• Knitted, crocheted or sewn items
• Personalised gifts and keepsakes
• Pottery and ceramics
• Upcycled or reclaimed furniture

That list covers most of what people mean when they search for things to make and sell, but it's worth knowing upfront that these categories are not equal when it comes to actual profit, which is where most guides on this topic fall short.

The Most Profitable Crafts to Sell (In My Real Experience)

There's a lot of generic advice online about the most profitable crafts to sell, but very little of it comes from anyone who's actually tracked their own numbers. Here's how it broke down for me and my husband:

• Cards and handmade jewellery bring in around £1 profit per item. Low price point, high competition, and materials and time add up fast.
• Candles, soap and smaller decor are a modest step up from jewellery, but still need real volume to add up.
• Upcycled or reclaimed furniture brings significantly higher profit per piece, thanks to a higher price point and much less direct competition.

Jewellery and cards are what most people picture when they think of crafts to sell, but they're genuinely the least profitable end of the scale unless you're selling in serious volume, or unless you're a jeweller making your own high end metal jewellery at higher price points. Fashion jewellery and handmade cards, the end of the market I was in, won't make much either way.

My Own Experience: What I Actually Made and Sold

I sold handmade cards and handmade jewellery, mostly assembling components rather than metalwork, through Etsy, my own Facebook page, my own website, and in person at handmade markets where I'd rent a stall.

I don't have exact figures for the whole period, since I later started buying in extra items to sell alongside my own handmade pieces. But by 28th December 2018, I'd sold 4,090 items through my own website and 87 sales through Etsy, which would all have been handmade, plus plenty more directly through social media and at handmade markets.

Here's the number that actually matters though. I remember one month where I sold £2,000 worth of items, which sounds great until you take off the cost of materials, advertising, market stall fees, website costs, postage and packaging. My actual take-home profit that month was only around £200, roughly 10% of what I'd sold. On the jewellery specifically, which was mostly under £3 an item, my profit worked out to around £1 per piece. To make that genuinely worthwhile, you'd need to be selling in very high quantities, and that's exactly why I didn't continue with it.

It is possible to make more from cards and jewellery, but you'd need much higher profit margins than I ever managed to hit. I also found people generally only bought from me when prices were low, or if I had an offer or discount code running. Hardly anyone was willing to pay what I actually thought the items were worth.

My Husband's Experience: Higher Margins With Furniture

My husband took a different route and did much better financially, making and selling furniture, some of it upcycled from reclaimed materials like scaffold boards, some built entirely from scratch. He's sold through Etsy, eBay, Folksy, Facebook Marketplace and his own website.

The profit margins are genuinely higher with furniture, but so is the setup required. You need a proper workshop and a lot of storage space, even for upcycling projects, since you're often storing pieces before and after you work on them. We had a large garden and ended up building a workshop and storage shed at the end of it specifically for this. Larger pieces also cost more to move, we've paid around £50 for a specialist furniture courier per piece.

It's not necessarily the kind of craft business people picture when they think of crafts to sell, but there's a genuine market for unique upcycled pieces. You can often find cheap or even free furniture outside people's homes, at car boot sales, or on Facebook Marketplace, and from there it's really just time, creativity and paint that turns it into something sellable.

Where to Sell Your Handmade Crafts

Between the two of us, we've used most of the available routes. Etsy and Folksy are the go-to marketplaces for handmade items specifically, and tend to attract buyers who are actively looking for that rather than mass produced alternatives. eBay and Facebook Marketplace work well too, especially for furniture and larger pieces. Your own website gives you more control and no marketplace fees, though you'll need to generate your own traffic to it.

Selling in person is worth considering as well. Handmade markets and craft fairs let you sell directly and get instant feedback on what people actually respond to, though renting a stall costs money upfront and takes a day out of your week, so weigh that against how much you're realistically likely to sell.

It's also not consistent from one event to the next. I remember my first market stall being a great success, though a lot of that was friends and family coming along to support me, and I took around £100 in sales, which felt great considering most items were only a couple of pounds each. At another show though, I didn't sell a single thing. My stall ended up in a bad spot with barely any foot traffic, which was genuinely disappointing, especially once you've already paid anywhere from about £20 to £50 just for the pitch.

Expert Tips From Michelle at Time and Pence

I've got some expert tips to share from Michelle, who blogs about money making, money saving, family life and health at timeandpence.com. She's spent the last 15 years making money from home, including making and selling her own skin care and beauty products, so she genuinely knows this world better than most, and she's shared some tips for this article..

Michelle's advice on getting started is to do your research first. You may think your crafted item is beautiful, but unless everybody else does too, you won't make much money from it. She recommends joining crafting Facebook groups to see what others are selling, asking friends and family for honest opinions, and looking closely at what your competitors are doing so you can improve on quality or add a unique spin.

On supplies, Michelle's first port of call is always eBay, since there's a huge range of craft suppliers there and ordering from overseas can reduce costs if you're willing to wait for delivery. She also recommends thewholesaler.co.uk as a wholesale directory that includes some craft and packaging suppliers, and aromantic.co.uk specifically for skin care and beauty ingredients.

On how much you can realistically earn, Michelle says that after years of bringing her costs down and perfecting her craft, she can make £30 to £40 an hour from her crafting. That's a genuinely strong hourly rate if you can reach that level of efficiency, though it took her years to get there rather than happening from day one, and it's worth noting that's a very different outcome to my own experience with lower value items like cards and jewellery.

So, Can You Actually Make Money Selling Crafts From Home?

Yes, but the honest answer depends entirely on what you choose to make. Low value items like cards and simple jewellery need serious volume before the profit becomes worthwhile, as I found out myself. Higher value items like furniture, or a well-run skincare business like Michelle's, can genuinely become a proper income, but they usually need more skill, more space, or more time to build up.

If you're starting out, my honest advice is to think hard about your profit margin before you think about what's fun to make. Price out your materials, your time, your postage and packaging, and any platform or stall fees, before you decide whether a craft business is actually worth pursuing or better left as a hobby.

For more realistic ways to make money from home, take a look at my full list of 60 ways to make money online, or my 5 tried and tested ways to make money as a UK stay at home mum for other methods beyond crafting.