First congratulations to you that you overcome all the obstacles. Your work is beautiful and your ideas how to solve the problems with this customer where great.
But as I have written to others already, I have no idea how you could make handmade items profitable… and doing custom orders are even more problematic. A good friend of mine designs handmade wedding cards as her main income, and she is permanently overworked. Because in my eyes the problem with handmade items is you can only earn more, if you charge more or use cheaper materials. Working faster/more is mostly impossible (or ends in overworking) On of her problems is, she is doing only custom orders and the consulting time is immense. With her experience in mind. I would make custom orders (if you still have fun to do them) considerably more expensive or I would charge the consulting time. Another possibility is to use a kind of “construction kit” with set design features (fabric, colours, panel size, border etc..) which could be mixed by the customer. And I would limit how often the costumer can change something.
And I am not sure if this is still a hobby or more of a job – this would also determine my decision how to handle custom orders…
Sorry for my long answer and perhaps you already thought all of this through… Nevertheless. I hope your fingers heal very fast, because this looks painful. And I hope you have now some time to relax.
💕💕
I really appreciate your answer because it helps put a lot of the details in focus! The consulting time is definitely something I overlooked, as well as making changes. I got lucky this time with a pretty flexible and easy to please customer, but next time might not be the case!!
This started out as a hobby, but I've been considering trying to make it more of a job. That was partly why I offered customs, thinking it would mean more business--and it does, but I just don't have the luxury of enough time to do it properly without being overworked like your friend. I'm concluding that it's not a realistic job at this stage of my life :)
Once this last customer leaves a review I'm going to remove that listing and then just write a blurb on my main shop page saying to message me about custom stuff. Then I can accept or turn down work on a case by case basis. There's just too much pressure once the customer has already ordered and paid. At least this was a decent learning experience ;)
Thanks so much!!