Should I open shop?

Hi bloggers, yes I am back after a long time of no blogging but, I have been reading blogs and keeping up with all my friends in blog land.

My 3 oldest kids from my 1st marriage lost their great grandmother on their dad's side this last weekend. Nora Casaus died at the age of 82 of a sudden diagnose of cancer that hit quick and took her life even quicker. She was a very love mamo, mother, friend, aunt and sister. We will all miss her dearly. We love you Mamo see you some day again in Heaven.

Well as you can see from the title of this post I am trying to decide on how to go about setting up shop, online that is, to start my own business of selling some of the hand made items I make. The items range from handmade jewlery, cloth dolls, childrens clothing, purses, and other goodies that I may create. This has been a dream of mine for years and I have finally decided that I need to just go for it and start somewhere. I am not very familiar with all the ins and outs of having an online shop so I am hoping that some of you out there can give me some advice and lead me in the direction I need to go to make this happen. I am not sure whether I should set up a blog with all my items or join etsy or maybe there is some place out there that is better then either of those for a home based business. There are a ton of questions I have that I am hopeing some of you can help me with also like, do I need to get a business license, do I need a tax id #, are the websites like ebay and etsy and such expensive.
If any of you ladies out there are willing to give a gal a hand in making a life time dream come true I would be so appreciative. Just lead me in the right directions and I will take it from there.

Onto other news, as I was saying my 3 oldest kids lost their ggrandma so we left Friday on a two and a half hour drive to attend her services. My little one stayed behind with Daddy because of our house load of animals we now have, that is a whole other story that I will have to update everyone on, a quicky is we now own two female ferretts(which we now love) and we added a 4th dog to our family, a german shephard that we adopted from the pound so now we have 2 female and 2 male dogs sharing our bed for most of the time, which is really making our queen sized bed feel more like a twin bed. Ugh......but we love them. Anyway back to what I was saying, the kids decided they wanted to spend some time with their family so they stayed and sent me back home by myself. I have talked to them daily and they are all having a great time and doing lots of catching up with Aunts, cousins and their Pampo and Grandma. The house is so quiet without them and lil sis is really starting to miss them. They are suppose to come home on Sunday unless they talk us into another week or so, it is their summer vacation too so guess we will have to consider that when they ask to stay longer.