Organised

I've been stitching up a veritable tornado in the past few weeks. It's been a lot of fun. Today I set myself the task of organising and pricing the things I have to sell at the market. If I waited until I'd put the last stitch into the last thing I could possibly make in a final burst of inspiration I'd end up with very little actually ready to sell or a sleepless night. Neither of those are good for me. So today--not tomorrow--is my day to get organised.

I've spread out all my crochet flower brooches; categorised them and checked prices. I only had to make a few changes. Now they're in bags ready to go. Ditto the knitted ones. There weren't many of those. Next are the--more recent--fabric flowers and felt and fibre necklaces. I'll need to buy or make some more tags before the end of today. Tomorrow morning I'll do a dress rehearsal of the stall set up. After that I can have as many last minute bursts of inspiration as I like--or not--the basic work will be done. 

Take 2--or Double Take

I really enjoyed the polka dot flower brooch I made this week. On the strength of it I asked myself a couple of questions:

• how would it look in a hand-dyed cotton homespun fabric?
• how long does it actually take to make one of these brooches?

Here's how it looks. And it took fifteen minutes to make after I'd assembled all the materials and worked out the technique on a previous incarnation.

 So what? Well, one of the topics for this weeks Make Craft Your Business class was pricing. We've been pointed to this formula as a good guide. It suggests a fair retail price is four times the cost of materials plus time. Yep, four times! That's to cover all sorts of things like finding and purchasing supplies, developing designs, labelling, promoting, etc, etc, etc. Not to speak of overheads. Now I'm no-where near making my living from my crafts, but it's a worthwhile question, particularly if I'm going to be more intentional about what I make to sell.

 I don't have an estimate for the time and materials I used to dye this fabric. It was a few years ago, but I know that good quilting cottons, whether hand-dyed or commercially printed retail for $24 per meter. This flower takes just under 10 cm of fabric, The brooch back costs 40 cents. The big question then becomes, "What price should I put on my time?"

 

I'd love to hear your thoughts on this difficult topic. I can tell you that when I pulled out the brooch in class and presented my figures, we were all struggling to know how to reconcile the issue. I deliberately did this with something I don't feel too precious about. In fact, by the end of the day I wasn't even sure that I liked the brooch. I'm a bit happier with it this morning. And the possibility of selling kits helps. 

Another One

I made another one of the open-textured scarves yesterday.

I'm still using this family of yarns.

Now to share my dilemma--how much to charge for them? The knitting takes an hour and a half. Add another twenty minutes for winding and organising the yarns and let's allocate ten minutes for pricing and labelling and such-like bits and bobs. So there's a couple of hours. But the yarns are all original handspun-by-me merino and merino-silk blends. There are half a dozen different yarns in each scarf. What would you pay for a scarf like this? Suggestions please!