Birthday parties and pricing your work

Hello! Sorry for not blogging last week, it was the birthday party and (wonderfully) it was really busy! We had a good turnout from our Woolbert’s Flockers as well as many of our lovely regulars and some new customers as well.

There are still a few skeins of our ‘Lucky Number 7’ birthday yarn remaining. I may have snaffled a couple of them myself to make a Timeless Twists Hat and some Simple Stay-Put Socks!

Pics of both will follow once I am in one place long enough to actually photograph them!

The price of handmade

As many of you will know, I’ve been on a bit of a sock knitting session whilst Adam is in hospital (yep, he’s still there! Waiting for a bed on a more specialised unit and still having the seizures) and have been churning them out at a reasonable rate. Wendy suggested the other day that I should make them to sell in the shop, so I thought for my latest sock that I would time how long it takes me to complete.

The answer for my size 7 feet, with a standard 60 stitch caston, is about 9 hours per sock. (the timer shown was stopped before I kitchenered the toes and sewed my ends in).

The yarn cost me about £10 for hand dyed and about £3 for the WYS Signature that I have used as contrast for heels, toes and cuffs. (I have estimated based on 1/2 the hand dyed and 1/3 of the signature); but what happens when we start taking into account my time?

Minimum wage is changing in April to go up to £12.21 per hour. This is the national living wage, the minimum that anyone over the age of 21 should be working for per hour. For my 18 hours knitting a pair of socks, this works out at £219.78. With the additional materials, this is therefore a total cost of £232.78. This doesn’t include any extras such as an increased hourly rate for skill level, or the shop being able to take a small cut for selling them. The minimum I could sell a pair of size 7 socks for, is £232.78.

Think about that for a second.

Think about all the people that ask you if you could make them a sweater or a blanket, or even a pair of socks. Do any of us feel comfortable charging for our time and expertise?

If you were a painter or sculpter, you would expect to be paid for your skill and your time, so why is fibre art any different? In fact why is it different from any other job? If you spend 18 hours working in a supermarket, or a cinema, as a builder or a bus driver, you would expect to be paid (at least) your £12.21 per hour for your time, so why not as a professional fibre artist?

There does seem to be a belief that if you work with fibre, then you are doing it as a hobby, on the cheap, and it doesn’t count as work. This has led a lot of people to massively underprice their work, sometimes not even covering the costs of their materials.

This is a discussion that we frequently have with people who look at the yarns we stock and say ‘people would never buy anything from me if I spent that on materials!’ when looking at the price of a ball of Noro yarn, or some of our hand dyed, for example. But here’s the thing – they do! We sell them in the shop. We have sold wearable art for £500 before, you just have to find the right customer.

The other thing is that are your skills only worth minimum wage? How many years have you been practicing, honing your skills? According to uk.talent.com the average wage for an artist is £18.99 per hour. This would take the price of those unique, hand dyed, hand knitted socks to £354.82!

As a group, we need to start raising the bar and showing people that our skills and time are worth paying for, and that as with everything, you get what you pay for when it comes to materials.

Now I’m not suggesting that I am going to be selling pairs of socks for £250, (though if you’d like a custom pair at that price I’d be happy to talk to you!), but I do think there needs to be a shift in how we think about and value handmade items.

Ok, soap box moment over!!

Birthday fun!

I completely failed to take photos of much of the birthday weekend (if you did, please send them my way!) but I did take these from our Weaving a Mini Wall Hanging workshop on Saturday morning:

As you can see, Olwen, Sandra and Catherine had a great time and made some wonderful pieces! I really want to get out my mahoosive peg loom and make an enormous wall hanging now… but I think I’m going to be sticking to socks (and actually getting on with the Coast and Castles Squares!) for a while first.

I’ve been spending a lot of time dyeing this last week, so expect some new colourways to be hitting the shelves of the shop once we’ve managed to get them dry. At last count I had about 16 different colours or bases to get dried and photographed!

This week I’ll be recording a couple of videos about how to do provisional cast-ons for those who are taking part in the KAL this month, so keep your eyes out for those too!!

See you next Saturday!

Nikki