We have a plan for the next few months! I’ll be writing a full post about it this weekend… for now, bookmark the link if you want to follow our adventures across the country (and possibly THE WORLD).
God, what a nightmare! To wake up to Straw Feminists in the closet, one of the greatest bogeymen of all time!
HAHAHA!! Beaton does it again! <3
Birds in order:
- Allen’s Hummingbird, f
- Arctic Tern, m
- Atlantic Puffin, m
- Bald Eagle, m
- Bank Swallow, f
- Barn Owl, f
- Common Raven, m
- Great Blue Heron, m
- Tundra Swan, m
Gethin fits into Barn Owl, but a lot of the time I tweak it to personal preference.
I recently did my first craft fair. And at that craft fair, one woman picked up every one of my hats, tried them on, and made a sort of a noise in the back of her throat indicating disgust. Then she muttered, “I don’t really like these hats” before looking at the price tag for one of them and looking at me over her glasses: “Do you really charge this much?”
Ok, I managed a retail store for many years, so I’m used to this type of customer. I’ve met hundreds of them, and I know it’s less about whatever she is looking at and more about what is going on in her own crazy brain. Some people just have this need to be nasty. But this was a little different. What she was cruelly and callously saying to me was that what I created had no value. My art has no value. It is worthless and ugly. And I won’t lie — it stung a little.
But back to her question about the cost. The particular hat she picked up was $150 and it was this one:
The offending freeform crochet hat: Lettuce Go to the Mothership. $150.
You can’t see from the photos, but it is made of thousands of tiny little stitches, all folding in on themselves and creating a pretty elaborate underwater sea creature type effect. It’s made of hundreds of yards of very nice wool in colors that I carefully selected and put together in a way I thought would be pleasing. I spent probably 18 to 20 hours making this hat.
So let’s do the math.
Without accounting for the cost of materials, at $150, I would be paying myself about $7.50 per hour for this hat. This hat that I created. This hat that is my art. This hat that is one-of-a-kind, that evolved from a tiny little round of crocheted stitches into its own Thing. This hat that I made with my own hands, that I kept working on until my hands began to hurt. $7.50 per hour. That is less than minimum wage.
Let’s add in the cost of materials, which were probably somewhere in the neighborhood of $40 for this hat. I used a combination of a handspun wool and some other more commercially available wool. That drops my wage per hour to about $5.50.
Now let’s consider all the other costs: sales tax, for one, which I don’t charge to customers (too messy), but I must pay on every item I sell. Sales tax in most places near where I live & work hovers right around 8.75%. So on that $150 hat, I will pay $13.13 worth of sales tax. My hourly wage is now $4.84. Is the customer paying with a credit card? That’s another 3%, or $4.50 I don’t get to keep from the sale of that hat.
How about the cost of the tags I make and print out at home? The tissue paper I wrap the hat in? The bag I put it in? My business cards?
I could make two of these hats per week, assuming they are all this intricate. Even that is pushing it; 40 hours per week of crocheting would be pretty hard on my hands and wrists. But let’s assume I make two such hats per week, priced at $150. My income? $193.6 per week, or just over $10,000 per year. And that’s before all those pesky other business expenses, like licensing fees, the cost of office equipment, gas, my craft fair booth display, and self-employment tax.
Can YOU live on $10,000 per year? If anything, I set my prices too low. And I acknowledge that. I do it because this is my art. I love it, and I will continue to do it, even if no one ever buys one of my hats ever again. I’ll just be that crazy lady who compulsively crochets a bunch of weird stuff. My future grandchildren can inherit all those bizarre things that crazy Nana Somer made back in the olden days.
If you are still reading this, I ask you: please. Next time you are at a craft fair, or on Etsy or another handmade site, think about how much work, love and time went into handcrafting that item you are thinking of buying. If the price seems high, I assure you, it is not.
For over 40 years, Vivian Maier worked as a nanny and spent her free time as a street photographer. Intensely private, she never showed her work to anyone, but left a legacy of over 100,000 negatives. These negatives were discovered by a local historian at an auction house in 2007 and since then her prints have been exhibited at museums from Los Angeles to Oslo. Lanny Silverman, a curator at the Chicago Cultural Centre, believes that “the best of [Vivian’s] work ranks up there with anybody. She covers humanist portraiture and street life, she covers children, she covers abstraction and she does them all with a style that I think digests the history of photography.”
Above are some examples of Vivian’s work. The photo at the top left is a self portrait taken in 1953. Vivian Maier: Street Photographer, the first book of her photography was published in 2011.
Time for another giveaway!
The winner will receive 40 HAND DRAWN STICKERS.
- Reblog this post to enter.
- No limit on reblogs
- Likes don’t count, but are appreciated
- Do not remove this text
- Winner must be following Effie Dee and have a visible email address or an open ask box.
- Winner will be chosen using random.org on 1st September 2012
Good luck!
:D
