It feels enormously, deliciously nice to be back home again after several weeks of being only there for a very short breather and then off again to something somewhere. Even though I enjoyed all the away-time a lot – Christmas with the family, New Year with friends, the EAC with colleagues – I am now really content with being home for some time, getting stuff into order and taking care of all the interesting things that were on the back-burner all this while. And catching up on cuddling the cat!

But you probably want to know about the conference much more than about how happy I am to be home again, so…

 The EAC took place in two locations - one of the university buildings (which was ample room for the ~100 participants of the conference) and at St Fagan's, a little ways outside Cardiff. It started with a very nice meet-up in the Pen and Wig on Thursday evening and then went into a tightly-packed programme of papers all Friday long. The topics were varied and interesting, and I enjoyed most of the papers very much. (With a few, I had some trouble understanding everything, since the speakers sometimes mumbled a little, but that's to be expected.) 
I especially enjoyed the paper about the ovens used for cooking on the Mary Rose, which was a totally astounding contraption that I'd love to cook in. Well, maybe not really, seeing as it's for feeding about 500 people.

After the papers, there was wine, snacks and a poster session before almost all of us walked off to a conference dinner.

Saturday we were taken to St Fagan's in a bus that seated 70 persons (though the persons it was intended for were much younger than archaeologists usually are), which was a little cramped but must have looked very amusing to anyone watching the bus spit out almost 70 adults instead of the schoolchildren that its bright yellow colour would lead one to expect.

The papers at St Fagan's were as nice as those the day before, but unfortunately the weather was not. Any open air museum will look much nicer in sunshine and good weather than in fog, grey clouds and drizzling rain - but I still enjoyed having a little walk around the premises and peeping into a few of the houses.

As all conferences, this one was too short, and unfortunately I was quite tired and not up to my best networking abilities. There's always the trade-off at conferences between a programme packed full of papers*, getting much into a short time, or leaving lots of room for questions and socialising at the cost of having fewer presentations. Cardiff EAC clearly opted for a full programme which left me more exhausted than I would have wished. So somehow I have the feeling that I could have gotten more out of it - but then one never knows what will follow later. At least I did manage to deliver my talk, do a spinning presentation and meet a good number of new people, as well as catch up with old aquaintances. And hear about a number of very interesting topics!

As usual, there was the discussion in Tannenberg. You know the one. The one about pricing of goods and services in the historical crafts sector.

I've had this discussion so often now that sometimes I fail to fire up, but most of the times I still get going and tell people what I think. (You can read what I think - I have posted a series about fair prices in crafts a while ago, the link is in the sidebar.)

Sabine of the Wollschmiede and I have been preaching this for a few years now, and at some unknown point during this time started to half-jokingly refer to us as frontpersons of the "Liga gegen Selbstausbeutung im historischen Handwerk" (League against economic self exploitation in historical crafts). Well, we actually started out referring to the textile crafts, but it soon became clear it's not limited to this (even though there's more to that specific minefield).
In Tannenberg, I made the joke again, within hearing of a few more friends and colleagues - and they loved the concept. I was promptly told that yes, they'd join the League, and a logo was needed.

So from all this, a facebook page has come into being, and there's a logo free for everyone declaring him- or herself a member or supporter, to copy (using any materials and tools and technique) and display at the sales table, the stall or wherever else.

We hope to help with the discussion of fair wages for historical crafts with this, and I hope it will enable more crafters to actually charge a proper, living wage for their professional work - and keep some hobbyists from breaking prices because they are "just doing it for fun". After all, it's even more fun if you get respect for the work, and paying a fair price is one form of showing respect.

 After the break for Freienfels and the CfP yesterday, here's finally the next post in the Crafting and Prices series - and probably the last one for a while.

Things are fairly easy from the buyer's side, as described in the last post - you either are willing (and able) to afford something, or you aren't. If there is no cheaper choice and you need (or really want) something, you have to pay whatever the asking price is.

If you are the crafter or the seller, you will have to figure out how much you need to charge per hour or per item to make a living. Pricing is a fickle game, because the market might be small, and there's competitors, and there's traps and pitfalls everywhere. If you charge too little, you ruin your own business and that of your competitors as well. If you charge too much, you might not sell, or might not sell much. And it's hard to tell whether you just need to find customers yet, or if your quality is too low for the price, or if there are other reasons why people do not buy. If you do not hold out long enough, or run into a streak of luck now and then, things can look pretty grim.

And the main problem in pricing, or at least one of the main problems for craftspersons, is the de-valueing by society. The system of demand and supply in itself has been tested over hundreds of years, and it does work. Things that are scarce are of higher value; things that take a long time, a master craftsperson, or lots of resources to make are scarce, and thus of high value. Items with a high value go for a high price, regardless of the reimbursement system.

Today, we have a trading system that can take into account the time and resources spent on developing and training, and that can make value easily understandable and translatable. It's money. A universal trading concept that envelops our whole world, that enables us to trade with somebody from the Philippines and somebody from Norway and somebody from Japan and US and Germany. Basically, there's nothing wrong with the system of supply and demand and currency as a general barter item.

The problem is one that has been there also for ages, and maybe only grown stronger with our globalised society: It does not take much to break the value of something. You only need to flood the market with something sold way under price, and people will flock and buy the cheap alternative. This will mean that you lose money at first. But if you are a large-scale entrepreneur and can afford to invest a few millions, or billions, or whateverillions, this is just a starting investment - because if everybody buys the item from you, the other people that offer the same goods, but for a fair price, will suffer. And eventually, they will have to give up. And once the competition is gone... you can up your prices however you like. Fat profits.

If you look around, that has been done again and again, on large or small scale. Buying good value for little money is a very tempting thing, and it's just human to do so. But there's a difference between getting a good (and still fair) price and buying something for much less than the asking price should be. Because the latter... it breaks the system. And we are all part of the system.

Buying for way under price, in time, will come back and kick us in the butt. Please consider this the next time you are tempted to buy cheap - especially textiles, but also other crafted things. Paying fair prices can help us all, while paying too little makes the system suffer. Buying fewer things, but for a fair price and in high quality does lend a different quality to life. It's not always possible, that is true - but do give it a try for yourself, and you will see that one-of-a-kind things, where you know the living breathing craftsperson who made it for you will change the way you look at things, and the way you value things.

We can break the system easily. But we can also be part of a revaluation of crafts, and handmade things, and high-quality things. In a world of mass-production, we can make crafted, bespoke items a status symbol and prestigious thing again, and craftspersonship a thing of value.

Think before you buy. Help making our world a better place to be.

read the start of the series

I left off yesterday with the question of an hour spent doing something that is part of general education and an hour spent doing something that you invested a lot of time for learning is really the same value.

If everybody knew that they will never get reimbursed for the time spent on learning a trade, on developing something, but only on the hours and materials used for actually producing the developed thing - what would happen? Would you like to spend a year living off your savings, knowing that you will never ever get back what you spent? Can anybody afford that?

If learning and researching and developing new solutions do not hold the promise of reaping the benefits of hard work and lean living later on, they lose a lot of their charm. If you could work one hundred hours on improving a loom to work half as fast again on the new loom, would you do that to churn out half as much cloth again - but lose the hundred hours and not get more value for your work, because you are paid in time-swap values, and not by metres of cloth? You lose one hundred hours' worth of value. Or you could use your old loom and get time-swap value for these hundred hours. It's an easy choice, I think.

Learning, reasearching, improving things and trying out new solutions is a cornerstone of our western culture. Learning of - apprenticing for - a specialised skill is the very foundation of our society. Division of labour means that I do not have to do my own dyeing, my own planting of food and harvesting, my own blacksmith work and tanning work - I find a trade that matches my interests and talents, and then I can trade with others. Everybody wins, because everybody gets better quality items: Fabric that is spun and woven properly and holds up to wear; crops that are healthy and nutritious because they were grown by an expert; knives that will cut through material, holding a good edge for a good while. Humans are not totally stupid all of the time, and I am convinced division of labour set in at a very, very early stage. It's just natural to ask your neighbour if he or she would be willing to tan this piece of hide for you, when in exchange you can retouche their household's flint scrapers into that new, more efficient form.


Learning, researching and developing have always been a valuable investment in our culture - because they hold the promise of more benefits later on. Of reimbursement. Because we are not calculating hours spent on producing something - we are calculating value of products. And that value of products is more than just the sum of time spent on the piece and materials used for making it - it's also the creativity of the maker, the years of research and experience, the special talent. And, of course, something can rise in value because it is coveted by a society and sink in value because it is not.

The value of an item is never objective. It is always a very subjective thing, and it can be vastly influenced by a person's current situation. If you are stranded in a desert and you really, really need water, you will probably be willing to pay a much higher price for it.

There's a scene in Out of Gas from Firefly that does say this beautifully: "Catalyzer's a nothing part, Captain." "It's nothing 'til you don't got one. Then it appears to be everything."

And this is the basic problem, and the ultimate opportunity as well. If we are trading value of products, I have to decide upon a thing's value for me and my situation, and that will tell me if the price asked - no matter in what form that price is to be paid - is acceptable for me. To evaluate the price of an item, I have to know a bit about it and its quality - whether the material and the production quality are good, and whether it will be as practical or decorative or whatever as it should be.

For this, I need to know things about the item. That will be no problem if it is something that I commonly work with - like textile or a textile tool; I know what I am looking for and I know what to look out for. But with something that I am no expert in? That's where I have to rely on the craftsperson selling to me. Or the sales agent. Or whoever does the selling - to give me good advice about the thing I need and to help me find the best match for my needs, for a price fair to everybody concerned. And then it's up to me to decide whether I want to pay this price or not.

continue with part VI of this series

read the start of this series 

Now... if things only were simple.

I have written about fair pricing for crafts, and I have written about values attributed to crafting work today, and organic cotton (and I can't believe that I never wrote about that before!) and things have sparked lively discussions both here and on Facebook (you will need to log in to Facebook to see these).

One thing that has come up in the FB discussions is the possibility to just swap time worked - ten hours of work for ten hours of work - plus reimbursement for the materials used by the other person for your piece.

That can be a valid option, and I know that "timeswaps" like that are successfully done both in Living History groups and associations and in private organisations, like Local Exchange Trading Systems. Those swappings of time value work on the basis of an hour spent being an hour spent, regardless of whether you are cooking and baking, working in the garden, butchering a pig, making a Fabergé egg, repairing a car, re-wiring the installation in a building, or writing a short story.

Because the work time invested is the same. Easy concept. No debates, no haggling, no unfair de-valueing of the housewife's baking a cake.

But is it really the same value? Or are we getting into the next bit of trouble and unfairness here?

I learned how to cook - well, the basics at least - by helping my mum and grandma at home, when I was young. I also learned how to bake cakes. My dad taught me how to gut a fish. I learned how to pull weeds in the garden and how to use a power tool for drilling and sawing. I learned how to thread a needle, sew on a button and mend a rip in a garment. I also know how to fold a napkin into a pleasing shape.
Those are basic skills that I gleaned either because it was part of my general education and the process of my growing up. Learning these things were a part of daily life, no big chunk of extra time set aside for them - just an hour here or there maybe, or a cooking procedure that took a minute longer.

Then I went to university to study medieval archaeology. I studied for years, learning things every day, honing my academic skills, writing a master's thesis and, later, writing a phd thesis. I went on conferences and I toured Scandinavia to get in contact with colleagues and to see medieval garments in museum depots. I worked on how to reconstruct medieval tailoring for years, doing test run after test run, buying fabrics and threads for this work. I wrote on my phd thesis for four years, after all the years of study before that. I did not get a funding, or a stipend, or any other money from the community or state or economy - my family supported me during that time, and I know I am insanely lucky to have such a wonderful family.

But does this mean that one hour that I spend baking a rhubarb pie after looking up the recipe in the internet really the same worth as one hour I spend teaching the medieval tailoring techniques that I reconstructed? Where is the worth of all those years? Should ten years of work to develop something not also be honoured in some way? Ten years of daily costs for food, lodgings, work utensils and supplies for research? Who pays for these? If I can work for thirty years now, shouldn't I be able to get back the expenses for the ten years spent preparing beforehand? Wouldn't that mean that I have to charge one-and-a-third hour time value for each hour I spend now doing the things that I learned and prepared for in these ten years?

continue with part V of this series

read the start of this series

I'm now going to wander a bit - but I'm still staying the same problem range. Because the question that will come up eventually when talking about crafts and pricing - especially textile crafts - is... why? Why is it so hard to ask realistic prices? Why does textile have to be so cheap?


The problem we have now is that what most potential customers deem a "fair price" is a price not too far from the cheap, store-bought, drenched-with-child-worker-sweat-and-blood stuff.
I recently saw a shop offering t-shirts for adults for 2.50 Euros apiece.
How can a t-shirt be sold for 2.50 Euros? How can that bring profit all along the chain - the shop, the transport, the spinning and knitting or weaving process, the dyeing, the planting and harvesting of the fibres? For 2.50 Euros end-user price, somebody has to lose somewhere out there. If not more somebodies.

And the end-user prices that are so low also affect the view of hand-crafted textiles. If next to no money is charged for something store-bought that is fashionable, new and about perfect, people ask themselves why they should fork out more money for a rustic handmade garment or textile? After all, Granny used to knit, and she just gave her stuff away like that. And you can buy an item like that in store Y for so much less money!

The thing that gets forgotten in this chain of thought? If you can buy a textile item or garment really cheap, somebody always loses. In one case, it's the crafter who loses money, time and self-esteem. In the other case, it's the farmers and workers in third-world countries. Farming cotton, the number one vegetable fibre today, is still mostly done with manual labor - and with a waste of resources that is nauseating. Oh, and let's throw in some bondage and slavery while we're at it, plus a lot of pesticides because cotton is really quite a finicky plant.


White Gold - the true cost of cotton from Environmental Justice Foundation on Vimeo.


If you are a textile crafter and buy ultra-cheap clothing, you help making those farmers lose. And you lose as well - because every single garment sold because it's so cheap will make the great chain stores want to sell more garments at that cheap price (or even cheaper). And this reinforces the communal impression that textiles are not worth much - or anything.

If you are a textile crafter and buy textile things at a price under value, you undervalue your own line of work. Your own set of skills. Your own use of time.

It's your own choice whether to do that or not.

continue with part IV of this series

read part I of this series

So... you know what your hourly rate should be to live off your crafts about as comfortably as you live off your job now.* You might have calculated how much to charge for a typical item that you make.

Now you face the "competition". To recap the comment by Stephanie Ann that sparked all this:

I run into this problem when pricing knitted items. I know I've worked X amount of hours on a project but know shop Y is selling theirs at prices so low.

I hear in the crafting community you should set a fair price or eventually you will not make enough to stay in business. I think it is probably true. 

Competition, in that case, is shop Y selling at low price - probably much too low a price. And this is the point in time where you face a hard decision:

Will you undervalue your time, your work and your skill to help keep handcrafted things low in prestige and esteem in our community? Will you match the prices of shop Y or crafter Z regardless of your own calculations and your knowledge about fair pricing for the time and skill involved?

Or will you value your own work and your own time and skill, and set fair and realistic prices for the things you craft? This might not sell a lot of items - but the persons who buy them will appreciate the craftspersonship involved and appreciate that hand-crafting does take more time. Selling an item at a fair price will feel a lot different from selling an underpriced, undervalued item.

If you do not need to sell pieces to make a living, this decision should not be hard for you. And if you do feel pressure to sell something because you need to gain additional money, consider this:

Continually under-pricing, under-valuing and under-estimating yourself will diminish your own intrinsic value-system of crafted items. And after a while, it will eat at your soul and your self-esteem. Underpricing yourself can also lead to a customer taking one look at your wares and turning away - not because it is too pricey, but because it is too cheap. "Something has to be wrong with that, it's too cheap" would be the thought in their heads when they turn away. If your prices are too low, you will get stamped as a silly hobbyist that has no idea about what is involved in crafting professionally, but still wants to sell - and selling items is professional behaviour, because it makes the crafting your profession. Every person selling too cheap instead helps to undermine the market for professional crafters that have no other job. And they are thus taking part not only in lessening the value of crafts, but also in diminishing professional level skill and knowledge - because these two can only develop properly if you can work at a craft as your main job.

So if you price realistically and sell, everything is fine. If you do not sell... there can be many reasons. "The price is too high" is usually not the right reason to blame. And whether you do not make enough money because you do not sell many realistically priced items or because you fling away your items at a ridiculously low price, the outcome is the very same - not enough money. But with a sale of a fairly priced item, you will at least feel good about that sale.



* It's probably time for a little side note here, just to make sure there are no misunderstandings: I am presupposing that if you are calculating prices or wages for your crafting, your craft skill level is on a level with your skill in your current, normal, day job. I am also presupposing that the virtual or actual crafted items we are talking about are a good quality, well-made and well-designed. We are not talking about a first try in some discipline here, but about developed, trained crafting of high quality - professional or semi-professional level. Though I absolutely think that you should value the time and effort gone into a first try or something that did not come out just as it should have!

read part III of of this series