My post about handspun yarn and pricing got the following comment by Stephanie Ann:

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. 

and since I found myself writing far more as an answer than should go in the comments sections, I'm just writing here now.

Yes, people in the crafting community often have their prices way too low. There's others with prices way too high, too - but those are few and far in between.


A professional crafter is a person having a freelance business. And they should calculate their prices accordingly - if you are a skilled crafter with a professional level of quality and you work 40 hours a week, you should be able to live off your earnings and pay your bills as well as put a little aside for disaster and old age. Just like you'd expect for somebody working a full job as an employee, right?





If you are interested in how much you would need to charge for your crafts, you can do the calculations yourself. Add up the costs of your material, the costs of energy (if you need power tools, fuel, heating, electrical lighting), and the costs of your tools. That's your basic material cost for your item. Now... if you have a day job, calculate what you are getting per hour - just roughly, so it's enough to divide your monthly gross wages by the amount of hours you work each month.
Depending on your line of work and the employer's taxes and social securities involved, you do cost your employer a good bit more than that - take your gross income per hour and take it times 1.5 or times 2. That is what you cost per hour. That is what you would need to charge per hour, in addition to the basic material cost for the items you make.

Now go get yourself a little booklet to jot down the hours you work on a project... I can about guarantee you will be very, very surprised after those calculations. (A project journal to jot down time spent on something plus details and observations, and dates worked on, is a very nifty thing to have anyways - just for yourself. I can absolutely recommend it.)


And this pricing is not including anything to cover the extra risks you have as a freelancer. After all, your employer has to pay you whether things are going well for the company or not - you have security there. If you are freelancer, you cannot assume that you can work for a customer all day, every day, and charge for that. So basically, you will need to recalculate your hourly rate so that it covers the non-paid work as well - your research, your skill enhancements, the time you need for travelling, sourcing materials, free consultations (yes, crafters will need to do that), and so on. You can find a nice little calculator here, for example, if you would like to play around with the idea a little.


So now you know what a fair price for your time would be. Has it surprised you? Is it way, way more than you thought it would be? Face it. That wold be a fair price for an item worked in a professional way, if crafting were your day job.

Now... can you picture somebody happily forking out that money?

(Post will be continued after Easter - regular blogging resumes on April 26. Have a wonderful Easter weekend, everybody!)

read part II of this series

A while ago, I mentioned that I've done a bit of wheel spinning again for a change. After a long while (felt like forever) of spinning to more or less fill two bobbins with single, I'm now in the plying stage.

This

is what it looked like after two hours of plying work. After three and a half hours of plying, the bobbin was more than full - it had a bulge in the middle. (Of course I forgot that I wanted to take a picture. Only natural to grab the swift right away, right?) The result is 595 metres of 2-ply yarn, and it's roughly about 28 wraps per inch. Since I gave it a soak right away to relax the fresh ply, I can't weigh it yet, since it's not completely dry this morning.

However, the plying time has made me think about pricing of handspun yarn again. Six hundred metres of yarn took three and a half hours of plying. If I do a very rough calculation and suppose that spinning took one and a half times the work time of plying (I'll time a bit of spinning next time), then that means roughly fourteen hours of work total. That is one and a half workdays for sixhundred metres two-ply! And that's wheel spun with industrially prepared merino wool, so no additional prep time required plus a relatively fast and efficient spinning tool.

Fourteen hours work - now what would you pay for a skein of handspun wool like that? Probably not my normal hourly rate times fourteen, and my normal hourly rate is not very high at that. And if you look at etsy or dawanda or any other shop, stall or market, you can see handspun yarn roughly half the length offered up for less than 20 Euro. (Oh, it's hand dyed as well.) Spinning rates seem to go up to a stunning 20 cents per metre - but you can have it cheaper, too.

Now, my little wheel is not the fastest one on this earth, and I'm not trying to spin as fast as humanly possible. But let's do some maths. One hour spinning and plying time taken together will let me end up with about 42 metres of two-ply yarn. If I sell that for 20 cents per metre, I will end up with the stunning sum of 8,40 Euros for one hour of my work. Plus the material needed - and I also need the tool to work with, of course. So let's say eight of the Euros remain as "winnings".

And now there's the snag. While 8 Euro per hour might sound not too bad at the first second, what you technically are as a spinner is... a freelancer. And that means you will have to calculate so that you can pay everything yourself - your health insurance (where usually your work/your boss will pay half, if you have a fixed job), your working tools, your stockpile, your vacations; you will need to make enough money so you can cover the times you are ill or some time off that you need to recover and recharge your batteries. Oh, and maybe some day you wish to be old and pensioned? Go pay for your own pension account, then. And if you make enough money for all of that, keep in mind that you will also have to shunt off the VAT from your selling price - and that's between 15 and 21% in Europe. (In Germany, those 8,40 Euros would mean 7,05 Euros for you.)

That is much, much too little money for that work. Ask any freelancer. Go read any freelance advice column, or webpage. And too little money for work - that's not healthy, and it's not good for the economy nor society. Plus too little money for textile work also furthers the underestimation and the undervalueing of this line of work that is so widespread today.

So... provided every spinner around that sells his or her own handspun yarn (and I'd bet it's mostly female spinners here) doesn't work at least three times faster on their spinning wheels than I do... they sell their work under price. Vastly under price.

That always leaves me more than a little sad. Hand spinners, please value your work correctly!

This blog post was the starting point for a series about fair pricing in crafts. Read the start of the series here.

Do you know that feeling that to some events, there is something like a secret topic? One of the main chat-topics at Freienfels was quality in crafts and the ability or lack of that ability to discern good craftspersonship from bad craftspersonship and good material from bad. It seems to be a thing very much on the surface of the mind of many sellers and of many crafters at the moment - both joy about the fact that there are still people who value good craftspersonship and sadness about them being quite few and often restricted to medieval markets and fairs.

That is, in my opinion, largely due to the fact that even basic skills in craft things are not much valued in most parts of society today. It is no longer obligatory for girls to learn how to sew and embroider or for boys how to carve and build little wooden boats, giving both sexes at least a small grounding in fine motor skills and a glimpse into craftspersonship. After this gender-specific basic instruction in crafting had been in use for a long time, I was one of the lucky generation(s) when I was in primary school - because in my time, all boys and all girls had to learn how to crochet, sew, embroider, saw, file and drill, in the aptly named "Handarbeit und Werken" (Handarbeit referring to "traditionally feminine", textile-centric work, and Werken to "traditionally masculine" work involving hardware and wood). Back then, I mostly hated the Handarbeit part and especially sewing by hand - there are machines for that, after all! However, these lessons gave me the basic knowledge about seams, stitches and textile work and they schooled fine motor skills. Some of today's schoolchildren do not get any of these lessons anymore - and that does indeed show when they try to get started with the stuff. While I will gladly accept the necessity for the next generation(s) to get acquainted with electronics in a young age and develop their computer skills, I think that neglecting a basic craft instruction is not good at all. For example if you don't know how to mend clothing, you can either walk around with the torn garment or throw it away and buy a new one. And if you have never tried your own hand at making something, how will you be able to evaluate good quality?

There is a special, deep joy in seeing a masterly piece of crafts, even if you know you can't afford to buy it. I have had tears coming into my eyes quite a few times, standing before a thing awesomely well made - a knife forged to perfection, a felt bag masterly done in a very difficult technique, a pair of shoes where every seam, every stitch spoke of the abilities of its maker, a spherical wood capsule that closes just firmly enough, turned to perfection on a lathe. The ability to perceive good quality of material and craft does not come by itself, but has to be trained - it is easiest to see for somebody who has already dabbled into that specific craft, because then you will know or at least have an inkling of the difficulties in making the piece. And then a masterpiece of craft - it can be well and truely mind-boggling.

I am sorry for everybody who has not gotten some grounding in basic craft skills when still a youngster, and I am sorry for everybody who cannot get this joy through craft perception for at least one single craft. And then, quite related to that... I am still hoping that the awareness of good quality and the appreciation of craft skills will creep back into our society, and I am expecting the day that a well-made handcrafted one-of-a-kind item of good material will again be something to show off your status - because that is when we craftspeople will be sought after once more. And when joy through craft perfection and craft perception will again grow in our world.