Slipping into Madness

E-3: Fivepence for One, Twopence for Two

What item would you be willing to pay full price for instead of getting the 'deal/sale' price? And why is that item so important to you?

Okay, I have to admit that I tend to be kind of a miserly kind of person. I have gone grocery shopping enough that I know how to shop the sales and the coupons and I'm unwilling to compromise my pocketbook for any product.

But there's exceptions. I am always willing to pay full price for art—whether it's fiber arts, ceramic arts, music, painting, photography.

Put it this way. I knit, and I know how much time and effort goes into making a hand knit object. Let's call the object a shawl, because I make shawls. If I were to sell one of my shawls, I would need the to receive the amount of money that shawl was worth, and even then, I might hesitate to give it to someone who wouldn't truly appreciate it.

So, how do we put a price on the shawl? Well first consider the amount of money spent on the yarn and bead. The amount of wear and tear on the needles. A reasonable price for the amount of yarn for a shawl is probably somewhere between twenty five and a hundred dollars. Depending on the quality and thickness of the yarn and the type of fiber and how it was dyed . . . etc.

Then, we have to add in the amount of time I spent knitting. Recently, I was working on a shawl at the library. I literally spent an hour and a half knitting and beading one row—and I'm still about eighteen rows from the end (at least). I anticipate that the bindoff when I get there is going to take me at least three hours. So, we're talking roughly one hundred rows total, each row getting incrementally longer—let's average it out, and say a hundred rows of shawl translates to about a hundred hours of work—more or less. Probably more.

And then we ask, how much is my time worth? Let's say minimum wage, which in Tennessee where I live is $7.25/hour. For one hundred hours, that's $725+50 for the yarn and beads = $775. And that's at minimum wage. Suppose, I think that my time is worth more than that.

It certainly shouldn't be less than that.

What gets me, sometimes, is the way people just assume that art should be free. I've watched one sister paint or another sister create beauty out of clay. When we hire a photographer to capture an event, we're not only paying for their time, but for their experience and expertise.

And that's why I'd pay full price for any art I needed. Or I'd learn to do it myself.

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