Today we’re getting just a little less personal, but a lot more political. I’m going to start with some questions: Do you like my art? Do you think it has value? What kind of value? Aesthetic value, sentimental value, spiritual value? What about monetary value? I’ve often been asked why I don’t try to monetize my art. A few weekends ago we went to an awesome event hosted by Owl Moon Raptor center (a local wildlife rehabilitation center) and of course I was wearing my favorite owl hat, a custom creation of my own design. A stranger complemented my hat, we chatted about knitting for a bit, then she offered to buy my hat right off my head. When I politely declined she practically begged me to make her a similar one on commission. Y’all, we’re broke, and I’m not going to pretend I wasn’t tempted. She didn’t offer a price, but similar styles of hats tend to sell for about $50 at most. She wanted it badly enough (and looked like she had money) so I might have been able to negotiate $75 or so. I could definitely use an extra $75! So why did I say no? Let me start by telling you a little about the hat and the design itself.
This style of colorwork knitting is called “fair isle”, named for the tiny island north of Scotland where it originated. It’s one of my favorite ways to knit colorwork, and I can design my own patterns using a simple counted grid; I usually use Stich Fiddle as pattern making software free online, but even just sketching out simple designs on graph paper works for fair isle patterns. The concept for this design is based on a hat I bought my first year of college from the campus bookstore when I first realized that Philadelphia winters were a bit more intense than what I was used to! I loved that hat, wore it all through college, but lost it the winter after I graduated. I’ve missed it ever since, the bookstore stopped selling them, and I was never able to find a suitable replacement to buy. As soon as I got confident enough in my patterning abilities I decided to recreate something similar.
I tend to approach patterning the same way I approach cooking. I look up a few dozen recipes/patterns for similar things, I read them, dissect them, copy bits and pieces that I like from each of them, add my own flair, and double the garlic(ok, that last part is just for cooking!). Then I experiment, taste test/knit gauge squares, and usually by the third or fourth try I’ve got something edible/wearable. So for this hat, I downloaded a few different earflap hat patterns to follow as a base for the shape of the hat, modified a snowflake pattern I’d created for cross stitched Christmas stockings, and looked at dozens of fair isle owl designs, borrowing the bits I liked from each of them to fit my style and the size I needed for this hat. Just creating the design, before I even started knitting, was very time intensive.
I like working with decent materials, but I don’t often splurge on fancy expensive yarn. This yarn is a 75% wool blend and it’s pretty good quality, but it’s my go-to cheap mass produced wool blend yarn (Patons brand, purchased from Michaels). The hat is small, but there’s 3 colors, so it takes 2 skeins of the main color and 1 each of the contrast colors. That’s 4 skeins, at $6.99 each, plus a couple bucks worth of fleece fabric for the lining and tax brings the material costs to a bit more than $30 at full price, but Michaels has good sales so let’s estimate I spent about $25 on materials. I used superfine sock yarn and very small needles (the thinner the yarn and the smaller the needles, the longer a project takes to knit). I’ve never timed myself, but I’d guess that a hat like this takes me at least 50 hours to knit– and that’s not including the many many hours that went into creating the original design and pattern in the first place.
Now, I had a blast making this! Definitely time well spent! But coming back around to the idea of monetizing: Even with my optimistically inflated price of $75, minus $25 of materials, and writing off the time I spent designing the pattern as an asset acquisition (like the cost of my needles), my profit of $50 would value my time at less than a dollar an hour. And if I really wanted to make a business out of monetizing my art, I’d need to invest in a paid domain and commerce features for my website, paid table space at craft fairs, and time consuming administrative tasks to be able to advertise, make sales, process payments etc. And if I ever managed to actually have profits that outstripped my operating costs, I’d have to pay taxes on those profits. All in all, as best I can figure, I’d end up very optimistically making somewhere in the realm of $0.50 an hour. Friends, I’m worth more than that!
Or am I? What does it mean to be “worth more than that” in a monetary sense? Why are we so quick to intertwine our worth, our value as human beings with our hourly wage? I was laid off from my full time professional job last January. Despite hundreds of applications and dozens of interviews over the past year, I’m still unemployed in my field.
To be honest I’ve been struggling a lot with self worth in this past year. I’m not providing for my family. I’m not a productive, contributing member of society. Right? I’m the recipient of government aid, I’m a burden on the taxpayers. This is what we’ve been brainwashed to believe. It’s bullshit, but despite my advanced education in economic theory and experience with anti-capitalist rhetoric and activism, I’ve found that even I have truly internalized these views that are so antithetical to my most deeply held values and beliefs!
My art doesn’t fit in the capitalist narrative. My parenting, my relationships with friends and family, my own personal journey towards spiritual growth, the healing I’ve attempted towards my mental health, none of that fits the narrative. None of that has monetary worth. Of course, I haven’t even done much art this year. I’ve been too depressed by my lack of productivity, by the utter failure of my socially acceptable and profitable career in the so-called-non-profit sector. And yes, I see the irony in being defeated by the internalization of capitalist values as my career in attempting to overthrow capitalism has stagnated! Of course, we all know that even the best non-profit organizations aren’t truly anti-capitalist. At best, my career has been a Sisyphean attempt to use the system to mitigate the harm done by the system!
That said, I’m now taking commissions. I’ll make you anything you want! I’ll invoice you directly for the cost of materials. I’ll track my actual knitting time and bill you at $15 an hour for however long it takes to finish your project– that’s below DC minimum wage, and much less than I make waiting tables, which is my other source of income right now. My best guess for the price of a hat similar to the awesome custom creation I’ve featured in this post is $700-$800. Is my art “worth” that?
- Featured project: Owl Fair Isle Hat
- Medium: knitting
- Pattern: Original
- Materials: Patton’s sock weight 75% wool blend
- Completed: Best guess 2018?
#knitting #showcase #throwback #politics #personalispolitical
The Owl Weaver 
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