I often get a lot of admiration for my crochet creations – especially the clothes, which I love AND appreciate. One of the most common, and well meaning comments I get is “You should sell these!”. Sometimes I explain why I don’t but a lot of the time I don’t bother, I just say, “I earn my living from teaching and designing crochet, not selling my finished items.”
Today, I was on a conference call that lasted 1 hour 20 minutes. During that time, I decided to join together 12 motifs with a continuous, join as you go, granny stitch border. In the image, you can see it’s the cream section of the work. For anyone that is interested in knowing why I don’t attempt to make a living by selling my crochet items, I will use this piece of crochet as an example to shed light on the reasons why I don’t crochet to sell!
Time and Minimum Wage
First of all, let’s address the minimum wage which is £11.98 p/h for London, UK. I have been teaching crochet and designing for 10+ years, there is no way I should have to, or want to work for less than £12 an hour with my skills and experience in the craft. However, for the sake of this example, I will charge £12 an hour.
I consider myself a quick crocheter, not mega fast but can certainly get up a good speed. If I was to charge £12 p/h for the cream border, that alone would be invoiced at £15.60. Each individual block takes me about 8 minutes to crochet. Already you can see the problem with this before we even extrapolate these numbers to factor in making an entire sweater.
I calculate roughly 6 hours 24 minutes for the motifs and 4 hours 48 minutes for the borders.
Total: 11 hours 12 minutes, round to 12 hours is £144
Material Costs
I haven’t even factored in the materials. Since I do my best to avoid plastics, I do not use acrylic and instead I use and advocate for natural materials. These tend to be more expensive. This cotton yarn is from Søstrene Grene and costs £2.28 a ball. The section shown, with 12 crochet motifs and borders is 65grams – which works out at about £3.00. I haven’t finalised the design yet, but my guess is I need about 48 motifs in total. So at least £12 in yarn alone. That’s actually one of my cheapest makes!
Total: £12
Design and Planning
I have not factored in the time it takes to design and plan the piece. The creative process involved in designing and planning each piece is hard to quantify, since a lot of it happens when I’m day dreaming, walking or driving. Bringing a unique and thoughtfully crafted item to life can involve a lot of trial and error with motifs, colour placements and the layout, construction and joins of the sweater. Let’s make a very conservative guess and say this part took me 2 hours.
Total: £24
Finishing Techniques
The finishing techniques – adding borders, cuffs, hems….sewing in ends, washing, blocking, drying…. these steps can add many hours and more yarn to the project. I’ll calculate 4 hours although this is conservative!
Total: £48
Distorted Expectations
Cheap, fast fashion has distorted people’s expectations of the cost of clothing, especially hand-made items. You can often buy hand-made and faux crochet garments for less than it costs me in materials to make the same item. Fast fashion is not only terrible for the planet but also creates and unfair competition for those that are trying to make clothes ethically. You can buy a similar sweater to the one I am making for £28 from one of the infamous online fast fashion sellers. For the sweater I am making, using my calculations above, I would need to charge at least £228!
Personal Well-being
I am not a machine. Contrary to popular belief, and what I jokingly proclaim, I don’t actually want to sit around crocheting ALL day and EVERYDAY. It would result in burn out, possible repetitive strain injuries and definitely postural and skeletal issues from the physical and mental toll of continuous crochet work. It would destroy my love of the craft.
E-commerce Insights
I have worked in e-commerce for many years. I know that selling a product isn’t just about selling the product! There is customer care, dealing with complaints…and with custom orders and handmade items you have a unique set of issues that arise. What happens if the piece doesn’t fit? What if they don’t like it? What kind of after purchase services are people expecting? For example, I have heard many horror stories where the handmade item has been mistreated by the buyer and they expect the maker to repair or replace at the makers costs! What happens if the item goes missing in transit? Yes, you can claim back the money paid but you can’t claim back the hours spent making the item or the replacement you may then have to crochet! These are all things I would find extremely stressful to deal with on a regular basis.
Passion for Teaching
I love teaching crochet – this is my main passion! To give you the tools and confidence to create your own unique items and for you to gain an understanding and appreciation of what’s involved in making a crochet garment. If I was trying to earn a living from crocheting clothes to sell, I would not have as much time for you and all of my beautiful community.
The Exceptions
Having said all that – there are rare occasions where I sell my crochet creations. These are sample sales and special custom orders.
I do accumulate lots of crochet items from teaching and making prototypes for designs. So, every now and then I will have a sample sale. Often times, these will not be priced to reflect the work that has gone into them – usually I just try to recovered the cost of materials as I know I would not sell them if they were priced accurately.
The other exceptions are when it’s for someone I know well, they understand crochet and the process and are willing to pay me fairly.
About the Crochet
The motifs in this post are what I call my Summer Grannies or Lite Granny Squares. They have less stitches in each cluster and more chain spaces. This makes for a more open motif that is lighter in weight, uses less yarn and is therefore a bit cooler! Especially when made in 4ply cotton like this.
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