The Process Of Evaluation

Casting off 456 stitches took fifty-two minutes. Casting off is double the motion of knitting a row which means that each of the last sixteen rows took roughly half an hour to knit. That's eight hours and fifty-two minutes for one and one-half inches of ribbed edging or $84.17 if you were to charge out at British Columbia's current minimum wage of $9.50 per hour. Obviously, that says nothing about the other nine days of knitting. Equally obviously, I knit for the love of it.

One thing I particularly enjoy about knitting is the opportunity to think and you know how good I am at that - at over thinking - BUT far too often in the past I've been the leap first kind of artist and - unfortunately - the safety net has not always appeared to save me - or perhaps fortunately it has not always appeared because that lack of net has taught me to think through my actions before running madly in some obscure direction. It's good to have a plan.

Since I have absolutely no intention of creating jewelry to sell just for the love of it and intend to get paid more than minimum wage, it's important to go through the process of evaluation and determine how I'm going to work in advance. Galleries typically have a 50% mark-up. That means that a product that retails for $100.00 must be created for $50.00 including labour, supplies, and office expenses. That's good information to know. Working with that number, I can determine how many hours to invest and what the maximum cost of supplies can be per product for each category or technique and then look at purchases and processes that achieve that goal. Here's an example.

The main pendant will be my most unique ingredient. It is the part of the jewelry piece that cannot be purchased and cannot be created by any other artist in my style. It is what will make my pieces mine. Besides that main pendant, a necklace would include beads which I can either purchase or create or some combination of the two. Sometimes, you would chose to make the bead for its uniqueness while other times, you would chose to purchase the bead because it's far more cost effective. Take the tube and rondelle beads that I made on Monday for instance.

Based on my one day of experience and conversations with Carolyn, it would take several hours to make 100 beads even after I knew what I was doing. There are about ten steps to forming each bead from conditioning the clay to the final polish. That's labour intensive. Let's assume it takes three hours and that I charge out at minimum wage. The total cost for labour would be $28.50 so each bead would be $0.285 for labour PLUS supplies. Carolyn retails these beads for $8.00 for fifty and the bead store in town retails similar ones for $0.15 each meaning that it would be far less expensive to purchase them.

With our individual creativity, that's not nearly as important to know. We're knitting or sewing or beading for the love of it BUT... when you're creating products for re-sale... this is the kind of information that helps you to determine where to spend your time and money. I spent some time yesterday finding a supplier for beads and findings. I also...

... bought a few more polymer clay tools and now have enough to get started. Combined with the beading supplies already in my stash, I'll make several prototypes of pendants, necklaces, and cuff bracelets and gather more information about the length of time and the cost of supplies involved. So far, my total investment in clay is less than $200.00. That's a low start-up cost if this works out and not a huge loss if it doesn't.

The piece above is 5" x 7". As a textile artist, I produced this size of work to test a design idea or to create smaller, more easily sold pieces. In a gallery, they retail for under $100.00. In the studio, they took one to two hours to create depending on the techniques involved. They are the closest to a pendant of any work I've previously produced.

When my daughter was visiting over the holidays, she said that she thought my pieces would be gorgeous and labour intensive as that's the kind of thing I like to do. She's right. I particularly love detailed stitch work which takes considerable time although a pendant is much MUCH smaller than a wall hanging SO... keeping that in mind... I'm moving forward.

Artists typically spend a third of their time on marketing and office work which includes functions such as documenting and photographing the pieces, listing them on a website or in product catalogues, shipping pieces to galleries or buyers, and things of that nature. I plan to work three days a week, ten months of the year. That would mean that one day would be for office work and two for creating the actual products.

Based on that information, I could create between twenty and forty products a year at a rate of one or two a week. That might sound ridiculously low and it could possibly be once I start figuring out how to streamline this and that procedure but what I do know for sure is that it took me three hours to bead the strap on the silk dupioni purse above.

My last decision - realizing that I am never going to be a world renowned jewelry artist and don't even want to be and would prefer to simply enjoy my work and create pieces with love and pride that are priced to match meaning that I'll have to wait for the sale - was to decide to focus on the products that I want to make - like necklaces and bracelets - and not on the ones that others think I should make - like earrings or rings. I've worn the same diamond earrings for about twenty years. Earrings are not my thing. While I enjoy rings, I like them either big and sparkly or quite gaudy but either way rings are not suitable to textiles. Hands and water come in contact far too often and water and fabric is not a good mix.

It's good to have made these decisions and to have a direction. As you can see, I'm doing a lot of thinking before I leap and this is a good thing. It could be in in the end that this direction does not work for me but it won't be because I didn't think it through and test it out thoroughly. Today is a finishing day. I'm tidying up the studio, doing some filing, completing the 2011 year end, and packaging up The Handbag Project for mailing.

Talk soon - Myrna

Grateful - an understanding of pricing and marketing and the learning of past experiences to allow me to make decisions.

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Personal Growth - Be cheerful no matter what; pray all the time; thank God no matter what happens. This is the way God wants you who belong to Christ Jesus to live. - 1 Thessalonians 5:16-18

On Saturday morning, I woke up with a large and very painful lump on the left side that did not go away and instead got larger. My doctor's office was closed until yesterday which gave me plenty of time to think over the possibilities even though it was most likely a cyst, which it was. At first I was angry. Negative wasn't the way I wanted to be thinking on New Year's Eve and ill or negative are not the way I want to be living in 2012. We've had many rough years for a really long time and - IMHO - in the year of turning fifty - I felt I deserved an amazingly wonderful, everything clicks into place, year for a change and maybe I do but there's no guarantees in life. Why not me?

Thinking over the possibilities reminds us to live now and points out what is important in life. I'm thankful for that awareness and for a doctor, especially for one who fit me in immediately, and for a health care system that means I did not pay a cent even though I had a small, in office, surgical procedure and a follow up test for the possibilities. I am blessed to be living where I live and with good health.