once upon a time…
…I had a boyfriend who wanted me to make him a scarf. He picked the yarn, a hand-dyed alpaca, out of my vast stash. I picked the pattern: Vice Versa, crocheted but soft and supple and very decidedly not crochet-like. The pairing of the yarn and pattern was a match made in heaven, resulting in a beautiful dappled weave-like scarf.
I worked on it for months – on and off, granted, but months, nonetheless – usually while sitting in doctors’ waiting rooms and things like that. When the scarf was finally finished, and I proudly presented it to the boyfriend, he… didn’t like it. Said it was too scratchy for his sensitive neck. I could have cried. I mean, he was with me the entire time I was working on this scarf, more or less… why didn’t he voice his concerns before I invested so much time and energy into making it?
When things went south, I took the scarf back. (I mean, it’s not like it was really his anyway – he never wore it!) But I’m really not a heavy-bulky-scarf person; I get the tail ends of scarves caught in car doors, or they drag on the ground, or get forgotten in the trunk of my car when I throw it there out of frustration. So I started to think about embellishing the scarf and selling it.
There were a few miscues, but at long last, the scarf is finished. And I think that my idea of embellishing it was a good one, because the scarf sold (to a high school classmate, granted, but still! it sold!) within 5 minutes of listing it.
I don’t talk about it much, but I have a lot of problems selling my handknits. I mean, not selling them, per se, but pricing them to sell. I know damn well that I’m asking prices that are ridiculously cheap for items that take me weeks, sometimes months, to make. On the other hand, I look at my stuff as “nothing special”, something that the average Joe or Jane could easily make for themselves for about $5 if they took the time to learn a couple basic stitches.
This scarf sold for $35 – less than the cost of the yarn used to make it, and never mind the investment of time to crochet it, or the fact that those appliques took me about 5 hours to make and apply. But at this point, in this case, I’m just happy to have found her a good home.
