Imagining a socialist utopia where I exploit the labor of women in my family by purchasing artisanal wares from them at prices that don’t even cover the costs of materials let alone compensate their labor.
If you ask your cousin to make you a baby blanket by hand for $20, she should cook and eat you.
Some knitters will charge 3x the cost of materials for a finished piece (which might be easier to figure out than charging by the hour). That means this hypothetical cousin spent $10 on materials, which means you’re absolutely getting low quality, scratchy acrylic yarn from Walmart.
Unless you live in a farming community, you’re probably not sourcing your yarn from your actual hometown; like, it’s not 1846. At best you’re sourcing it from the nearest farm, IF they have sheep and IF they’re the kind of sheep whose wool is sought after for yarn and IF they also happen to spin and/or sell the yarn at their own establishment instead of selling it elsewhere.
She’s not making a living off this either, she’s doing it as a side hustle or as a cottage industry type thing as a SAH. The people who make any money off knitting are making money selling patterns and/or dyed yarn; it’s basically impossible these days to survive off the money you make from knitting because you can’t charge what the piece is worth if you want anyone to actually buy it.
$100 is the absolute minimum I would consider charging for a baby blanket. Which works out to about $7.25 per hour for roughly 14 hours, which isn’t an impossible time spenditure for a small piece like a baby blanket, but I would still be charging minimum wage and not even factoring in cost of materials.
A decent sized baby blanket calls for about 800-1200 yards of medium thickness yarn. If you want a 100% wool yarn made in the USA (like Germantown by Kelbourne Woolens) then you’re looking at $16 for a 200-yard skein so $64-96 for just the yarn for this blanket. So if I charged myself minimum wage and got this blanket done fairly quickly and charged for materials we’re looking at $150+.
Also like, not to be shady but there’s no guarantee that it’ll last forever just because it’s handmade. Handmade items can be shittily made too.
This is a perfect encapsulation of far right psychology. You want homegrown and local and handmade goods but you’re so used to mass produced modernity that you have absolutely no concept of what it takes to produce even basic essentials, and worse yet, you often scoff at the idea of paying more than mass produced prices. For $20 I will knit you a gauge swatch.
Excluding the crucial fact that office jobs pay you an income….if staying home to raise children and do chores and bake bread was really so much easier and more joyful than working in an office on some objective level, why aren’t men doing it? Why aren’t they chomping at the bit to be ~leisurely house husbands~ to a working wife? Why aren’t they stepping up to depend solely on someone else’s income in exchange for round-the-clock domestic labor, if it’s really as blissful and their propaganda suggests? Curious.
Logan is a terrible person whose primary issues (failkids) are entirely self-inflicted.
THAT BEING SAID. If I worked my ass off all my life only to realize that, in my efforts, I have given birth to Wealthy Children, I too would be a massive asshole. Like moreso than I was before
The problem with being a self-made man is that if you have kids they will be rich kids, the worst variety of kid.
This is why every rich person, the moment they realize they will have a child, MUST larp as a poor or working class person for about the first 20 years of that kid’s life
And don’t hop up my ass about ethics or whatever. If, upon turning 21, my parents had been like, “Sike, hey, we’re loaded, we pretended to be struggling financially all your life so you learned the value of hard work and what not. All your student loans are paid off.” I would have forgiven them.
Can people stop being funnier than me for like, twenty minutes. Please
have you heard of this spray that makes you see hair on your face that is otherwise invisible so you can shave it with a dull plastic razor that comes in a 20 pack which will be on this planet for hundreds of years??? buy. have you heard of this single use sheet masks that does nothing different than a normal mask and you have to wear it overnight (it will come off) and on flights (you look crazy)??? buy. have you heard of this camera that makes you see your greasy scalp (normal) and dead skin (also normal) up close so you can purchase a treatment for hundreds of dollars and/or exfoliating scrub containing particles that are going down your drain and straight into the sea???? buy. have you heard of this special plastic gadget that
