First World Problems in The Past

You have my permission to ignore this entry. :P It’s just me whining about how horrible I have it right now. LoL

So, it’s a mailing entry, again.

I finished Norman.

.. yes… that is a purple bug in the background. It was a wirewrapped bug made for me by a friend.

That’s my desk at work, hehehe, hence the calculator.

So, my problems… Number one. Lakefair is two weeks away and West Coast Chainmail still hasn’t sent out my rings that I ordered a week ago. To be fair and honest, it was a fairly large order, with 11 different sized rings to cut, tumble, package and send. But that doesn’t help me much when it’s two weeks from Lakefair and I don’t have any large flowers because I don’t have my rings. I thought I bought the rings for large flowers earlier, and must have forgotten them. c.c

There’s also rings for other projects I want to make. Like a Celtic Labryrinth maile belt…

That picture was taken from http://www.joshuadiliberto.com/PATTERN.html He has a lot of amazing patterns. Some of which I really want to try.

Ooh! I decided which bear I wanted to pick up for my bears… I’m going to go with the top one of my Barbies and Bears entry. He’s about 9 inches tall, and looks like he’d been through a war. I figure I’ll pick up 20 bears to start with, since shipping and handling is a flat rate of 20.00. Makes it easy to figure out how much extra each bear is when you put in S&H. Mom is taking my idea and running with it… she likes the idea of doing a tie so that some of them have ties, some of them have hauberks, belts, and coifs, some have just belts, some have shirts, etc. etc. She’s more excited about it than I am. I told her I wasn’t doing a Build-a-Bear maile shop. I don’t think she believes me.

I’m beginning to look through the winter shows for the ones I want to go to. I need to get into touch with a few people to find out if there’s still space at some of the shows. -makes a face- I hate this part of the whole thing. Buuut, it’s a necessary evil. It’s the figuring out what I can and can’t do that’s the hard part.

Oh, another hard part? Pricing things. I have no clue what to charge for Norman up there. People’s like… well, take the amount of money for materials, and then double it and then figure out how long it took you to make it and then times that by what you want to make for each hour and add in blah blah blah. Which is well and good, but if I do it that way, either I’m charging waaay too little for things, or I’m charging waaaay too much.

If I did that with my flowers: .50 for supplies. Times that by two is $1.00. I want to get 10.00 an hour (at least for this example) and it takes me only 15 minutes to make it, so 10.00 / 4 = 2.50. Cost of flower: 3.50. I don’t mind if I end up selling a couple for that amount at all, but I don’t like that to be the actual price of my stuff.... granted, you’re supposed to factor in your overhead like how much it costs for your booth, but I’m not going to figure that out for every show. I like just a flat 5.00 for the flowers, with it coming down to 9.00 for two of them. Or 15.00 for four.

But if I was to do that for Norman: The kits cost aproximately 25.00. Granted, I’ll have a lot of certain sized rings left over, because we use less of them in this than what’s packaged, but 25.00 is a good starting spot (actually it’s closer to 30.00, but with my percentage off, it’s only 25.00). 25.00 for supplies, doubled is 50.00. I’ll still go with 10.00 an hour… and I think I ended up spending 5 hours on Norman. That’s like… 100.00 going with that pricing scheme. Which is good and all, because Norman’s cute and is worth 100.00, but I don’t know if anyone would buy him if I put him at that price, and that’s not counting the overhead that I’m supposed to factor in.

A fellow maile worker I talked to said that he doesn’t do larger pieces because unless it’s custom and fancy-smancy, you don’t get your time back at all… which is totally true. Flowers take me 15 minutes, cost .50 to make, and sell for 5.00… a Tablero board took me 11 hours, cost 60.00 to make, and with glasses and dice, I might be able to get 200.00 out of it, if I’m lucky and someone really wants it. But dammit, I really want to do something epic.

I got another order today, no rush on this one though (phew). Curt from work wants a guitar strap and I get to sit down and figure out how I want to make it and what metal we want to do it in and all that fun stuff. This is great because it’s getting my name out and whatnot, but it’s a pain in the arse since I have so many other things I have to do this month and next month and blah blah blah.

All in all, it’s good, just frustrating.

P.S. I need someone to price my shit, yo!

Edit: I just got done posting this when West Coast Chainmail emailed me to say that my package was in the mail… woot!

Last updated December 24, 2016