Selling your handmade items? Here’s how to figure a fair price.

If you sew, sooner or later someone is going to suggest you sell your handmade items. It’s a compliment for someone to say that things you make are nice enough for someone to spend money to have them. But what is a fair price for your handmade items? You’ve got to factor in your materials, your time, and other less obvious expenses. Deby from So Sew Easy has some advice in her post on pricing your handmade items. She is talking about items you’ve sewn, but her reasoning holds for any handmade item. She also includes a handy calculator to help you set a price when selling your work.

Click below to go to her post:

Selling What You Sew – How To Price Your Work, by So Sew Easy

[photo from So Sew Easy]

Why is it critical to get the pricing right? You will not earn a profit if your handcrafted product is not priced correctly. Without a solid profit margin, it will be difficult to keep your firm going and surely impossible to earn a living from it.
Many professional craftsmen base their labor expenditures on a figure of $12 to $20 per hour. Many people propose multiplying the base price by 2.5 or 3 to determine the retail price. Do you want to offer your handcrafted craft product on a wholesale basis? Then, for pricing, use this formula. 2 x Supplies = Wholesale Price
Wholesale Price x 2 Equals Retail Price (or, in other words, Supplies x 4).

But wait you are not done yet! Remember to provide your hourly pay rate – how much do you wish to be paid each hour?
Simply multiply the number of hours it took you to create the product by your hourly rate to determine how much you should charge for labor charges (on top of the supplies cost).

One last thing to calculate is your overhead costs, this is not supplies but other little things like Electricity, fuel to the market, tools you have bought to product the crafts, etc, If you don’t account for everything you will run at a loss.

Etsy is our preferred online seller for handmade items and crafts, Etsy is a familiar shopfront that makes buyers comfortable and confident in making purchases. Looking for other options to sell your crafts than Etsy? Check out this article – Alternative places to sell your crafts online .

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I’m always tempted by the pretty velvets at the fabric store. So much texture! And the way the fibers catch the light! But sewing on velvet is trickier than you’d think. That nap that lends beautiful texture also likes to slip and crawl. That nap can also spell disaster if you cut a piece the wrong direction. That isn’t to say you shouldn’t use buy that velvet and sew it into something gorgeous, you just need to go into your velvet sewing project prepared. And Melissa at Melly Sews has a post that takes you step by step through sewing on velvet.

Velvet is such a luscious fabric, especially for winter sewing projects. Of course there are velvet Christmas sewing projects – stockings, tree skirts, santa hats – but velvet is beautiful for all winter. Think of all the gorgeous velvet dresses, evening bags, hair accessories, even pillows and other home décor that you see all winter long.

Melly Sews’ post gives you the tips and tricks you need to know in order for your velvet sewing project to end up a success. There are types of projects better suited for velvets, and kinds of projects to avoid. She describes the different types of velvet available. And she also tells the best way to lay out and cut your pattern pieces from velvet fabric. Her tutorial also covers marking, pressing, and of course sewing that beautiful fabric. There’s also a video included in case that’s your preferred method for learning.

Head over to Melly Sews to learn how to sew on velvet fabric.

And if you want to learn more about that lovely blue velvet dress shown, she has a post that tells more about it including 2 ways to style it depending on if you want to be more dressy or more casual.

[photo credit: Melly Sews]

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