forgetgutenberg

Or designing.

 I forget that I like designing things, mostly because every time I make a sketch for something, it gets lost in my incredibly disorganized collection of notebooks. Also, it takes a very long time (particularly knitting) to test it to figure out if it actually works in the real world.

I must need a test-knitter.

Anyway, that’s what I’ve been up to. I’m knitting a shawl, because I happen to like knitting odd, deceptively complicated triangular (or, as in the case of that one thing, jellyfish-shaped) objects. The current one has some charm, and I’m not putting up pictures because if I manage to get the pattern written up, I’m going to submit it to Knitty or try to sell it.

It’s nifty, either way. The process of coming up with lace that does what I want it to is stretching my brain a little; not too much, because I’m still figuring things out – like, oh hey, in a couple more feet I’m going to have to figure out how to turn a corner with the edging. That should be interesting. Fortunately, I’ve got a book with pictures and a bunch of people who are actually good knitters who hang out on Wednesday nights. 

I keep saying I’m over-extending myself. Actually, that’s wrong. I’m not challenging myself enough, that’s all. That’s why I keep getting bored with projects that aren’t either tiny or really wacky.

I hate being bored. It’s not that I don’t want to do work, or whatever, it’s that I want to be challenged. All the time. I don’t want to spend any time at all being bored and dealing with routine. Routine is boring, and boredom is the devil’s pillow. Or something like that. That Soren, what a wacky guy. Pfft.

What should I teach?

Yeah, I think it might be thinking about spring. Finally.

So I was walking home from the coffee shop the other night and thinking about how much I’d have to price my knitting in order to give myself any kind of hourly wage, and how much I could price it so people might actually buy it. These numbers are nothing like the same. Clearly, selling the knitting isn’t the answer – with a very conservative estimate on production time and a pretty low hourly, we’re talking seventy-five bucks for a pair of socks. Maybe sixty. A decent shawl comes to around a hundred if it’s really simple, or two fifty if it’s actually complicated. Realistically, people don’t pay that much for knitting. Which is really too bad – I have a couple of shawls I’d like to sell, but they’re both in the hundred and fifty dollar range.

The same thing happens with books, but at least they’re mass-produced (by comparison). An edition of fifty that takes … oh, say two hours a book, which isn’t nearly enough, but whatever – that’s twenty dollars a book, plus materials which at least get spread out across the whole edition. Selling a book for twenty-five or thirty, that’s not so unreasonable.

That said, if there’s anything on my gallery pages that anybody wants to buy, drop me an email or a comment. I have copies of Faustus for sale, and some of Incantations, as well as a bunch of thesis-related bits and pieces. So that’s my vague hope that maybe there’s interest out there in buying my work – I’ve got to come up with a way to pay rent, and frankly I’m not holding out hope that my day job is going to do it much longer.

I’ve been giving some thought to ways to use my handspun, since I have a whole lot of tiny little skeins of the stuff. I think perhaps a rigid-heddle loom is the solution. Which raises the problem of how to get a rigid heddle loom, now, doesn’t it? 

What I’ve been working on, and why there are no pictures in this post: I’ve been writing. Again. Nasty habit, but if I finish something I’ll be quite pleased with myself… 

Tell me this, o great internet. How on earth does one market the kind of work I do?