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| Image by ifindkarma via Flickr |
"The reasonable man adapts himself to the conditions that surround him... The unreasonable man adapts surrounding conditions to himself... All progress depends on the unreasonable man."George Bernard Shaw
Just an average american woman.
by Elaine Ossipov
Thursday, November 24, 2011
One of My Favourite Quotes, Shaw
Tuesday, November 22, 2011
Titter Dee, Twitter Dum, I smell the blood of being Over done!
Twitter De, Twitter Dum, I smell the blook of something being over done!
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Twitter also says you should mention one person Per Tweet on your Follow Friday, else the score is divided by the number of users you mention.
Somehow between #FF Creations and #FF in reality the two creatures have yet to meet. It's been my experience while on Twitter you name as many of your twitter collegues as fast as you can and reply to any whom have done the same to you. No So accourding to the Follow Friday Rules. Please check them out there.
http://www.followfriday.com/
Now where is that cute little bird when I need him...ummm.....
Twitter also says you should mention one person Per Tweet on your Follow Friday, else the score is divided by the number of users you mention.
Somehow between #FF Creations and #FF in reality the two creatures have yet to meet. It's been my experience while on Twitter you name as many of your twitter collegues as fast as you can and reply to any whom have done the same to you. No So accourding to the Follow Friday Rules. Please check them out there.
http://www.followfriday.com/
Now where is that cute little bird when I need him...ummm.....
Monday, November 21, 2011
the true cost of handmade
I recently did my first craft fair. And at that craft fair, one woman picked up every one of my hats, tried them on, and made a sort of a noise in the back of her throat indicating disgust. Then she muttered, “I don’t really like these hats” before looking at the price tag for one of them and looking at me over her glasses: “Do you really charge this much?”
Ok, I managed a retail store for many years, so I’m used to this type of customer. I’ve met hundreds of them, and I know it’s less about whatever she is looking at and more about what is going on in her own crazy brain. Some people just have this need to be nasty. But this was a little different. What she was cruelly and callously saying to me was that what I created had no value. My art has no value. It is worthless and ugly. And I won’t lie — it stung a little.
But back to her question about the cost. The particular hat she picked up was $150 and it was this one:
The offending freeform crochet hat: Lettuce Go to the Mothership. $150.
You can’t see from the photos, but it is made of thousands of tiny little stitches, all folding in on themselves and creating a pretty elaborate underwater sea creature type effect. It’s made of hundreds of yards of very nice wool in colors that I carefully selected and put together in a way I thought would be pleasing. I spent probably 18 to 20 hours making this hat.
So let’s do the math.
Without accounting for the cost of materials, at $150, I would be paying myself about $7.50 per hour for this hat. This hat that I created. This hat that is my art. This hat that is one-of-a-kind, that evolved from a tiny little round of crocheted stitches into its own Thing. This hat that I made with my own hands, that I kept working on until my hands began to hurt. $7.50 per hour. That is less than minimum wage.
Let’s add in the cost of materials, which were probably somewhere in the neighborhood of $40 for this hat. I used a combination of a handspun wool and some other more commercially available wool. That drops my wage per hour to about $5.50.
Now let’s consider all the other costs: sales tax, for one, which I don’t charge to customers (too messy), but I must pay on every item I sell. Sales tax in most places near where I live & work hovers right around 8.75%. So on that $150 hat, I will pay $13.13 worth of sales tax. My hourly wage is now $4.84. Is the customer paying with a credit card? That’s another 3%, or $4.50 I don’t get to keep from the sale of that hat.
How about the cost of the tags I make and print out at home? The tissue paper I wrap the hat in? The bag I put it in? My business cards?
I could make two of these hats per week, assuming they are all this intricate. Even that is pushing it; 40 hours per week of crocheting would be pretty hard on my hands and wrists. But let’s assume I make two such hats per week, priced at $150. My income? $193.6 per week, or just over $10,000 per year. And that’s before all those pesky other business expenses, like licensing fees, the cost of office equipment, gas, my craft fair booth display, and self-employment tax.
Can YOU live on $10,000 per year? If anything, I set my prices too low. And I acknowledge that. I do it because this is my art. I love it, and I will continue to do it, even if no one ever buys one of my hats ever again. I’ll just be that crazy lady who compulsively crochets a bunch of weird stuff. My future grandchildren can inherit all those bizarre things that crazy Nana Somer made back in the olden days.
If you are still reading this, I ask you: please. Next time you are at a craft fair, or on Etsy or another handmade site, think about how much work, love and time went into handcrafting that item you are thinking of buying. If the price seems high, I assure you, it is not.
TLC Family "Christmas Card Mobile"
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| Cover of TLC |
How to make a Hanging Mobile using your Christmas Cards.
This is a great idea, and you can get the kids involved as something to keep them busy on the cold winters day.
Don't be afraid to display your Christmas card mobile high above the crowd!
What You'll Need:
- 2 wire hangers
- Red or green colored tape
- Plastic drinking straws
- Hole punch
- Christmas cards
- Red or green colored string
- Artificial mistletoe
- Streamers
- Ribbons
- Ornaments
- Scissors
Ask an adult to help you make the base of this mobile. Insert one hanger into the open part of another hanger so that they form a cross shape. Twist the tops together so that they form one hook. Wind colored tape around the base and the rest of the hangers, if you like.
Tape the straws to the base, so they jut out from the base. Cover the straws with the colored tape. These will
Read more of this article by clicking here
Sunday, November 20, 2011
Two Great Gifts For the People Who Have Everything
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| Image via Wikipedia |
What to get the people who have everything?
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| Image via CrunchBase |
Two Great Christmas Gifts: Consider Supporting these two Charities this year -
World Wildlife Fund Adopt An Animal
Gifts Range from $ 25 - $250.00 One Time Donation and the minimal donation your Gift Recipient will receive:
- 5" x 7" formal adoption certificate
- 5" x 7" full-color photo of your species
- Species spotlight card, full of fascinating information about the animal
- Personalized acknowledgment letter to your gift recipient.See sample letter
If you provide an email address for the gift recipient, they will also receive the
following Bonus Online Premiums
- Printable, personalized adoption certificate for the species adopted
- Computer desktop Images of the adopted animal
- Instant messenger icons of the adopted animal
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| Image by Octavio Rojas via Flickr |
A Message from the Founder:
Google might have close to a million servers. Yahoo has something like 13,000 staff. We have 679 servers and 95 staff.
Wikipedia is the #5 site on the web and serves 450 million different people every month – with billions of page views.
Commerce is fine. Advertising is not evil. But it doesn't belong here. Not in Wikipedia.
Wikipedia is something special. It is like a library or a public park. It is like a temple for the mind. It is a place we can all go to think, to learn, to share our knowledge with others. When I founded Wikipedia, I could have made it into a for-profit company with advertising banners, but I decided to do something different. We’ve worked hard over the years to keep it lean and tight. We fulfill our mission, and leave waste to others.
If everyone reading this donated $5, we would only have to fundraise for one day a year. But not everyone can or will donate. And that's fine. Each year just enough people decide to give.
This year, please consider making a donation of $5, $20, $50 or whatever you can to protect and sustain Wikipedia.
Thanks,
Jimmy Wales
Wikipedia Founder
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The above has been brought to you from the original Wikipedia Site, under the GNU Licensing Agreements, share and share alike!
I feel the Wikipedia is the best online resource for finding information, and think about it, before we had Wikipedia we had "Encyclopaedia's" which I remember were very expensive, and then you had to get a new one each year to supplement the current volume. I just can't stress how important the Wikipedia is.
And look at all these great images on this post, that's right, all from Wikipedia - well, most. ~eo
AND BOTH ARE TAX DEDUCTIBLE GIFTS
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