About once a month someone asks to buy a quilt. Either they saw me working on it, or they have a friend who is pregnant. The delicate subject of price inevitably comes up, and I try to quantify the cost of materials, designing, piecing and quilting. I am not fond of this. Money is not the reason I sew, and slapping a tag on it feels like
pricing my children. But like my artist friends, I do buy groceries and selling a quilt to someone who truly appreciates it has its own charm.
It is easy for me to forget that most people have no idea how much fabric goes into a queen sized pineapple or Dresden plate (twelve yards) or what it costs per yard ($5-$13). Neither can they know without me telling them how long a pattern takes. Even I don't know unless I take pains to keep track, since I sew while in my
right brain which is notoriously oblivious to the clock. Besides all this different patterns vary hugely, depending on whether I have made them before or they require learning a new technique.
When I stopped to calculate it I was surprised how quickly I can whip up a lap sized star. (ninety minutes) There is still the setting squares, border, sandwich, quilting, and binding to deal with but even taking that into account I can finish it in less time than my daughter
spends commuting to work each week.
There is another pattern, foundation pieced stained glass windows, that is gorgeous using batik fabric. The basket of bright colors has waited prominently in my sewing room for six months as I ignore the dishes to try yet one more pattern in the book. Then I did the math. Each block takes between one and three hours. The top has thirty blocks. Even ignoring the cost of batik, which is no bargain, and the hours I have yet to
put in turning a top into a three layered quilt, it exceeds the hours my daughter spent actually performing her job once she got there.
I still remember a conversation in my pre quilting days, when a friend finished a nice sampler for a craft show. She asked me what she should charge.
"Forty dollars?" She controlled the urge to spit at me. I had no idea, and it wasn't for another ten thousand spools and five hundred quilts that I
realized the ridiculousness of my answer.
When we deign to assess another person's marriage or family, we tread on cracked ice. We have no idea if simply holding it together to arrive at the Fourth of July picnic with edible food and clothes on was a gargantuan task, or a grab and pack. It is not ours to quantify if someone else worked too hard, or too little, paid too much attention or cut too many corners. We have not earned the right to put a price tag on their
worth, or to suggest that they chose the wrong pattern to begin with.
But I wish I could go back to that woman and try again. I know what I would say.
"It's priceless."
