Gnomes in the neighbour's yard

 I imagine these little guys looking up at my elderly neighbour on the balcony, cheering her on!  She fell a few weeks ago and mildly chipped a hip bone- thank goodness it was a soft grassy landing. 

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 Thank you for the feedback on my previous post on Craft Fairs!  Maybe it's just me, but I wonder whether there's been a bit of over-saturation in the 'craft show' department.  From my perspective, craft show organizers jumped on the band-wagon and just let nearly everything and anything into their shows over the past few years, not really doing the kind of curating that perhaps really needed to be done to make sure that everything in the show represented the best of. 

Perhaps too, the larger craft shows that have existed for a few decades have started to feel like a mall for those of us who are used to going to more intimate, smaller shows.  This was one of the reasons I had decided not to participate in the One of a Kind Show at Christmas- I just felt as though it was over-whelming people- this massive trade show style building with no natural light and no character.  It hardly seems in line with the slow craft movement.

It's also interesting to hear a little feedback on pricing.   There are a lot of great articles for craft/art people on how to price one's work.  Personally, I have always felt that the assumed value of ceramics was low compared to other art mediums.  Factor in the time spent to learn the craft of ceramics (years in school + workshops + community center courses + years of professional practice- for me this adds up to 18 years), include the time it takes me to turn around a full kiln-load of new work (2 weeks to make the wet work, 1 week to dry out and bisque, 1 week to glaze/glaze fire), plus add the cost of supplies, the cost of renting a studio, the cost of hiring occasional help to up-date the website/photograph the work/be a summer studio intern/make my production molds, plus the cost of the kilns, the cost of doing shows/travel to do shows, plus the biggest cost of all: wholesale, where the shop takes 50% of the retail price and now my $40 mug is actually only a $20 mug that I have to pay all those things with.  Not to mention bank/internet fees, business licenses and shipping/packaging costs, which always seem to ring in a little more then what I charge.  Did I mention that I like to pay myself sometimes?  Interestingly enough, I very rarely have extra stock- especially mugs in the studio- they sell out faster then I can make them.

What am so I afraid of?

I will admit that I find it hard to price my work. I have a hard time not giving people a deal when they come by the studio to purchase my work from me (I'm a real softy on the home front...).  I'm not really great on the cold hard facts when it comes to crunching the numbers, doing the math, and actually figuring out how much it costs for me to run a business to actually make a profit. 

And then there was this conversation I had with my husband the other night.  We were talking about an artist friend of mine who quoted a potential client a really large sum of money for a custom order they were inquiring about.  I admitted that I didn't think I would be able to quote that high an amount on my work.  That I felt I would somehow be obliged to cut the person a 'deal' based on the volume of the work they would want.  Even if they didn't ask for one.

He asked why I thought asking someone to pay me what my work is valued at would be too much for me to ask.  Why I was afraid of making money or making a profit.  And I had to stop and think about whether I really and truly do value my work.  

It's a complicated issue for me.  It's not just about whether I value the work that I do, it's also whether I value ceramics, or art on the whole.  As 'luxury' items that I can't often afford, I find myself questioning the value of making more stuff in a world that already has enough stuff.  I see well-designed, manufactured objects out there in the world for cheap and my psyche questions why my work should be so much more costly to a consumer than that work? 

I can't help but come back to the reason why I do what I do at this point in the conversation that happens in my head: I love what I do and what I make. It's a craft and a skill that I've been honing for close to 17 years and it's something so part of who I am and what I dream about that I can't imagine my life without making.  And at the end of all that I realize it's not about the money for me.  If it were, I wouldn't still be doing it. And that's the catch, the hitch, the dilemma I have with my own argument.  If it ain't about the money, it's most likely not going to be profitable in a financial sense.  If I fall into the trap of measuring success financially, then given my mind-set I'm probably always going to be disappointed.