Renting a Rug Doctor

My very first job was at the local Pick N Save grocery store. I was a cashier and service desk clerk, and I worked there for....3 years I think? Over that time, one of my responsibilities was to help people rent that little red carpet scrubber machine....and now (a bunch of) years later, I'm the one making the rental.

Honestly I'd never given it much thought. I don't remember my parents ever using one of these in the house I grew up in, and later on they built a house and had a crew come in and scrub everything from time to time. I DO know that on the day I rented the Rug Doctor, I was in a really foul mood. You see, I'd finally picked out a rug for the "den" area of my remodeled studio. ((link to rug) When it arrived, I wasn't certain it was the ONE, but I spread it out thinking I'd either get used to it or I'd return it.

However.....disaster soon struck.

All of those white spots are the result of an unhappy cat - not sure if it was unhappy bowels, attitude or both. This discovery made ME so unhappy I couldn't deal with it, so my husband did, and he was rather aggressive on the Resolve and not so much on the rinsing, so those white spots are not only discolored, but also rather crusty. I went down several times with a bucket of water and a scrub brush, and this was as good as I could get. I thought maybe it was actually bleached, but I decided to give it one more chance with a heavy duty scrubber, and re-evaluate my options after.

I got the medium sized bottle of the Oxy-Steam Carpet Cleaner solution (I opted against the pet formula because the pet portion of the stain was already gone. I also opted against the upgrade version of Oxy-Steam because it was bigger and I didn't need that much, and I was already irritated about having to spend any money on this in the first place.) My total cost was $50, including a $10 deposit. Operation was pretty simple. It was easy to remove the whitish reservoir to put in the diluted solution, and it wasn't heavy at all to pull. It operates by pushing a button to get the water and scrubbers going while you pull it backward. If you don't push the button, it runs as a heavy duty vacuum. One thing I'll say is that if you're doing a rug, you need another person to stand on the edge so the whole thing doesn't get pulled back into the vacuum, which has pretty strong suction. Obviously this isn't an issue with carpeting which is attached to the floor! I also had quite a lot of excess water, even after going over it a few times with just the vacuum function, so I ended up laying it out on the concrete portion of the basement to dry so as not to cause the vinyl flooring to pop up with all that moisture sitting on it. I also draped it over a coffee table to get some air to the underside after a day or two.

The results?

I'd give it a solid "decent." With the comparison of the before and after photos, you can still see the outline of the original stain. Everything feels the same texture now - no more crusty spots - and it's not quite so obvious in person where the problem areas are. Part of the issue honestly is probably the rug itself. It's viscose, and has both sheen and direction to it. It's sort of like microfiber in that you can rub your hand on it one way or the other and see its path. I'm hoping that both with regular vacuuming and a coffee table in the middle (you can see one of its bright footprint on the upper right above, which also demonstrates that this rug shows tracks if you breathe on it), that the rug will be ok in the basement studio. If I had endless money, I'd replace it with something else, but I don't, so I can at least rest in the fact that it's definitely CLEAN, even if it doesn't look perfect. I also wouldn't buy a viscose rug again. This is just NOT a "messy person" friendly material.

To sum up - Rug Doctor = I'd use it again if I had to, but I hope I don't have to! Viscose rug = not thrilled, wouldn't buy again.

It may not be pretty

...but at least I'm moving.

Slowly, slowly, I'm staining, painting, polying. My usual problem with painted/poly-ed surfaces is that I get too impatient and don't allow enough drying time between coats, resulting in a sticky surface. That won't be a problem this time! I can basically get a coat on something every couple of days....and I'm sure it's about a week by the time I get back around to the beginning.

It's a good thing I'm in the mood (sort of) for painting. I keep turning around and finding spots like this that I just straight up missed when I had this color out for touch ups.

I rented a carpet scrubber to try to solve the unspeakable horrors done to my rug. The jury is still out on whether or not it worked - it's taking a long time to dry despite dehumidifiers and fans pointed in its direction. An afternoon rest outside caused, well, a frozen rug. I did learn that you can't JUST shampoo the middle part of the rug where the nonsense happened. As it started to dry, there was a definite visible line where I'd scrubbed and where I didn't. Luckily I'd prepared for such a thing and had enough time to RE-scrub before returning the machine. Long story short....I don't recommend a viscose rug. I'm not sure anyone will ever be allowed to touch it if it comes out of all this looking ok.

As I have absolutely nothing finished to show you, I'll leave you with this. What is wrong with the world. The My Little Ponys of my day were nowhere near this terrifying. Or....vertical. I'm so confused.

making progress like molasses

I don't know what it is, but I am in a capital F-Funk.

Everything I'd like to do seems to be preceded by a whole bunch of other tasks, some of which I want to do, some I really don't, and others I'm not sure if I can.

I want to do more sewing to both grow my shop offerings and to make a bunch of personal things I have in the queue. To do that, I need to finish the sewing studio. To do that, I need to finish the cutting table. To do that, I need to assemble it. To do that, I need to finish painting the bases so that I can attach and stain the top. I've managed to get exactly one coat of paint on one of the cutting table bases. I'll need at least two coats of paint, and another coat or two of poly. That single coat took forever. Even mother nature was laughing at me as she rained down falling leaves into my wet paint, and now it's too cold outside to even finish the job.

So to do that, I need to clear space in the studio itself, but it has inexplicably become overrun with toys as well as all my junk because I haven't finished out the shelving yet, so I have nowhere to put anything. To do that, I need to figure out what to do about the rug so that I can face being down there. (I finally ordered a rug several weeks ago. It wasn't quite what I was expecting, so I was trying to get used to it. In the meantime, the cat had several large disgusting incidents all over it. My husband tried to clean it up, but used way too much cleaner and way not enough rinsing. I've tried scrubbing at it with water several times, but I fear the whole thing may be ruined, which really pisses me off. Last ditch effort may be renting carpet scrubber to try to fix it. And probably drinking a bottle of wine to take the edge off.) To stop this from happening again, I need to actually HANG the door that I purchased to prevent it in the first place. To do that, my husband needs to modify the door. I don't feel like I can do this myself because he started modifying the frame, and I expect he had a correlating plan to do the door the same way. So all that being said....I just feel stuck. I feel like there are just too many things, and they all feel overwhelming.

I'd like to be on top of the laundry situation because not being on my game is spiraling out of control over the rest of the house.. To do that, I need to clean out the laundry room which is currently filled with both scraps of and full sheets of drywall. I can't physically move the 4x8 sheets by myself (probably), so instead I just get frustrated that they are in my way. I'd like to move them into the garage, but to do that I need to either organize it or face the fact that no, we will not be parking a car in there this winter. All of this basement/laundry disorganization prevents me from other issues, like storage of outgrown clothing, what else can or should be moved to the studio from the former office/now playroom. There's this crazy domino effect, and I seem to be the only person bothered by it. But I feel like it's more than I can tackle on my own. I'm not great at asking for help. Maybe it's because I have this insane rolling list in my mind (yes, even more than I've outlined here!). There's an order that I feel things need to be completed, and I think I'm just crap at communicating said order. Plus it's not like time is this unlimited thing, and my timeline never seems to align with those of the people I need help from.

Usually I can get out of this sort of cycle by just writing things down, or talking it out or something. But it's not working for me this time. This time I just feel overwhelmed. Rather than feeling motivated by my list, I feel sort of crippled by it. 

So I feel stuck. And in a funk. And altogether crabby about it.

Some thoughts on pricing on Etsy

Crochet Booties

The holiday season is quickly approaching, and for handmakers, now is the heart of the busy season. As soon as the calendar clicked over to fall, I could see my Etsy shop views and favorites start to double....and even triple. I've been making enough sales to keep me rather busy, but I'm not overwhelmed just yet. However, making products, listings, re-listings, shipping things out....it's all got me to thinking a lot about the way I run my shop and the way I've set my prices.

Want to know a secret? When I opened up my shop, I had no method to pricing. None. I simply threw out a number that felt sort of ok and went with it. I sold quite a few kids hats in the early days, and I priced them all pretty much the same. I thought, well, a kid's hat should be about.....this much, and I held that price despite differences in quality of material, varying complexities in pattern or color changes, and just went with it. I did price enough to cover the cost of materials and a little bit of pocket money to, most likely, buy more materials. But for my time? I pretty much didn't get anything for my time.

Slipper Socks

Don't get me wrong, I love making things. But when you are taking time from your family, your leisure time and your own hobbies....you sort of want something to show for it in return. I don't think that's greedy, I just think that's fair. Ironically, the more complex and time intensive a project is, I'm more likely to give it as a gift than for something for sale. I recently had someone inquire about the Nova sweater dress I'd knit to see if I'd ever consider making them for sale (by the way, thank you SO much for your interest! That was so sweet!) My first instinct was, good lord, how would you even price a whole sweater?! I mean, I can't just say $40 because that's what you might pay somewhere like baby Gap, because what if it takes me a month? But I also can't just say $300, because that's astronomical.

So I decided to actually work it out. What WOULD it cost to make that dress? In the past, I simply searched for similar items on Etsy and priced myself sort of in the low end of the middle of the pack. But after doing a bunch of research, and an incredibly enlightening conversation with the lovely and talented Elizabeth Ivie of Ivie Baby, I came to the conclusion that it makes MUCH more sense to look at my actual process and workflow to set my prices. I made myself a little spreadsheet, and it really opened my eyes. Even for the few existing items in my shop, I was paying myself a really wide and nonsensical variety of rates....some as low as $2/hr. Wow. What's minimum wage these days? Somewhere around $7? I've definitely done those jobs, as cashiering and filing work bought my first car and got me through the early years of college. Knitting and sewing certainly feel like more skilled labor than swiping canned food through the scanner. And yet I was only paying myself a fraction of that rate. And why? I'm certainly much more proud of anything I make in my shop than I was of those neatly alphabetized files.

I'm still working through it, but I think I've come to a couple of conclusions. First, an hourly rate doesn't make sense for knitting. For example, it takes me about 3 hours (roughly - I rarely have that much time in a single block in order to measure this!) to make one mitten. Double that, because most people order two mittens, and we're up to 6 hours. Conservatively, another hour or two for finishing work (it ALWAYS takes longer than you think it will!) and the cord....now we're up to 8 hours. 8 hours x $7/hour = $56. FIFTY-six dollars. FOR BASIC KID'S MITTENS. They're cute. But I'm not certain they are $56 cute.

Toddler Mittens

So....hourly rates for knitting sort of don't make sense. However, an option commonly used by commission knitters is a rate per YARD of knitting. This can range from $0.15-0.25 per yard of yarn depending on the difficulty of the pattern. I can easily do some mathematical wizardry (ahem multiplication and division) and figure out how many yards of yarn I'm using based on the total yards in the skein of yarn and the weight of the finished object. It's been pretty enlightening for me to work those numbers on the current (and super long list of potential future) items in my shop.

Hourly rates DO make sense for sewing though. Yardage doesn't, because yards go by in a snap when you're talking fabric! Plus there are all kinds of other details from cutting, actual sewing, finishing, and details like buttons, snaps or zippers to consider. Elizabeth said that she looked around at what professional seamstresses charge, and set her rates accordingly. When you are selling independently, you are not only the designer and maker, but you are also responsible for all of the back of house accounting, billing, shipping and marketing - those overhead costs really should be factored into your rates.

Even if you are selling as a hobby, it's important to price your work fairly. Some people are doing this as a full time gig, and it would be wicked tough to survive at $3 an hour. I've been working on a pair of socks (off and on) since June. So given the time investment, and the fact that good, solid quality sock yarn can cost $10 on its own, it's sort of heartbreaking to see people selling a pair of handknit socks for $12. I don't think you can even get Smartwool socks for less than $20 without some sort of monster sale! Obviously everyone should do what feels right for them, but the implication to buyers might be that ALL handknit socks should be worth $12, and I just don't believe that's true.

Snap Scarf

 I realized one more thing that I think is key for me to keep in mind. I - and other crafters and makers like me - might not be my ideal client base. Let's face it, I learned to knit and crochet and sew and who knows what else because I want nice things for just the cost of materials. I'm WILLING to invest my time and energy into learning these skills and into the time it takes to make them. I am not willing to pay for someone else to do this (mostly - I do still buy handmade from other people when I just don't have the time to pull something off or the desire to do it as well as they do!). It's important for me to realize that other people would much rather make the trade off to pay someone else to do the hard work and for them to buy the finished object. After years and years of mass production, there are plenty of people out there who actually want to seek out artisans to make them beautiful handmade things. And THOSE people are my actual client base. They understand that the cost of handmade goes beyond the wholesale price of paper and ink, or yarn, or fabric. It's much more than that. It's time. It's talent. It's hard work. And it's care.

So those are my thoughts on pricing these days. How do other people do it? What is handmade worth to you?

Chai Cider, my fall drink of 2014

I chuckled to myself the other day when someone on facebook posted a link to the 25 Things All Basic White Girls Do During the Fall, because so many of them are hilariously true. And in years past, I've been as excited about that pumpkin spice latte as all the other basic white girls. But I have to admit that while yes, I have had one this fall....I didn't really like it this year. I'm not sure what it was, but it just wasn't doing it for me.

A few weeks ago, while on the road for work, I saw a slightly different fall offering on this little coffee shop's menu, and I gave it a try. Apple cider chai....and I'm in love. I've even asked Starbucks to make them for me, though truthfully I have no idea what that coffee shop does to make them. The Starbucks version actually wasn't quite as yummy. My home version, happily, came satisfyingly close.

And even better, it's basically not even a recipe. All I did was heat up cider...and use it to steep my chai tea. Easy, yummy. It's definitely my go-to drink this fall!