Unexpected Sale

Since one of my goals this year is to finish works in progress with my knitting, I finally finished the Bears on Glacier scarf kit that I purchased in Ketchikan in September. The kit cost $40 and included the pattern and two skeins of merino in ecru and glacier (blue). It is an illusion pattern where you alternate the two colors and knit the same 2 rows in each color for the illusion effect.

I made some errors and had to frog parts of it and reknit the pattern. Near the end of the scarf, I discovered that I did not have enough of the ecru to complete the scarf. I wrote to Bobbi Daniels of Raven Frog Fibers to ask her opinion and she kindly offered to dye a little bit more of the ecru and send it to me. After some distractions with the USPS, I finally received it and finished my scarf. It was lovely.

I took the finished scarf to my knit group, the Infinite Knitters, at the local Starbucks and was doing a show and tell since many of them had seen me working on it. It did come out really well. Here is a photo that Liz took of me and the scarf. As you can see, if you look at the scarf head one, it just looks like bands of color, but if you look at it from an angle, you can see bears in ecru. I worked the pattern so the bears feet were all facing the same directions but were facing different directions.

A lady sitting a the next table over who was hanging with a friend saw me with my scarf and approached me and wanted to touch it and see it close up. I handed over the scarf and she then asked me how much she could buy it for. I have never sold anything that I have made so I wasn't sure if I wanted to sell it. I told her I would talk it over with my knit peeps and let her know.

After lengthly discussions with my knit peeps, Liz broke it down for me by time. I figured it took me over 60 hours to knit the scarf and if my time is worth $10/hour, I would need to charge her $600 for the scarf. This seemed outrageous. However, if my time was only worth $1/hour, the scarf would sell for $60. Then it was a decision of whether I really wanted to sell it or not.

After thinking it over, I decided to ask her for $300 plus the cost of the kit - $340. I figured that she would decide it would be too expensive and I would not have to sell it. To my surprise, she whipped out her checkbook and wrote me a check.

You can see the buyer on the right side of the photo wearing an arctic red jacket.

I donated some to charity and of course bought some more yarn....:).