AKA you want HOW MUCH?! For a HAT?!

Allow me to start with the following statement: You are underpaying for your clothing. Yes you. So am I.

We live in an era of cheap, mass produced, clothing that is inexpensive due to globalization. $1.00 goes a lot further in Togo (GDP for 2015 $4.08 billion) than it does in the US (GDP for 2016, waaaay more than that). A happy side effect being that we’ve gotten used to $10 tee shirts and breaking $100 for special occasion or business garments. Heck, HAVING special occasion or business garments rather than one or two outfits you wash and/or air out frequently.

This does tend to skew our perception of what clothing costs to make and what textile work entails. I mean, I can go to Local Big Box Store and buy a skirt for $10, so offering $20 for someone to make it for me is more than fair. Right? I mean, if it’s someone who likes sewing anyway I can probably just offer them what I’d pay at BigBox and that’ll be super fair. Not quite, dear heart.

This gets even more pronounced (in my personal experience) for commission work for reenactment garb. When you’re used to spending $10-$50 on a single garment and suddenly you need to commission something you can’t buy at BigBox for your persona, $300 for a dress seems outrageous. And it is! Just not in the way you might be thinking.

(Note: this is just an example. More will follow at the bottom that include spinning and using period appropriate tools and less luxurious raw materials, as well as one entirely modern example.)

Remember that French Hood I made and posted pictures of? Here’s a refresher picture .

Hand stitched, hand woven silk, linen, real pearls ect. How much would you expect to pay for that? $100? Maybe $200? Lets figure it out together.

Silk thread (60/2, 2 cones in white) $70.00

Pearls (3 strands of 15in) $90.00

Linen 1/2 yard @ $15 per yard.

Wire 10 ft $7.00

Dye (red and black) $10.00

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Materials: $184.50 (not counting shipping costs. To keep math simple lets say $200.00)

Great! That was on the upper end of what we’d be willing to pay for it, I’ll just hand a check to my weaver/fabricator and — hold up there tiger. You’re missing something very Very important in this calculation.

Labor.

Without this you don’t have a French Hood, you have a pile of string, wire, cloth, and dye with some pearls scattered all over the table.

You may be asking: Why should I pay labor costs? This is someone’s hobby! It’s what they do for fun! I’m paying them to do something they like!

My darling, it is a hobby and for fun when the laborer in question is either A. Making something for themselves, or B. making a gift for someone else by their own initiative. As soon as you ask them to make something for you or a friend it becomes a commission and a job, and they should have their time compensated appropriately. Just like any other job or service. You don’t ask an accountant to do your taxes for free because they love counting, you don’t offer to just cover your plumber’s material costs because they like laying pipe, don’t be that guy that assumes you shouldn’t pay your artist.

Sewing and weaving *are* skills. Textile work *is* skilled labor. Skilled labor with artificially depressed wages. Where I live skilled labor pays $25.00 an hour and up from there. So that’s what we’re going to use. It takes just as long to get good at textile work as it does any other kind of skilled labor so I’m not going to dip the price just because it’s a bit higher than we’re used to seeing for handmade textile work (which, if we’re being honest, is generally $0.00 – $1.00 an hour).

This took 112 hours of active work to make. 88 hours of warping and weaving, 24 hours of patterning, sewing, and dying.

112 hours at $25 an hour is $2,800.00 plus the material cost of $200.00 is a total cost of $3,000.00.

Ok! Lets say we bought the silk instead of weaving it.

Materials:

1.5 yards of silk @ $20 a yard: $30

Pearls (3 strands of 15in) $90.00

Linen 1/2 yard @ $15 per yard: $7.50

Wire 10 ft $7.00

Dye (red and black) $10.00

1 yard silk ribbon $15

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Material cost: $159.50 not counting shipping. So lets say $175.00

Great! We’re saving money already!

Now to add our labor costs of 24 hours at $25 an hour ($600.00) to that and we come up with $775.00. Which is, admittedly, much more reasonable than $3,000. But still way more than I’m betting you were expecting to pay for a hat.

Maybe that’s just silk and pearls though. I still want an authentic garment, hand stitched, but lets go early period just to keep it simpler.

Ok. Let’s run through the tunic I made my husband a while back. Not completely authentic because it was a cotton/linen blend rather than straight wool or linen. But it was hand stitched. I’ll show the numbers for the simple tunic, as well as the embroidery and trim and you can mix and match as you wish.

Fabric: 5 yards at $11 a yard = $55.00

Thread: $3.00

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Material cost: $58.00, lets say $60.00 because round numbers are nice numbers. (add another $2.00 for thread for seam treatments, another $10 in yarn for woven trim).

Fitting/cutting patterning: 3 hours

Sewing: 20 hours.

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Labor time: 23 hours @ $25 an hour $575.00 + $60 = $635.00 finished tunic. No embellishment.

Seam treatments: 6 hours (add another $150)

Woven trim: 20 hours to dye, warp, weave, and attach (add another $500.00)

For the heck of it lets figure out how much a completely hand spun, hand woven, hand stitched, embellished Saxon dress would cost to fairly produce. Why not go for broke? Literally. Baring in mind a Saxon dress is an unfitted tube with sleeves. Not anything super fancy or complicated.

Fleece (raw gotland): $100.00

Soap for processing: $6.00

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$106.00 in materials.

Labor:

Washing fleece: 3 hours

Combing/carding fleece: 90 hours

Spinning fleece (at a rate of 20 yards of thread per hour): 1020 hours.

Warping (at a rate of 100 threads an hour – note this is fast): 18 hours

Weaving (at a rate of 2 inches an hour – also fast): 22.5 hours

Cutting/patterning: 2 hours

Sewing: 20 hours

Woven trim: 30 hours

Seam treatments: 6 hours.

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Total hours: 1,211.50 hours at $25 an hour is $30,287.50 plus the material cost of $106.00 makes this a $30,393.50 dress.

Puts that $300.00 dress into perspective doesn’t it?

But ok, maybe you do just want a friend to make you the simple drawstring, cotton, skirt you saw at BigBox that you didn’t like the color on. A simple tube, with another tube on top, and some string threaded through the top tube. As dirt simple a garment as you can get.

Cotton cloth (1 yard): $6.00

Thread: $1.00

Drawstring: 50 cents.

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Materials: $7.50.

Labor:

Patterning, cutting: 1 hour

Sewing/serging/hemming: 2 hours.

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3 hours @ $25 an hour = $75.00 + $7.50 = a total cost of $82.50 for a reproduction of your $10.00 BigBox skirt.

Next time you want to commission something, and the price tag makes you choke a little, remember this one simple fact:

You are underpaying for your clothing.