Month in Review: May 2019

Wow, I’m way behind on this one! Here’s eeeeeverything that went down last month—it’s quite a lot!

• Maryland Sheep and Wool! I attended the indie pop-up at the Knot House on Friday and then visited the festival both days. I had several designs on display throughout the weekend. On Saturday night I hosted a little Sip ‘n’ Knit and got to meet a few online knitting friends in person!

• THREE new patterns were released: Soundside , Albemarle and Mándame Flores.

• I recorded and published a brand new tutorial on decreasing in 2-color brioche.

• Episode 5 of the Hilo & Stitch podcast dropped.

• All of the exclusive tutorials from the Currituck Sound NMKAL became publicly available.

• I completed my challenge and 3 part blog series, Knit Design in Time, to investigate how long it takes to bring a pattern from concept to publication.

• I announced a June fundraiser: $1 from every pattern sale this month goes to RAICES Texas; I’ll double it to $2 if we hit 100 sales.

OK, I think that’s it! Hopefully the June recap will be more timely.

Knit Design in Time Results: Part III

In Part I of this series I broke down how many hours it took to design and publish Soundside. In Part II, I dug deeper into the number of patterns I would have to sell to cover the related expenses and then pay myself minimum wage and a local livable wage for the hours put into it. At the time I hit “publish” on that post, I hadn’t even covered my expenses, let alone earned anything.

In the last 7 days I have managed to sell a couple more copies and have officially covered the expenses for Soundside. So at least I’m not longer working for free. I’ve now made $7.20, or $0.16/hour.

Again, I acknowledge that this is an over-simplification of the indie designer income and equivalent hourly wage, but it’s still very telling—any way you slice it, I put in 43+ hours of work on a project and the immediate compensation for that work was . . .dismal. You can appreciate the privilege that comes with being able to invest time in work without immediate results—our family does not rely on my income, so the pressure for fast payoff is lessened.

Still—time spent on work is time spent away from my family, away from what some would consider my household duties as a wife and mother (let me tell you, my house could be a LOT cleaner), and valuable knitting time spent on samples rather than personal knitting (although those things do sometimes overlap). Is it worth it?

A calculation that is perhaps a better picture of the overall situation would be (monthly income - monthly expenses)/work hours—but it is not much of an improvement. Using that formula, my monthly wage in April was about $3.50/hour. In March it was $2.25. In February I earned an absolute king’s ransom at $8.75/hour. For the entire year 2018 I averaged $4.15/hour, which I believe is what I made as a part-time trainee at the movie theater in 1996, when my expenses were gas, car insurance, a pager (yes!) and whatever social life I managed to have.

This is not sustainable, which I’ve previously discussed here. At the end of the day, I may need to face the fact that there are simply not enough people interested in my patterns to sustain this business. That’s just the way it is. Obviously no one’s obligated to buy my patterns, and while I greatly appreciate the loyal customers I have, I can’t keep designing just for them.

But if we don’t need the money, can’t I just do it as a hobby?

For some people, that may be an option.

But for me, it’s not.

For starters, I’m missing out on the things mentioned above—family time, personal knitting time, housekeeping (which I could probably continue to deal with). And while we do not rely on my income to sustain our current lifestyle, earning a decent second income would allow us to make some changes we’d like. Traveling to my husband’s home country, Peru, more often—JJ is 6 and we’ve only been once. Perhaps sending the kids to Catholic school when they’re older, which we’ve considered. Doing more summer camps and sports and extra-curriculars for them. Pursuing more interventions for Ollie, who has 22.q deletion syndrome—insurance covers much, but not everything we’d like. We have an entire room in our that is empty—presumably it was a formal living room for the previous owners, we’d like to make it into a library/study, but can’t afford to furnish it.

And equally important, at least for me, is that while I love designing patterns, there are aspects of the job I don’t enjoy. I hate messing with charts and trying to make them work for all sizes. I detest going to the post office to mail out samples and prizes. Emailing people when they fail to pay me makes me so anxious. Dealing with rude customer emails is so frustrating. And it’s painful to watch a design I put hours and hours of work into flop.
I don’t think I’m alone in feeling that a fair income can help the good outweigh the bad in pretty much any job. In a job you hate, all the money in the world might not be enough to keep you from quitting, but doing a job you love might not be enough to make up for terrible pay either.

As I announced in October, I will continue designing through 2019, and will also continue to work on expanding my customer base and diversifying my income streams, with the fervent hope that things will work out.

I’ve put a number of years into design and feel like I’ve paid my dues. But looking at these numbers, it’s clear that unless something dramatic changes between now and January, I’m going to have to move in a new direction in 2020.

Some things just aren’t meant to be.

Knit Design in Time Results: Part II

In Part I of this series I reviewed the time that went into creating the Soundside pullover, and how it was divvied up between the various elements of the process, with the grand total being 44.3 hours from start to finish.

In Part II, I’m going to look at the financial side of things.

The first thing you might think is “44.3 hours—that’s a week’s worth of work at a full time job.”
Well, sort of. Only, you can’t knit for 8 straight hours a day, 5 days a week, 50 weeks a year. I’m not saying your hands would actually fall off, but I do think they would just stop working and probably become disfigured. So there’s that.

But yes, if that were humanly possible, it is about the week’s equivalent of a full time job.

So how much should a skilled person reasonably expect to earn per week at a full time job?

That obviously varies a LOT, so I’m going to break it down to an hourly wage and see where things stand.

The current minimum wage in my state is $10.10/hour; the estimated living wage in my county/state for a single adult is $17.54/hour (it gets more complicated when you add in kids and a 2 parent household with both working, so we’ll just stick with that number; but you can see the breakdown here).

So, at minimum wage I should earn $447.60 for my 44.3 hours of work; at a livable wage, I should earn $777.31.

That’s 64 sales and 111 sales, respectively.

But wait!

Expenses.

Before I can start earning anything, I have to cover my expenses.

The yarn for this design was generously provided by The Farmers Daughter Fibers, so—yay!—one less expense. I modeled the sweater myself because that’s what is most convenient and cost effective for me at this point in time—so no money spent for a model either.

The next big expense is tech editing. The cost to edit this pattern was $70, so I have to sell 10 copies of the pattern to cover that first.

And then, overhead—there are expenses for my business that are spread over the year, like software licensing fees, my website, etc. This is a little trickier, but I estimate that I squeeze in about 18 hours of work each week (probably more the week I was finishing this design!), meaning that 44.3 hours is about 60% of my monthly work hours. So we’ll say it should cover 60% of my monthly overhead, which, based on a monthly average, is $34.80, or another 5 patterns.

So, my first 15 sales will just cover my expenses. Then I need 64 additional sales to earn the local minimum wage for my work, or 111 sales for a livable wage.

As I’ve discussed before, this isn’t quite a perfect model for the indie knitting pattern design biz—older patterns may continue to earn money, other revenue streams may be in play, etc. so the sales:salary relationship isn’t exact. But whether or not it correlates to actual income, we can still get a good picture of the money earned directly from pattern sales and whether it comes anywhere near sustaining a full, or even part-time, business.

Want to take a guess at how much I’ve earned from this pattern so far?

-$14.80.

Yes, that’s negative.

I haven’t even covered my expenses, let alone started earning an income.

You might think that’s not a big problem, since it’s only been 13 days since the pattern was released, but patterns generally earn the most money as soon as they drop. The further you get from the release date, the fewer sales—not always, but generally speaking. I might expect sweater sales to pick up again as the fall approaches, of course, and there’s always a chance someone super knitting famous will happen upon my pattern and give it a boast, but the majority of the money a pattern ever earns comes during the first few weeks.

Not exactly promising.

So, where do I go from here?

More on that in Part III.

If you enjoyed this post, you may also like. . .

Knit Design in Time Results: Part I

The great Knit Design in Time experiment has come to an end with the publication of the Soundside pullover and brought with it all kinds of useful data on pattern design, earnings, etc., so let’s jump in and take a look!

First, though, a few notes:

1.       I was really pressed for time at the end of this project, so I rushed through a few elements that I would usually spend more time on, like photography and photo editing.

2.       There were occasions where I just forgot to start the stopwatch before I got to work. :-/

3.       A drop shoulder is pretty much the easiest sweater style to design—there’s no waist shaping, no armhole shaping, no sleeve cap shaping…it’s basically a square with sleeves. This one does have a little neck and shoulder shaping, but comparatively, it was simpler to design and grade than, say, a set-in sleeve cardigan, and so logically probably took less time.

With those caveats, let’s start with the grand total: 44.32 hours from concept to publication.

What does that include, exactly?

• Swatching

• Knitting the sample

• Grading (calculating the measurements, shaping and stitch counts for all sizes, in this case, 6)

• Writing the pattern

• Drawing the schematic

• Running the test knit

• Photography

• Photo editing

• Tech editing (that is, time spent revising the pattern after my editor has reviewed it)

• Final pattern layout

• Publication (creating the pattern pages and uploading the pattern on Ravelry and Loveknitting)

• Promotion (newsletter, Instagram, creating promotion codes, advertising, etc)

What’s not included?

• Time spent creating and revising the initial sketches/concept for the design

• Time spent scouting yarn and arranging yarn support

Mostly because I did those things before I decided to do this experiment.

For anyone who’s ever wondered exactly how long it takes to knit a sweater, there’s no one-size-fits-all answer, but I can tell you that this one took me about 32 hours to knit, at a gauge of 6sts/inch (although I was not knitting at what you would call an enjoyable pace; more like hand-cramping breakneck speed) . That’s 72% of the design time on creating the sample.

That leaves about 9.5 hours for everything else, pattern writing and grading being the largest chunk of that—70% or 6.75 hours.

Is it more or fewer hours than you thought? I’ve always estimated 40 hours for a sweater design, so I wasn’t far off (although, as I said, this was a pretty simple design to grade and knit and I was rushing through some of it), but it’s still a bit shocking to see it all down on paper. I was surprised to see that publication and promotion—setting up the pattern on Ravelry and Loveknitting, creating ads, doing Instagram and Facebook posts, writing the newsletter, etc.—took nearly 2 hours of time, since those are elements I sometimes consider tangential to pattern design. They are really a big chunk of the work.

I’m not surprised that the sample knitting took the vast majority of the time, but something to consider is how much time I could save if I could somehow outsource all of my sample knitting.

But of course, sample knitting isn’t free—at the rate I pay ($.15/yd), this sweater would’ve cost me $195 to have knit. We’ll get into the money in Part II of this post, but suffice to say, I definitely can’t afford it!

Thoughts or questions? Share in the comments!

If you enjoyed this post, you may also like . . .