Fugly Did It

I don’t expect everyone to agree with me, although, it does sting a bit when diatribes are hurled at you. But in the interest of fairness, I think everyone should read Gwendellyn’s commentary that I’ve excerpted below. I’ve placed my responses in bold, because I’m certainly not one to roll over and take it. Well, sometimes.

I’ve seen some comments floating through cyberspace about my tone, and well, me! That I am condescending, obnoxious, arrogant, egotistical, over-valued, and unoriginal. Don’t hold back! I don’t feel I am any of these things, and I’m not sorry for anything I’ve said. My opinions are just that, opinions, with a little bit of humour (that maybe you aren’t getting?) thrown in on the side.

I’ve interspersed photographs of a quilt I had the absolute joy of sleeping under in Amsterdam in April 2012, while staying on a house boat. The owner said he paid $3,000 for it, and just had to have it. At the time, I remember thinking, “Wow, that’s a lot of money.” Now I think, “Wow, that’s not nearly enough.”

So now, if you’d like to grab a cup of tea, and read on, enjoy.

Gwendellyn26 November 2013 09:17

I think you’ve [commenter, mumasu] said one of the major things that’s been bothering me, here. There are a lot of gender issues at play, and as a male voice in a predominantly female world, I don’t know that’s it’s fair that you say this with an air of confidence, as if we are in your position. 

Agreed. I am a man. I am also a gay man. I am fully aware of the unfair gender issues in our society. I can only speak from my position, but I do think there are some psychological and sociological gender issues at play as to why some people (women, but also men) do not value their work as much as others.

A lot of quilters who sell their quilts do it to support their family, as an additional income; they’re not looking to build a standalone business and can’t afford sit on a high horse of advanced art education because what they created was “three dimensional art” (there are so many reasons that statement is completely false but I can’t even go into that here) …

My grandmother made quilts for additional income, and I watched as she barely broke even. I certainly don’t have a high horse about having an education. I’m proud of my education, and every month when I repay my student loan for the next twenty years, I’ll remember it. As for what you qualify as art, I’m not sure. There are obviously varying levels of artistry, and what people consider to be art. We are all allowed to have our own opinions here.

… Or maybe people say things like “to all of the scrap-vomit, (and let’s just be perfectly honest, fugly) versions of the Trip Around the World quilts that hit the Interwebs last year. Whoa! […] I’m just saying, some of them kind of hurt my eyes”; and then some quilters out there feel that what they’re creating is no longer worth your $30/hour idealistic fee. 

This really hit a nerve with a lot of you, didn’t it? Let me clear this up. I was not implying that all scrap vomit Trip Around the World quilts are fugly. Yes, I thought some of them were. So what? I don’t like every single painting hanging in a museum that the gallery institution has told me I am supposed to like. I don’t expect you to either. That does not mean in the slightest that I didn’t appreciate the amount of work that went into each of those quilts. Hell, I just made one, I know! There are many of these quilts that I thought were pleasant surprises, and fantastic creations of people sharing fabrics from around the world. I also notice you deleted my line of that paragraph that read, “No need to write the hate mail!” Convenient.

Or, like mumasu correctly comments below: you can label yourself an artist. A woman doing the same job, I will tell you 90%+ part of the time, will be called a seamstress no matter how she chooses to label herself. 

Whether I agree or not, WE must revolt against this attitude. I am on your side!

I feel so uncomfortable with you making a massive profit off of a lifetime of work done by these seamstresses. Why do you look down on that word as a label? You say that sewing is a skill, but then look down on someone saying “just” sewing. Yes, you are just sewing. You are solely doing the action of sewing. That commenter wasn’t saying that the act of sewing wasn’t skillful (as a person who sews themselves, why would they?) but rather than you are only utilizing a single skill when you are sitting a sewing machine, and sewing a seam. Yes, in that instance, you are “just” sewing. You’re not an artist when you’re at your machine, you’re a seamstress. Deal with it. 

Is this all because I am a man entering a traditionally women’s space? If I was a woman asking to be paid this amount, would you even be chastising me in this way? Massive profit? Seriously? I’d still have to make like a bazillion quilts a year (and sell them all!) to make a massive profit.Now, I fully admit I have been sewing for all of 18 months. So I would not begin to call my sewing capabilities “artistry,” although they are much better than I’ve seen from people who have been sewing much longer than me. However, my point here was that your pay rate should be scalable to the experience you have, accounting for local wage rates. Anyone know what the masculine version of seamstress is? Oh, and my great-grandmother was a seamstress. 

And, to keep going on your profiting off of the years of woman’s work, I find it so insulting your comments on the “scrap vomit” trip alongs (and, honestly, I’d feel this way regardless of whether or not I just started one that is quickly becoming my favorite thing I’ve ever created: http://instagram.com/p/hHvJRXPk4S/ here, feel free to burn your eyes!); 

Everyone should check this out, because, hey, it’s not fugly.

… because if you appreciated anything about the tradition of quilting and the seamstresses that handed this tradition down and made it into the trade that you are able to enjoy today, you would be able to at least appreciate a scrap quilt for what it is, if not what it looks like. 

I was only implying they weren’t my aesthetic. Calm down.  

Traditional quilts were so scrappy because of the amount of money fabric cost – they’d use clothing scraps, or save up for fabric and use it as sparingly as possible because it was precious. Vintage quilts that you see using only one or two colors are first off, more rare the older they are, and secondly, a sign that it was a prized possession. Being able to buy and use that much fabric for a single item was a luxury! 

Agreed.

By saying that only perfectly coordinated quilts suit your delicate sensibility, you’re basically eschewing the traditions of quilting, and flaunting your priviledge like that is really embarrassing. 

You have implied that about me, I never said that. I think scrappy quilts are the absolute business! My favourite quilt ever, that I made with my grandmother, that is currently on my bed, is a Trip Around the World quilt made of 44 different fabrics of cotton and batik. What is aesthetically pleasing to me, may not be aesthetically pleasing to the rest of the world, or vice versa. We are allowed to not like all of the same things.  

I feel such a connection and passion for this topic because I was unemployed when I started quilting, and couldn’t afford more than a few scraps at a time. When I started, I wasn’t sure on the aesthetic of scrappyness, I wasn’t into it, but when I learned about the origins of quilting and realizing that I was in the position that my own ancestors were in a few hundred years ago, I learned how important it is to keep traditions like that alive.

Agreed!

And, I mean, not only just talking about how insensitive to scrappy quilting that remark was, but how insulting to the people making these quilts. 

I LOVE SCRAPPY! But it does not mean I have to love every quilt that is scrappy.

I’ve always felt that this community is so supportive, and I saw someone whose blog I follow mention that when they first started, they thought that everything was sugar-coated, that they didn’t know why people didn’t point out when there were flaws in what someone made. Here’s the answer: who cares. You didn’t make it, and if you did, would you want to read someone out there off-handedly call it “fugly”? Really? I mean, insulting in such a childish way, too. Your whole attitude about this is decidedly obnoxious. 

I am confident enough in my work that if someone called it fugly, it really wouldn’t bother me.  “Meh, oh well, I can’t please everyone. Glad I wasn’t trying.” Wow, this fugly word really ruffled your feathers! I can’t imagine if I had called them fucking ugly. I still think we could be friends. 
I’m also saddened to see that you didn’t make this quilt for someone purely out of financial reasons. Quilting to me, as I have seen it over the internet, and the way that I’m experiencing it, is such a giving and generous craft. I want to make things for people. I love it, even at a financial burden. Even if I didn’t “make” as much as I thought I should. It’s worth it to share, to love, to give. 

This is my 13th quilt. The first 12 were all made as gifts. I did make this quilt purely as a financial exercise. I stated my intentions long ago.  

I haven’t even gone into your flawed pricing model. Your design fee, as a commenter above noted, is in indeed where you charge for your artistry etc. I think she meant to say that either you should decrease your design fee (or have it a sliding scale on par with how designed the quilt was – for instance, did you design the pattern, pay for the pattern, or was it a free tutorial posted online?) or you should charge more for your hourly rate to compensate. Not both.

I can agree with a sliding scale of the design fee. But it sounds like here that we could both be arriving at the same number, just in different ways. Lower design fee, but higher wage. Do note, I never once stated that this was my pattern, that it was a complex pattern, or I had any claim to it. My design fee was for the idea and concept of the quilt as a whole. By the way, you don’t have to use my pricing model.

I’m also COMPLETELY baffled as to why you’ve decided to give your own quilt a mark-up.  BECAUSE WE AS QUILTERS ARE SEW WORTH IT.

Do you know why mark-up exists…? It exists in the retail world to make middlemen money. Buyers buy from suppliers who sell it to retailers. Buyers mark-up product so they make a profit off suppliers. Retailers mark-up that product again, so they make more of a profit than the buyers. Both buyer and retailer acknowledge that they could sell their product for what the supplier sold it at and still make a profit, but they mark-up along the way because first – it is beneficial for both buyers & retailers, since they both need each other, and second – because of rising overhead costs. Suppliers have minimal storefronts, if any, buyers sell exclusively, retailers are open to the public. There is a reason for some cost increase along the way; however the retail world is vastly overpriced in so many ways, why on earth would you build your personal model on that example? Are you your own buyer and retailer and you’re paying yourself for your services…? Do you have more overhead when you’re the one selling your quilt than when you were the one making it? 

I’d also note here that I haven’t included any charges for wear and tear on machinery, small business expenses (IF this is a business for you) like electricity, sketch book, pens, petrol for going to seven different fabric stores, time accounted for photographing, photo-editing, posting on an Etsy site, the money saved on the backing fabric by scouring for it on sale, the $10 extra I spent on Aurifil thread but didn’t tell you about, plus so many other small expenses that I’m happy to come out of my profit.

Your wage is your profit. Your wage is what you’re being paid for the labor you are doing. If you’re not making money by charging your customer cost of supplies + a wage, you are doing something very very wrong. What I tend to do when I sell things is keep track of cost of supplies, then add a profit margin to that – the amount I believe I should be paid for the work that I did. I believe that my workpace is not “hourly” therefore it is unfair to charge “hourly” rates. Not everything fits into a retail model, especially a small business like this one of crafting and creating.

Yes, the wage is what I am being paid for, for the labor of what I am doing. The profit is on top of all of the combined production costs for that item/quilt. 

We may have to agree to disagree.And that is completely fine.