So with daughter's new awesome (expensive) school, I've been doing my best to drum up new business. On the day I announced on my shop that I was opening up custom orders, I got an email for a huge order.
One queen size quilt, four twins and two crib sizes. She already had all the materials and the tops done, just needed them quilted. So we messaged back and forth hammering out details, and then came the kicker - price.
For just the quilting, I usually charge $0.025 per square inch. Which isn't a whole lot compared to other quilters, but still alright considering the time investment involved.
Total for all seven quilts came to: $813.02 And of course she wasn't happy. Said that she'd already spent a ton of money already, and the quilting design wasn't really complicated, you can guess the rest.
I'm trying to be nice, so I broke down her order for her, told her for me to just prepare and do the quilting, I was looking at 120 hours of work. And that if the $800 was too much, that I could do it for $5 an hour, but I would have to charge shipping. So $600, plus about $50 to ship everything. Also that I would be happy to do payment plans, or spread the work out to try and make it easier on her.
Oh no, she cursed a blue streak and said she was only looking to pay $250 MAX to have all this work done. So I wished her good luck, and got out my chocolate.
I don't really think I overcharge for my work. I know other quilters who charge 4-5 times what I do and they love to tease me about it. (jokingly of course, we're friends and they live in an area where they can actually charge that much.)
One queen size quilt, four twins and two crib sizes. She already had all the materials and the tops done, just needed them quilted. So we messaged back and forth hammering out details, and then came the kicker - price.
For just the quilting, I usually charge $0.025 per square inch. Which isn't a whole lot compared to other quilters, but still alright considering the time investment involved.
Total for all seven quilts came to: $813.02 And of course she wasn't happy. Said that she'd already spent a ton of money already, and the quilting design wasn't really complicated, you can guess the rest.
I'm trying to be nice, so I broke down her order for her, told her for me to just prepare and do the quilting, I was looking at 120 hours of work. And that if the $800 was too much, that I could do it for $5 an hour, but I would have to charge shipping. So $600, plus about $50 to ship everything. Also that I would be happy to do payment plans, or spread the work out to try and make it easier on her.
Oh no, she cursed a blue streak and said she was only looking to pay $250 MAX to have all this work done. So I wished her good luck, and got out my chocolate.
I don't really think I overcharge for my work. I know other quilters who charge 4-5 times what I do and they love to tease me about it. (jokingly of course, we're friends and they live in an area where they can actually charge that much.)
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