I ordered my stuff on Friday and it got here Saturday afternoon The first one I picked to spin is the middle blue. All the names are interesting. This one is Primaveral. Of or relating to early spring. Spoiler: Condensed for your eyeballs Also I miiiight have my first custom spinning request? I was showing the fiber off in a server is don't normal fiber sperg in and someone asked If I could spin their older dog's fluff. Apparently pupper is getting up there in years and requester's mum doesn't handle loss of pets very well but she's also a knitter and they thought having some chiengora to remember their good girl by would be nice. She (doggo) was clipped for summer so the fall undercoat blowout I think would be too short to spin, but spring time shedding should be perfect. They're planning on sending over enough fluff to "fill a 13 gallon trash bag" and added me to their contacts so they could talk shop when it's closer to shedding season next year. I've never spun yarn for anyone else, I'm kind of at a loss as to how to price something like that? Help???
http://thefybercafe.com/TheFyberCafe/Welcome.html i immediately thought of this woman - it looks like she charges $18/finished ounce of yarn, which ... feels like a lot a quick google search tells me that a 13 gal bag is approximately 49 liters^3, and that the average volume of an ounce of wool is 0.02 liters^3 - or, alternately, that ~43 liters^3 of wool weighs about a 2000 oz/125 lbs - i feel like the conversion somewhere is horribly wrong because that... can't be right (wool weight-to-volume calculated here) alternately, i guess you could charge based on like the final yarn product? knitpicks sells yarn anywhere from $4/100g to $25/100g, and my gut says to put it at around $10/100g (also, $18/1 oz yarn = ~$63/100g - so, yes, "feels like a lot" indeed)
A LOT of those finished yarns are relying on the cost of the raw fiber as well as the work for the final product. An ounce of angora sells for more than the same ounce of Coridale. The fiber in this case is both worthless and priceless. It's value is purely sentimental to the dog owner so it's not going to be a factor in the final product.
poking around etsy, looking for "handspun yarn" and "yarn handspinning," gave me an average price range of $20-40/100g, with most of it weighted in the mid-30s. everything above $40/100g was specialty fiber (angora, alpaca), and everything above $50/100g was a silk blend - there are quite a few things in the range of $150-200/listing, but they all seemed to be ... i guess "yarn kits" by this one shop? (each listing was for a ball of yarn around 2lbs, being sold as "enough yarn for you to make a sweater"). in the $60-80/listing block, again, most products were weighed in pounds not ounces, with a few one off listings for very fine, lace weight skeins (i'm not going to call this a thorough analysis - i spent 15 minutes on this) but like you said, a lot of this pricing is based on the fiber - looking at the cheaper end, and when i narrowed my search to "merino wool," it seemed that most listings were in the range of $10-20/100g, so i'm still feeling pretty confident with my gut assertion there were two listings that offered to spin your dog's fur, they link back to each other, and also said that they were an advertisement page not really a listing (custom orders only) - neat data point, but didn't give me really anything to help factor into this i suppose you could try to estimate how much time cleaning, carding, and spinning will take you? and just price based on that? but i don't think that will give you a neat "$x/100g" number
okay this is what I got various etsy listings, some for a Full Skein, some with more detailed info about how they do their math: https://www.etsy.com/market/chiengora_spinning a textile site that talks about what they do and how they do (it's in britain and they charge per gram): https://www.tutleymutleytextiles.com/spinning-pet-fur.html I've seen a couple other things so I'll keep an eye out for them?
Jesus these etsy listings are really fucking pricey... Eta: the second listing is more helpful. Very rough conversion from Euros and grams to USD and ounces, it works out to around $15 per ounce. A lot more reasonable than $25!
as good as it is to get an idea of the prices that are out there, i'd focus on figuring out how much time you're actually spending. see how much you can spin in about an hour, and then you can use that to make sure you're compensated fairly for your time. the formula i always learned was materials x 3 + your hourly rate for any hand crafts, and then double that if you plan to do any wholesaling since stores will usually want a 50% markup. so in a case like this you should be pretty safe offering them the "wholesale" rate, but pad it a little bit so that you can account for prep time on the fiber
My Tour de Fleece 2019 results! I spun a total of 647g of yarn (nearly a pound and a half of fiber), with a finished yardage of 1297yd! This was ridiculously fun.
That is deff something to consider for when I start spinning for sale, but in this instance the raw fiber is being provided and sent back to the provider. My cost is purely time and labor in this instance, since I have no materials or other overhead costs. Time varies based on how fine I'm spinning, what I'm using to spin (in this case I'd use the wheel because that's a lot to spin on a drop spindle). I also have to consider being competitive while not undercutting the current market. Doing a different calculation than what's standard (hourly vs by weight) could end up either vastly over charging or undercutting.
re pricing the dog hair spin -- i'd say give them a ballpark number, but let them know you can't give them a final number until you've tested some of the fiber. unless you've spun very similar dog hair before, you can't know how easy or hard it'll be, how fast or slow it'll go. dog and cat hair generally isn't very crimpy, and wants to be spun smooth and fine, which takes a LOT longer than a fat crimpy wool like merino. but then again, if the dog is extra fluffy, it might spin like merino after all. i just know my maine coon's fluffs spin like angora rabbit, and would take me like 5 hours a skein if i did it in that quantity. (i just did a couple hundred yards as an experiment, but trying to do anything thicker than laceweight resulted in the thread breaking. it needed to be very high-twist, and that means a very fine single.)
From the pics they sent she is indeed a very fluffy girl and I would imagine it would spin up similarly to my old pups floofs (I still have a grocery bag stuffed full of saved undercoat from him that I've been meaning to wash and card. I should use this as an excuse to get that done finally). I have spun a little chiengora on a drop spindle, but I would want to do that amount on the wheel which I need more practice with.
came across the website of the knitter for coraline's clothes and not to be dramatic but this is fucking surreal. this is real ass witchcraft
i geat a headache shaping glove fingers sized for my own meat slab hands, ffs. that is a superpower right there.
