Knitting advice Nr.14: Don’t undervalue your home-knitted / crocheted Christmas gifts (they’re luxury items)

For far too long, I was feeling self-conscious as I gave away my handknitted Christmas gifts. I would say something around the lines “I’m broke so I could only afford to knit you a little something”. These days are gone as I have realised how mistaken I was! I was evaluating the value of my knitted items based only on the value of the yarn I had bought. Exactly as if I had bought these gifts ready-made in a store. And as if you could in fact buy such hand-knitted or crocheteted items in a store. So first big mistake was not taking into account my working time, even at a minimal wage rate. Second big mistake was not even taking into account the tools of my trade (bought pattern – that one pattern or a book, the needles, the stitch markers, the blocking forms for socks).
And when I started feeling less embarrassed by the situation as I was taking into account that the price tag of my gifts should include : price of yarn + working hours + (at least, price of that one pattern), I was still massively undervalueing my gifts. I was overlooking my level of expertise (3rd big mistake) and the time, money and effort it took me to reach this level of knitting/crocheting expertise. As if I had known how to knit socks, mittens, etc. from birth. As I’m not an alien, this is of course not the case, so alongside the time it took me to practice a number of skills (such as different decreases, increases, decorative stitches, colourwork techniques etc, ), it also took me time and money/working hours to acquire this knowledge (through books and leaflets, videos watched on you tube).
Fourth big mistake was not valueing the uniqueness of my gifts. A hand-knitted or hand-crocheted item is absolutely unique. It is not mass-produced somewhere. Let’s recalled that in the global, all that comes in “limited edition” comes with a higher price tag.
Fifth big mistake : underrating my creativity. I am not a knitwear designer. So I can’t compute any “creativity process”, can I ? Wrong! I am indeed not designing from scratch my knitted items, but I am making a whole serie of decisions that amount to a creative process (choice of stitches, choice of cast-ons, choice of cast-offs, choice of colours selected for colourwork, alterations in the pattern, choice of a particular wool, etc. ).
Sixth big mistake : depreciate my gifts by forgetting that they are custom-fitted ! Of course my early gifts were not custom-fitted. I was still acquiring the expertise needed to achieve this. But now they are. And do you know one of the difference between couture and ready-made ? The custom-fit of course!
Seventh big mistake : not factoring the durability of my Christmas knits! There’s the saying : “it’s expensive to be poor”. That goes for garments too. You buy cheap and poor-quality clothing that start looking bad on you after very few washes and that wear out ever so quickly. Not so with your hand-knitted garments. They are likely to sustain the test of time much more than almost all store-bought items. What is more, they are also easily mendable.

Now, let’s sum up all this together : how would you call a handmade, unique and custom-fitted garment realised by a highly experienced artisan? A luxury item! And should you be keen on downplaying your own achievments, can we at least agree that your knitted/crocheted homemade Christmas gifts are worth a much higher price tag than their mass-produced counterparts ?

Sidenote :

As I was on twitter, I discovered than in the US, you can find yarn at thrift stores and that some people feel belittled by other members of the knitting community for using such yarn. This outrages me.
In Switzerland, very few people are knitting and I have never found yarn at thrift stores. Should I find some, I would have no hesitancy at buying it. In the US also, some people buy second-hand sweaters at thrift stores and re-use their yarn. In Switzerland, you will have a very hard time at finding second-hand sweater that is warm enough for the winter. Especially if your size is not tiny or you are looking for a men’s sweater. I don’t why. Maybe people sell their sweaters online or just dump them. But here again, I would not hesitate to buy second-hand sweaters and reuse their wool if I was in the same situation as in the US.
As I have made the case above, the price of the wool an item has been knitted with is only a fraction of the item’s total value.
Also, a lot of energy goes into the creation of yarn. It takes a lot of water. Some dyeing process and wool treatments are highly polluting (read for instance my Knitting advice Nr. 11 part 3 on the chlorination of wool). All synthetics yarns take decades (and even centuries) to decompose. Therefore, we should all be thankful that some of us are recycling yarn to create Christmas gifts and garments. We live in God’s creation and as a Christian, I think this is what we should be focusing on as we celebrate Christmas.

Christmas time has not always being easy for me. As much as I love the Advent songs, baking stuff and such, it is also the time of year were you get bombarded with adverts and magasine depictions of the perfect Christmas that I could never afford. When I was young, this was the time of year where I felt a failure, enable to provide gifts of the same value than other members of my family were giving. I felt crushed. I am still poorer than my family members, but I don’t feel crushed anymore. These last years, attending church has been a rather effective buffer to all this commercial Christmas propaganda. And as I have stopped massively undervaluing my Christmas gifts, I love making them even more. I hope you enjoy your knitting too. Let’s all celebrate the birth of Christ and God’s holy creation!