It Pays To Be An Old Sew-And-Sew

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At this point, I decided to invest $3.00 in an ad in a local paper. My plan was to run the ad for five days, then renew the notice again and again until I'd acquired plenty of customers ... but as things turned out, those first five days of advertising were all I ever needed!

I received five phone calls from that ad, one of which was almost too good to be true. A local fabric shop needed someone to make model garments for them and wondered if I might be interested. Needless to say, I rushed right over! It was the perfect assignment: Making model garments is the easiest kind of sewing to do, because the finished clothes don't have to fit an individual. The item is just cut out exactly by the pattern and sewn up without any adjustments, bastings, or fittings.

The nice part of the deal was that the store manager offered to give my name to interested customers. So my model garments served also as a good form of advertising.

THE WAGES OF SEWING

As people began to call and ask me to sew for them, I started to think about how much I should charge for my work. Since I couldn't always look at a pattern and tell how long it'd take me to make the garment, I finally decided to charge a fixed amount for a basic dress (or blouse) and then add to the price according to the number and complexity of the desired "options". (See the Price List that accompanies this article.)

With time, I learned also to charge extra when working with plaids, stripes, slippery fabrics, or velvet, due to the extra labor involved.

I tried to work out my prices so that I'd average about $3.00 an hour. In the beginning, though, my speed was not always consistent, and I had to learn plenty of sewing shortcuts before I could really depend on making $3.00 an hour.

For handwork of any kind, I charge a flat hourly rate of $3.00, unless it's a rush job ... in which case I charge 50% extra. (For me, anything in less than two weeks is a rush job.)

WEDDING GOWNS

Wedding gowns deserve special consideration. I set the price quite high on these because they're such a pain. Oh, the sewing is easy enough ... it's having to deal with those moonstruck brides that drives me up the wall! Young brides have so many showers and luncheons to attend and so much shopping to do, it's virtually impossible to tie one down long enough to arrange a fitting.

Then too, of course, wedding plans do occasionally fall through ... which is why I require a $35 deposit up front on all wedding dresses. If worst comes to worst, I need something to show for all that time and work besides a half-finished size 8 that I can't even wear to the P.T.A. meeting!

ALTERATIONS

Early on, as I acquired more and more customers, I began to get requests to do alterations. At first, I was reluctant to take on these assignments ... but I soon realized that such work could be very profitable (more so, in fact, than the sewing jobs I'd been doing).

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