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So if any of you don’t know, I make costumes for a living. I specialize in mascots/fursuits. It’s been really rough this year, since luxury stuff like that is the first thing to go when people are feeling the pinch, but I’ve been coping. I love doing this, and I’m not going to give up on it if it’s at all possible.
Anyhow, that’s not the point. That’s just the intro.
Today I got an e-mail from a customer. He’s buying a basic costume set, fuzzy gloves, fuzzy slippers, a tail, and a set of ears on a headband. When we started discussing this I told him that ears cost $20.
The e-mail says that he wanted to ask if the ears he was getting were the super-realistic ones mentioned on my website, the ones where I hair the ear rims individually, one hair at a time. Then he said that he assumed they were, for $20 but had just wanted to make sure!
This is stupid, firstly, because the one place they’re mentioned on my web site is the place where I say doing a full costume to that level of detail costs several hundred extra. So why on earth would one assume that doing it on some random individual part doesn’t?
But secondly, and this is the pet peeve, WHY on earth does he think that I’m going to spend most of a day placing hundreds and hundreds of individual fibers by hand for twenty flipping bucks?!
And this kind of thing happens all the time! People look at my pricing, and they make snide comments about how I must really be rolling in the dough! ARGH! Yes, a full mascot suit is $1,200. Yes, I realize that’s a lot of money, but that suit takes me most of a month, and costs me $300-odd in supplies, so I am getting $900 for my entire month’s income, you dip and I have to LIVE on that! That isn’t money I get to spend on silly fluff, that’s the money I pay my rent with and buy food with and some months I barely have enough to do that! Of course most months I do a few plushes and a bunch of tails and so on, so I have a little more, but seriously I have never made more than around $1,500 a month. You just try living on that and see how well you do!
Grrrrr.
That just drives me crazy and I hate it. I’m scraping along, practically dirt poor, and these people who HAVE hundreds of dollars to buy stupid frivolous stuff like costumes with sneer at me for how much I charge, because they don’t even take ten seconds to think about how much work goes into something like that!
So that’s my pet peeve. What’s yours?
My pet peevs….
“Hi, I’d like a caeser salad please.”
“Great! What kind of dressing do you want on that? We have french, italian, blue cheese, thousand island and caeser.”
“Duhhh, I think I’ll take the caeser….”
Second pet peev…
The flagman in a ‘construction zone’ waving me through. Now, this is only when I’m on a back road with no other cars in sight and no other traveling options…..Sometime I may stop and roll down my window and ask exactly where else would I go??
That’s horribly frustrating. I’m so sorry that you have to put up with people’s bad manners and snide comments… alot of folk don’t realize the amount of time and effort and cost that go into costumes, especially those that are period pieces or things like mascots. My biggest peeve was always the women who couldn’t understand the need for corsetry and hoops under certain era’s styles. The undergarment gives you the correct sillouette, not the dress that tops it all… Hang in there. Hopefully things will pick up soon.
twindragonsmum
tdm
I hear you on the fursuit stuff SPark. I know how much work goes into them from doing the very small amount I’ve done and they are painstaking!!! Honestly, you offer a very fair price for your services. The same goes for PYOs which gets to my pet peeve…
I am probably one of the most ANAL painters on the planet. There are times I even can look at real professional painters work and roll my eyes at the obscure details that are overlooked simply because you assume the peron who will be getting the piece won’t notice or care, or don’t seem to care enough themselves to bother with such a minute detail. Many people think I’m overpriced, but you get what you pay for. When you flip over a PYO of mine. there is not one nook of white area unpainted, not one feather not perfectly within the detail lines, or a paw pad or claw not completely painted to the wic. These are the obscure things that most people don’t notice, but crazy obsessive complusive people like me have to catch or else it doesn’t meet my personal standards for my customer. I spend an exaspertaing amount of time on each PYO I paint because of this. Hence why I can’t seem to ever crank them out on a frequent basis.
*shrug* I don’t mind it. I just get irritated when people complain about it all the time but want perfect results in the meantime. I can say, despite the cost I’ve never had an unsatisfied customer. 😉
That’s just a professional peeve, nothing too serious. You know what really gets me?
Working 2 jobs and then dragging my exhausted behind home, walking in the door and seeing my boyfriend sinking deeper into the couch playing video games and then complaining he’s hungry. LOL!
This really only irritates me when I left a clean house of course and now it’s trashed with dishes and laundry scattered around the rooms and animals whining cause their food and water dishes are empty. GROWL!!!
Got a busted Windstone?
drag0nfeathersdesign@gmail.com
*OPEN for repairs**SEEKING GRAILS*
Arc-en-ciel Emperor
Siphlophis Male Dragon
Calypso Hatching Empress
Ivory Moss Sitting Baby Kirin
Tattoo Mother Kirin
Emerald Tabby Male Griffin
Tie Dye + Orion Hatching Royalty
Indigo Rockfish + Flame Tabby Little Rock Dragons
Dragon Quail + Obsidian Frost Old Warriors
Betta Sun Dragon + Male Dragon
Dreamscape, Orion, Poison Dart, Fireberry, Spangler + Tigerberry DragonsGah…how dense do you have to be to assume someone wants $20 for hours of painfully tedious work? Makes me wonder if some people just choose to not engage their brains at all.
My current biggest pet peeve…or peeves…are my two younger sisters. Right now I’ve apparently earned myself their scorn…I haven’t the faintest clue how or why, and of course they aren’t going to tell me what’s wrong. They’ll just continue to stop speaking when I enter the room, glare at me and sneer answers to my questions, then whisper intensely the second I leave. They’re also making a big show of being exta-chummy with one another, just so I know they’re really pissed at me.
Sad part is, they’re 21 and 18. Aren’t we a little old for this stupidity? Grr… 👿
I’m with you. Same thing happens for the furry artists, the fans whine about paying $35 for an original piece, hello, that piece took at least 12 hours to do, just time alone means the artist is getting less than $3 an hour! Add in supplies, etc…they aren’t getting squat for painting/drawing your custom commissioned art.
And yet they still complain that that is too high! To those people I say, fine, draw your own character then!
No one seems to be willing to break it down into the time it takes, then figure in an hourly rate. Would they work for someone for less than $3 hour?? Most would not, yet they expect us artists to, and complain when we ask for more.
So I can understand what you are talking about.
BTW…what would it take to do a dragon suit? My best friend has wanted one for years, and I would like to see if there was a way we could do a payment plan so we could make him one. It would be a bit complicated since it would need wings, and no, I do not want a discount. Email me and we can talk about it a bit.
Kyrin
My professional pet peeve is at conventions. Sometimes I get people who come up and want to bargain for Windstones or the fairies and other statues I sell. I already sell Windstones for as low as I’m supposed to. And I sell the other stuff for lower than the original companies sell them for retail on their online site. And these people want an even better deal! I’m already giving them one. And they don’t have to pay shipping.
It’s very satisfying though when I sell something for what I ask for it and then have someone come back on the last day and offer me a lower price for the item. I can then say, “No. I’ve already sold it for full price.” Nyah-nyah. OK, I don’t say the nyah-nyah part, but I sure think it. 😛
I had another seller (not a Windstone seller) offer to trade me greeting cards and puzzles for a Windstone Trio of Cats once. I can’t believe she even had enough cards and puzzles at her table to cover the value of the piece. Not that I wanted any of them…
Ok. Sorry. That’s my peeve.
Spark, I remember you posting about this before, and because of it, I now pay a lot more attention to the work that goes into any piece of art, whether it’s painting, jewelery or whatever. I look at it and try to imagine the time needed to do it. Most of the time, I think “It’s a fair price” (like the PYOs I get), once in a while, I think “Wow, I’m getting a deal!” (like this hand-made bracelet I bought) and once in a while, I think “That’s too much for this amount of work” (like this really simple necklace I got). So thanks for the reminder.
Drag0n, I’m as anal as you are. I do flip around my PYOs to nitpick at them, and I flip around the ones I get!
My professional pet peeve? People think that a 10,000 word text only takes 24 hours to translate. They never think that if they needed 3 months to write it, it juuuust might take us a wee bit longer that a few hours to come up with the same thing in another language?
Personal pet peeves:
– wall-to-wall carpet. That stuff’s nasty for your health!
– people who aren’t organized.Read my books! Volume 1 and 2 of A Dragon Medley are available now.
http://www.sarahjestin.com/mybooks.htm
I host the feedback lists, which are maintained by drag0nfeathers.
http://www.sarahjestin.com/feedbacklists.htm(My boss’s girlfriend. 🙄 ) Mostly I guess it’s just women/men who are with a guy/girl who is NEVER going to be up to par, but all they do is complain (B***H) about them ALL THE TIME! “He/she does this wrong, or that wrong, or he/she can’t do anything right…and blah, blah, blah.”
I honestly don’t care about knowing all of someone else’s deep down personal life in that reguard.( I do however feel for women/men who “must” stay in a relationship because their needs far outweigh their means of monetary gain.) I can’t say it’s been easy, but I have done it for a while, and it isn’t killing me. Infact, I don’t have to clean around my toilet because he can’t aim for that 12-18 inch hole that is just a couple feet below the urine’s point of origin, or pick up the wrappers from what a man eats after he is lazing on the couch and asking me if I’m gonna do the dishes, or fight for the clicker. 😈 I have a 13 yr old son for that. 😛 I am sooo glad to be single at times. 😆 But, the downfall is there is no companionship when you are single. 😕Yes, I do agree with the flagger thing too…Excuse me, but why do you feel it’s necessary to point to the other lane over and over and give me a scowl when I know I have to get over there cuz you’re standing in the middle of the other lane!? Do I look that blonde? Or is that an Illinois state requirement? :spank:
As I have mentioned before I am hard of hearing and my main pet peeve is when somebody is talking to me, someone who knows I am hard of hearing, and they turn away or walk away as they are talkimg to me because they know if they are not looking at me I can’t understand a word they are saying. My sister and my b/f are the WORST about that
My pet peeves? One is when people talk louder or turn up music when I am on a cellphone. Especially if they KNOW I am on a cellphone. Especially if I am calling on their behalf. And they know that I can’t differentiate sound to any degree (ie. I have to turn down or turn off music when I am on the phone or talking because I just can’t tell the difference between the two sounds). I’m talking fiancee and roomies here.
Another pet peeve? My fiancee’s mother. She’s a manipulative b***h, she asks him to do all sorts of construction projects when he visits for the weekend that he doesn’t necessarily know how to do (like fix a door to not let in cold, not install a new one to do this, but fix the old one, because it’s cheaper). I mean, he’s not there to just serve her, and she has no right to expect it! And then I ask him to grab me a drink when he’s already going up to get himself one, and she says I’m manipulative. And that’s the worst of what I do. 🙄 Guilty mind?
Bleh.
Sorry about that guy SPark. He probably has no idea… like alot of us, he thinks you pick up some fabric and sew it together and VIOLA!! Ears.
I have so many pet peeves I would seem like a bootch if I listed them all. Dont have kids if you cant afford them or dont plan on taking time to raise them. (NOT talking adoption here) Same with pets. Disposable pets is a big pet peeve of mine. Dont complain about things you are not willing to work on to fix. Get a job. Get an education. Dont litter. Dont think that others are put on this Earth to clean up after you. Be a contributing member of society… most of all, be part of the solution and not part of the problem. Thats enough for now…
Sorry about that inconsiderate dork, SPark. I don’t know why people can’t understand that art takes time and you pay for quality.
I’ve got a couple professional pet peeves. When you work with people you inadvertantly will. But they’re not unmanageable. Nothing ticks me off as bad as this: When you’re driving on a main road and have the right away and some idiot pulls out of a side road ahead of you. You’re coming at 60 km/h or more and he figures that he can accelerate fast enough not to hinder you. Or he doesn’t care and figures you’ll brake for him. I absolutely hate that. Bad drivers are my biggest complaint anyway.Wow! I’m sorry about that SPark! I know I have some pet peeves, but my most recent one is my father-in-law. He came up here from Arizona, and he saw Chloe for the first time, but all he could say was “Every time I see how healthy Chloe is, I can’t help but think about poor Mallory and what Lance and Carol is going through.” I mean, I know exactly how he feels, but he couldn’t stop saying that, and it made me feel guilty for having a healthy baby! 🙁
I know, I shouldn’t think about it that way, but it was how he was saying it. I don’t know, now I feel bad for thinking this way. Am I bad for saying this? 🙁
Money is another pet peeve, or rather how people are so greedy and manipulative over it.
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