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By: Patti Ghezzi for DivineCaroline

I’m flattered when friends say I should sell my hand-knitted baby hats and sweaters. It’s the highest compliment I can receive. But selling something I’ve spent hours making-out of sticks and string-is a loaded proposition that puts my inner artist at odds with my practical, bill-paying self.

How much should I charge? A baby sweater takes more than twelve hours to make. If I charge fifty dollars, I’m paying myself an hourly rate about equal to what I made at my first job scooping ice cream at Baskin-Robbins, more than twenty years ago.

And consider: if I knit something as a gift, the recipient will love it just because I made it. But if I sell something I make, I worry that the buyer will inspect my creation for flaws, and find plenty. My hang-ups run even deeper than that. Knitting is my passion, and becoming a knitter-for-hire feels as if I’m corrupting an otherwise untarnished endeavor.

I’ve also had experiences selling my handiwork that didn’t work out so well.

Knitting is my first love, but I’m bi-craftual. I’m also a calligrapher, a practitioner of an ancient craft clinging to the edge of extinction, and curiously refusing to surrender. I studied calligraphy with a teacher whose love of exquisitely drawn letters made me view the alphabet as art. When I look at calligraphy, I don’t just see letters. I also see the spaces between them, and the elegance of language made visible on paper.

At one point in my life, I made the decision to sell my services as a calligrapher. Sure, my skills were shaky, but I thought my italic letters were good enough for an untrained eye.

For professional calligraphers, wedding invitations are THE primary source of income, supplemented with occasional baby announcements, proclamations, and restaurant menus. I designed business cards for myself, calling my micro-enterprise, “Classic Calligraphy.” I wrote up bids for weddings, low-balling my prices to make sure I got jobs.

My friend Kathleen called. She was pregnant and wanted me to create a calligraphic rendition of philosopher Khalil Gibran’s famous work beginning, “Your children are not your children…” The passage was to be a Christmas present for Kathleen’s husband. “Sure,” I said, “No problem!”

Anxiety about how much I should charge welled up in me, but I pushed it back down, reminding myself that this was business.

Like any professional, I procrastinated until the project deadline was upon me.

Read the entire story at DivineCaroline.com