knitting for others

I've been thinking a bit about knitting for others... as in, someone comes up to me and asks me to knit something for them. I've hardly had people ask me to knit them things, but when they do, my normal reaction is ok, sure.

scenario number one: my cook. She asked me the other day for me to make her MIL a hat, she saw the crochet hat that Hermione Bagnold made me in round 1 of the duel, and thought a warm hat like that for her MIL would be good since where she's from, it gets rather cold.

I said ok... she offered to buy me new yarn, but i just said, i'll see if i have something suitable in my stash, i'll just make it from that. I think in the end I'm going to give the hat that Hermione made to the cook's MIL because I can only wear one hat at a time, and honestly hats make me itch... so if said hat wants to go with the MIL, then go with the MIL it shall. Plus I hated making that hat.

Scenario number two: the other day, I was sporting my toast at work, and the "other mary" came by my desk and asked me to make a pair for her. I said that she should just make a pair her self, and that it would be easy. I didn't offer to knit a pair for her... She had said she was going to buy me some yarn and to knit it... I just said, she can knit them herself, even though she doesn't know how to knit.

i think the thing is that i only like to knit things when i want to knit them. I don't want to feel like i'm on a deadline so much... it takes all the fun out of knitting really... like when my mother had asked me to knit her a phone cozy. I did so because she's my mother, and she even helped me wind the skein into a center pull ball, but it did take me a real long time, like a whole month to finish a tiny phone cozy... it's not that i didn't want to knit for her, it's just... i didn't want to because she had asked.

Knitting for money: At the craft store last week, I saw some scarves that the store was selling for around $299-399 a scarf... yes it was on what seems like larger needles and such, but it's really still not enough money in my opinion... What would I charge for the Malabrigo scarf that I made? the yarn was $18 bucks x 3(labour) = $57 USD. Ok, maybe i'll dumb it down to two times the cost of the yarn, $36 USD since it was a fast crochet... but what amount of people do you think would pay for that?*

I should really not devalue my own valuable time.

*V just told me that Nords had a similiar scarf for $34 USD... interesting...