I decided to take a break from regularly scheduled society to move out into the woods, grow a beard and blacksmith.
I've made quite a few things, spatulas, ladles, knives, skillets. I'm having a hard time selling them. Money is getting thin but I have enough coal and rice to last a few months.
What should I do?
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Blacksmith yourself an axe, chop down some trees and become a carpenter.
I've got tools and I built my small workshop. I'm unexperienced as a carpenter though. Doesn't changing trades leave me with the same problem though? Selling my labor is my blocker.
Well, for one, wake up from the dream that you're somehow in the medieval ages where developing a physical trade might secure a stable enough income for yourself, much less any kind of future you'd have beyond that.
You're a hipster, and you can make cool shit, and that might have sustained some kind of etsy-based artisan cottage-retail business for the past decade or so.
But the times they are a changing.
Unless you have a lock on some kind of source of income that allows you to buy drop-forged pet projects, then you're probably not likely to invest in other people's labors of love.
So, you just dive into the fact that whatever temporary privilege allowed you to pursue such a dream also makes for a good story, and you pitch yourself into whatever industry you might have a chance at getting a foothold in while the settling ashes of late capitalism remind you that you're at the risk of getting burned.
You're never selling a set of skills, though; you're always selling a worker.
So be the worker you've learned that you are through this whole process.
You'll do fine in whatever it is, no doubt.
If you could drop out of society to go full-Thoreau, then this is like remedial shit.
If you combine your blacksmithing and carpentry powers, you can make cool furniture.
That will be easier to sell than spatulas and skillets, because most people don't care about the quality of their kitchen utensils these days.
I appreciate the advice. I'm near full-thoreau. I spent the whole winter without heat. Land is paid off. I charge my laptop and run the well pump off solar. My expenses are stupidly low, I don't need much. I don't think I can garden enough to feed myself sustainably, so I'll need some kind of income. (100$ a week?)
I might be perma burned out on my old career. It's a shame if a simpler life isn't possible anymore!
Start farming, you scrub
Check that timestamp tho.
It's true; artisanship only ever ascends to the higher brackets of income.
You never know how late you are in terms of late capitalism, and it seems reasonable that the latest of capitalists would pay for an artisan chair before they drop a bunch of cash on something they could find at Restoration Hardware.
Seems like shipping costs are significantly worse on furniture. I'm not above trying this though. An oak tree fell down on my property. Maybe i'll make a few oak and forged steel end tables and plop them on etsy? Where-to-sell is my mystery to solve.
Intellectually, I am right there with you.
Have you considered simply applying for government benefits and trying to sustain yourself with them?
If all you need is a hundred a week, it seems likely that welfare might provide that, if you are an Amerifag, and there are many other countries in which you'd probably even fare better.
Forged Jewelry will fetch more money, even if it’s just steel and engraved.
If you own all the land, you could lease part of it to a developer of some sort, if you find one who might accommodate your needs.
Of course, this would require that you pitch your land as something unique to a developer, but there are a lot of needs out there.
And a hundred a month seems like a pittance for the opportunity of renting, say, a quarter of an acre for whatever purposes they might have.
I'm sort of spitballing, because location, location, location, but it's worth looking into if you're so desperate as to post to Jow Forums, lol.
Look for local craft markets or boutique stores. I know a woman who makes a very good living selling crap made out of stuff she finds on the beach by doing those two things.
Good looking, high quality, hand made furniture is hard to find these days and hipsters will absolutely eat the shit up.
Maybe you can start catering to LARPers, the actual ones. If you can pull off the high fantasy feel I'd imagine there's good money to be made.
Welfare isn't a thing for me at this stage. Trying to do the best I've got with the runway I've got.
Maybe my health will deteriorate living lowly like this and I'll end up qualifying for disability. I'm aiming a sliver higher.
My night time delusion of granduer fantasy is to build some cabins on my land and let people who want to make shit stay in them. Maybe like a hipster commune, or a shelter for artists. I'll try craft shows are next.
I could live low for 100$ a month, but 100$ a week regains me my humanity. The land is 45 miles away from the nearest town. I've gone a month without hearing a car on the road.
On some level there's a tinge of desperation, but doing something this dumb has been mostly serene.
Lets see the knives you make that's the good shit
I mean, since you've already gone almost-full Thoreau, then you've probably read this: ebooks.adelaide.edu.au
There's a lot of people who share your dream, though.
You have a community of people who appreciate artisans, regardless of what proportion self-identify as such.
Instead of building cabins for people to stay in, try inviting people to build the ones they want to, maybe. Again, just spit-balling, but the concept of "virgin land" is actually probably pretty rare for anyone who wants to build something, and if you have it, then it's worth waiting out the market for.
I like where your head's at. Keep one cabin empty for aspiring new members, ask that they help build the cabin for the next newbie.
I need to figure out survival in the woods myself before building a community is anything more than a fantasy. :)
Virgin land is all over the place in the midwest!
Your stuff looks pretty cool. Where do you sell it?
Thank you! I posted some things to my gf's etsy store, but got literally no traffic for months, let alone a sale. Most of my newest things aren't anywhere, i've been looking for a distributor.
I looked into amazon, but they want like 45$ a month. It seems inappropriate for my one-of-a-kind items. I don't mind trying to crank out 30 cheese slicers or something for Amazon, but that monthly fee scares me. At this stage that 45$ looks better as rice.
I've been to a few consignment stores and turned away. A hipster store asked me for a line sheet with MSRP and such last friday. Seems a LITTLE silly when everything is one of a kind, but i'll keep trying to jump through the hoops.
Going to look at spring craft shows this week.
If nothing sells by next autumn i'll rent a booth at a renaissance festival as a coup de grace and I'll give up.
Oughta get over the shyness of posting the etsy page atleast, huh.
Been struggling to find pictures of recent knives. Found some old and in progress stuff though. Here I tried to make a parang out of an old lawnmower blade
You've got some cool stuff.
However, I think if you're going to charge that much money you need to clean the finish up on your pieces.
When I first started smithing, a friend sarcastically asked if I could make a shiv for him. I made it out of a screwdriver and a toothbrush.
Here's what it looked like after I silver plated it. In case he went to prison and had to regulate a werewolf.
Well, there's the idea of appealing to a kickstarter or other such crowd-sourced funding.
There are a lot of people who might be willing to pay anywhere between $5-$25 per month to know that someone is able to practice their craft in a place where they can go a month without hearing a car on the road.
Not me. I wouldn't pay shit for that. But I know people, and there's a lot who would.
Honestly, it's worth a shot until you can find a more permanent solution.
You might be right. Each piece represents about 2-3 days of labor AS IT LOOKS NOW, and varying material costs in terms of raw steel, coal, sand paper, etc. That, and looking at other people on etsy is how I ultimately priced my stuff.
I'll keep trying to get faster so I can put more quality into each piece. A palm sander and a power hammer would be awesome someday. Lol
Just find the people on Etsy who are based in the L.A. area, and they'll fucking drool at the idea of being isolated enough to be able to really perform to what they imagine is their fullest, without the annoying complication of human intervention.
I'm serious; you could probably get five or ten people to contribute five or ten dollars just by explaining how quiet and idyllic your workspace is.
>Keep one cabin empty for aspiring new members, ask that they help build the cabin for the next newbie
Ooh, that's good; like a "take what you have inherited in this cabin and build upon it" challenge...
There are a lot of artists who would probably be into that.
As long as you don't mind that cabin becoming the nightmare of creativity that it would inevitably become, then you should totally do it.
At some point, you can offer challenges to people who'd spend the night there, and then you're just doubling down, lol.
This is all very achievable.
Just ignore the people who want knives. They don't really appreciate how hard it is to make a good knife; they just want to be able to buy one that's really good.
I've seen enough late-night television to know this.
I've gotten a mild sense of this. Back before I started working higher carbon steels, a guy I got into a conversation with at a home depot asked if I'd make him a karambit. I told him that if he got me enough good knife steel to make him 3 attempts, i'd make 3 and give him the one he like the most for free.
I was trying to be honest about my skills at the time and generous. I figured I could get some sponsored hammer time on good steel.
His response? "Ah naw man I don't need anything fancy. Just fold regular steel 3 times or something."
I tried to explain to him that making pattern welded mild steel Damascus was a colossal waste of time and a bad idea but he just couldn't be bothered to get me 2 feet of O1 or something.
In retrospect that interaction taught me a lot more than the hammering would have.
I've been thinking about it, and I think the pitch works a lot better in person. That ladle feels like an indestructible soup slaying weapon in real life. Probably 3 pounds of pure soup scooping turgidity.
Folks expect to get their ladles for 4$ at the local garbage store, but those plastic ladles don't feel like this. You could win a fight outnumbered with this thing.
You're hilarious, and I don't even think you're wrong. Like, the idea of scooping hot soup at people is something that makes me chortle.
Don't believe it. Most people don't think about where they get heir ladles from.
You need to appeal to the most elite of markets in terms of their kitchenware, and you need to be able to justify your presence.
But you're full of bullshit in terms of the spiritual trials you have undergone in the interest of developing your craft, and the kinds of worldly interests you have foregone in order to have gotten there.
It's not that you're not full of shit, but that you actually did sacrifice in ways that whoever might be buying your things didn't, and the knowledge that they don't understand this is all you ever really have to know in terms of their "overpaying," which is what they might claim before being asked to justify exactly what the fuck degree they might have been asked to overpay.
99/100 times, it's nothing. The one time it is, give them their money back. They'll sing your praises for being fair in ways that actually make it worthwhile, and that's what makes your campaign legitimate in the first place, so it's only all the better.
This is a terrible place. I'm really horrified to be here.
Yeah. People are basically fucking morons when it comes to 99% of the things they pretend to be interested in, and when they start to figure out how much energy would be required for what they want, they basically just nope right the fuck out.
And sadly, they have the right to, and you can't blame them.
But it doesn't mean that they can claim the same knowledge you have as one who decided to follow such an art.
But they have told you that they have no interest in your art.
And when your art is in determining what might make humanity a sort of consciousness that you can determine, then your art is something that they see as little more than little slips of vending-machine paper from the people who they have determined might produce art.
Holy shit, this is like the most self-abusive lie that anyone has ever told, but the person who needs to hear it isn't there.
Oh, well. It's not like anyone is there to contradict it, so deal with it.
I've had a long running problem in my life with working for free. I don't suspect i'll miss out on any customer service loyalty points, if there are any to be gained.
When the going gets tough, I have a bad habit of making my own life more difficult.
Sometimes I'll catch myself in the mode of "If I can't survive with this level of self flagellation, then the world is wrong!" This is a stupid way to look at things.
On the other hand, sleeping in the freezing cold for a few weeks makes me feel tough. When a lot of things are out of your control, suffering you DO control can be a source of relief.
> This is a terrible place. I'm really horrified to be here.
Jow Forums, or earth?
> This is a terrible place. I'm really horrified to be here.
Jow Forums or earth?
...
Lol; from this point you're probably already not going to find yourself.
And maybe you shouldn't.
#humans are dolphins
[you are already not it]
[your imagination that you are it is what makes you not it, and it's basically painful at this point]
[sure, you think you can imagine it. It's a large joke among your experience, but it's really a sad sort of of recognition]
[lololol; you are hilarious]
So, just keep laughing.
[literal chunk of consequence of]...
You have no reason to fear.
It is a place of laughter.
and that is all you have to orient yourself towards.
It's your best bet, lol.
But really tho, how much DMT do I have to smoke to sell a spatula.