At my sister's church, a man suggested that the ladies of the church should make quilts for the needy. One of the ladies suggested that, instead, they could make a top-quality quilt and raffle it off to buy blankets for the needy. He just couldn't figure out why the women wouldn't want to donate hours and hours of time and hundreds of dollars of materials, to give a quilt to someone instead of a $35 blanket.
I think some people believe that all quilts are made from cast-off clothing, like in the "olden days," and therefore the materials are free. And the quilters are just sewing in their spare time, as busywork, so no value gets attached to the handsewing, either. And it's just pieces of cloth sewed together. How complicated or time consuming could that possibly be?
Let me hasten to add that I am not one of those people.
This brought to mind my MIL's craft group at church. The church holds a huge craft bazaar every year, raising thousands of dollars for the church's missionary efforts. The craft ladies provide a good number of the crafts sold, working for months in advance. There is one woman in the church, Portia, who cannot sew, paint, or do any sort of craft. But she frequently comes to the craft group's meetings to "advise" the ladies on how she thinks their crafts should be made. ("Oh, I don't like that color. You should make it green instead." or "I don't like quilted items. I don't think most people like quilted items. You should knit something instead.")
The worst part was that the group holds a pricing meeting the week before the bizarre to determine how much they should charge for each item and then put price tags on. Portia would come to the meeting. The craft ladies, who knew a bit about handmade crafts and how much people (who appreciate the work that go into them) will pay for those items, would price them accordingly. Nothing outrageous. $25 for a hand-quilted throw pillow. $20 for elaborately painted glass Christmas ornaments. $150 for a beautifully made two story Victorian dollhouse, complete with dolls and furnishings.
For every item, Portia would hear the suggested price and sniff, "I wouldn't give $15 for that."
"That" being the large hand-embroidered, detailed wall hanging, that the ladies wanted to charge $50 for.
One year, Portia didn't feel the ladies were taking her advice into account, so she waited until the meeting was over, then went around the room "correcting" the price tags. It caused a lot of confusion on the morning of the bazaar and lost the church quite a bit of money in potential sales.
The pastor thinks Portia hung the moon, so going to him would do no good. MIL says they now keep the time and location of the pricing meeting a secret and then lock the craft storage room up so the price tags can't be "corrected."
