I’ve been thinking a lot lately about why I do things. Not in a “Why do I even bother” sort of way, but rather in a trying to understand my motivations kind of way. I’ve just been overanalysing how I choose to spend my time and these are the factors I think it generally comes down to these factors, or a combination thereof :

• I want to have something
  • This is usually what it comes down to when I do things for money. I want to have something, and for that I need to have resources I can exchange for it, but it also applies to when I do things like cook so that I can have food.
• I want to have made and accomplished something
  • In some prideful way I want to impress others with my skills, or to be able to look back and feel some satisfaction in knowing I did something others could not
• I inherently enjoy doing it
  • Stuff like watching tv, and eating dessert. I know no secondary benefit will come out of the activity, but I enjoy it anyway

I’m sure people who study psychology have more robust ways of analysing why people do what they do, and that I’m reinventing the wheel, but bear with me anyway.

Last weekend I sewed myself another pair of pants and I analysed what compelled me to sit down and do that. Part of it was certainly related to my desire to have new pants and get a good deal on them. The fabric was relatively cheap, since it was vintage. $30 for 5 meters of some kind of thick polyester blend from the Textile Museum. I used a little under 2 meters of it on the pants, in addition to a $1 zipper, a leftover button and thread I already had at home. I’m going to estimate that if I don’t count the cost of the leftover fabric, which I’ll likely use on another project, but I do count the used thread, and the wear on the needles, the total cost in materials for the pants would come to around $15. I suppose that’s a pretty good deal. You’d be hard pressed to walk into a mall in Toronto and come out with $15 pants, even if they were heavily discounted. But is that really the right benchmark? Since the fabric was vintage, maybe a thrifted pair of pants would be more comparable? I don’t think finding $15 pants at a charity shop would be too out of the ordinary.

If I’m just sewing pants to have them, I also need to consider my own labor. For this pair of pants I spent around 8 hours spread out over two days cutting fabric and sewing (the fabric had a tartan pattern so this process took longer than usual, since I did some basic pattern matching between pieces). I also spent at least two hours finding the pants pattern, printing it out, assembling the letter-sized sheets together and cutting it out. If I were to “pay” myself the local minimum wage of $17.60, that would bring the total cost up to $191. These pants might be a pretty bad deal with that considered, but I’m going to be generous and compare them to a locally made, designer pair of pants instead. A similar pair of pants from Em & May currently costs $172, which after tax is almost the same price as what I’ve calculated for my me-made pants. Thai might also be a more fair comparison because I know just any pair of pants wouldn’t satisfy my desire for pants. I know part of why I made my own pair of pants is because I want to:

• Avoid consuming anything produced under unethical standards (which makes it difficult for me to justify buying cheap, new, clothing from the mall where I’m not going to know what went into making them)
• Have unique clothing items that help me express my ‘personal-style’

These two desires are always going to cost a premium, or require a lot of time researching and browsing vintage marketplaces

That said, is counting my labor in terms of minimum wage the correct? While I’m currently unemployed, if you were to convert my annual salary at my last job to an hourly wage, I was making over $60 an hour. If I plug that into my earlier calculation I am left with a $615 pair of pants. Based on this math, I should stop spending my weekends sewing and spend all my free time programming for profit.

But I know just ‘having’ my low-waste, locally made, sort-of designer pants isn’t all there is to it. I absolutely get some kind of prideful rush when someone asks where I got my pants and I get to say I made them. I like knowing I can do things some people find impressive, and compliment me on. I also have to admit, while there are parts of the sewing process I find unpleasant (like seam-ripping my mistakes, threading my serger, taking all my machines out and and putting them away because I don’t have a dedicated craft room and stomaching the occasional failed project), there are other parts I certainly enjoy (like meditatively guiding my fabric through the machine and seeing everything come together).

So does my crafting-madness compulsion to make pants make sense? Am I getting the best value for my time in terms of both fiscal value and increased happiness when I do these sewing projects? Would I be better off doing something more directly monetizable like applying to jobs or practicing my live-coding. Should I do something purely enjoyable, like reading a fluffy romance novel? I’m not sure these are things I can realistically figure out, even with my through framework of:

• Am I doing this to have something?
• Am I doing this to accomplish something?
• Or am I doing this because I just enjoy doing it?

I still think, at least for me, it’s worth considering the above just to make sure I’m never doing something tedious, that I hate, in order to save a couple dollars.

Anyway, my new pants are pictured below. I used the Sara Pleated Pants Pattern from fabrics-store.com. I got the pattern for free before the website started charging for it, so I didn't have to include that in my calculations. I made the pattern a size up from what the pattern suggested for my measurements, because I was worried about the waistband being too tight. While I like the slouchy fit for its current trendiness, it'd probably make them in a size down if I were to use the pattern again. I did do one modification to the pattern, which was sewing down the pleats for a few centimeters, so they wouldn't bulge out from the waist.

I am very fond of the way they remind me of the big dress pants of 80's businessmen.