How Much to Charge for Crochet Items, Blankets and Baby Blankets

October 21, 2026 · Selling products and running the numbers

To work out how much to charge for crochet items, set an hourly floor from the year you want, time the item from a sample you stitch yourself, then price it as its hours at that floor plus the yarn and notions it uses. In the illustrative example below the floor is $27.05 an hour, a scarf of 5.5 hours comes to $166.55, and a 30 x 36 inch baby blanket of 23.5 hours comes to $664.47. Those are price floors: the least each item can sell for and still pay the maker and the business.

None of these are market prices. The income, costs, yarn, stitching speed and fees belong to one made-up maker. Weigh your own items, time your own stitches and use your own figures.

The crochet pricing formula

floor rate   = (income / (1 - tax set-aside) + business costs)
               / crochet hours a year that items pay for
item hours   = (stitches / your stitches a minute + finishing minutes) / 60
materials    = yarn used x (1 + yarn shipping share) + notions
price floor  = item hours x floor rate + materials

Step 1: what an hour of crochet has to earn

The example maker wants $12,000 a year kept and crochets 15 hours a week. 10% of those hours go to swatches, samples and ripping back, which no item pays for. Admin and selling are real hours too, but no buyer pays for them directly.

Divide the year by every crochet hour, ignoring the unpaid samples, and the answer is $24.35, short of the floor. Of the 1,012 hours the maker works in a year, only 621 are paid by an item, 61%. So the income works out to just $11.86 for each hour worked, while the floor a paid crochet hour must earn is $27.05. The same split is worked through in the freelance hourly rate calculator.

Step 2: the yarn in one item

Weigh the finished item on a kitchen scale; the ball band gives the rest. The example scarf weighs 180 g, made from 100 g skeins of 200 yards at $8.50 each. Yardage follows weight, so the scarf uses 360 yards, $15.30 of yarn. Adding 8% for shipping and tax on the yarn order and $1.25 of notions and tags gives $17.77 of materials.

That prices only the yarn the scarf used. It took 2 skeins, leaving 40 yards over. If those leftovers will not go into another item, charge for the whole skeins instead: $19.61.

Step 3: time the item from your own sample

Work a sample in the item’s stitch and clock it. The example maker did 300 stitches in 15 minutes, 20 a minute. At $27.05 an hour, each stitch is worth $0.0225.

Time is 89% of that price. Rows in different stitches can be timed as separate samples and their minutes added.

How much to charge for a crochet blanket

A blanket is too big to time whole before you quote it, so scale up from a swatch. The example swatch is 6 x 6 inches, used 14 yards and took 40 minutes. A 30 x 36 inch baby blanket is 1,080 square inches, the area of 30 swatches, so it needs 30 times the yarn and the minutes, plus a 10% allowance for the border and joins, plus 1.5 hours of finishing.

Materials here are the whole skeins bought, with the same 8% shipping share and $1.25 of notions as the scarf. The larger blanket is 2.78 times the area and its price floor follows the hours: 62.6 of them against 23.5.

How much to charge for a crochet baby blanket, as a custom order

Custom orders add time that a stock item does not have. Say a buyer orders 2 of the baby blankets above, in a pattern bought for $6.00:

• Pattern: $6.00 spread over the 5 items the maker expects to make from it, $1.20 each.
• Learning: 2 extra hours on the first one, spread the same way, $10.82 each.
• Design: 1.5 hours of messages and color choices for this order, $40.58.
• Rush: 15% added, because the buyer wants it by a set date.

The order comes to $1,393.56 before the rush and $1,602.59 after it. With 50% taken up front, that is $801.29 at the start and $801.30 on delivery. Check the pattern’s own terms on selling finished items.

The insight: price the hours, not the yarn

A price set as a multiple of the yarn cost tracks the wrong input. The scarf’s floor is 9.4 times its materials; the baby blanket’s is 23.1 times its materials. No single multiple fits both. Three times the scarf’s materials would be $53.31, $113.24 short of its floor.

Time is 89% of the scarf’s price and 96% of the blanket’s. That is why your timed sample moves the price more than your yarn receipt does: get the stitches a minute right first.

Did the scarf pay? Checking a sale

Say the scarf sold for $120, plus $6.00 shipping the buyer paid. The maker paid $7.20 postage, $1.10 for packaging, and a 6.5% platform and card fee on item plus shipping, $8.19, taken from the maker’s own statement. After those and the $17.77 of materials, $91.74 is left: $16.68 for each hour of making, below the $27.05 floor. The price that pays exactly the floor is $181.00. If your fees are on a platform statement, the Etsy fee calculator post shows how to read them off line by line.

Business costs and the unpaid sample hours are already inside the floor, so this check subtracts only the costs that came with the sale.

How these were calculated

The floor rate is income divided by (1 minus the tax set-aside share), plus business costs, divided by crochet hours a week x (1 minus the unpaid share) x working weeks. Yarn used is the item’s weight over the skein’s weight x the skein’s yards, priced at the skein price per yard. Item hours are stitches over stitches a minute, plus finishing, over 60. A blanket’s yarn and minutes are the swatch’s, scaled by area and the border allowance. Every figure was computed twice, once by the code behind the product below and once by an independent program that adds the paid hours up week by week, counts skeins one at a time and prices the scarf stitch by stitch, and the two agree to the cent. All inputs are illustrative, not market prices or measured stitching speeds. None of this is financial, legal or tax advice.

To run this on your own year, yarn and stitches, the pack below has eight linked calculators, including market booth and class pricing, so a change to your floor flows through every price.