SBQ: About Chartpacks
Friday, February 16th, 2007This week’s Stitching Blogger’s Question is:
Do you like to buy “chartpacks” that include charms, buttons, and/or beads or do you prefer to gather all materials yourself?
This is a really good question, and I think designers and shops would benefit from studying the stitching community’s answers to it. So far, the large majority of answers I’ve seen (i.e., a very unscientific tally) favor chartpacks. However, those who dislike chartpacks say they tend not to buy them even if they like a pattern — at least not unless they plan to stitch it right away. I suspect designers who offer chartpacks are missing out on a fairly large market — the pattern collectors — unless they offer stitchers the option to buy charts and chartpacks separately from each other.
I definitely like the option of a chartpack, but most of the time, everything is automatically bundled with the chart — which means I don’t have a real choice regarding the chartpack. If everything is bundled together, then I have to buy the chartpack if I want the chart.
Since I am just as much a pattern collector as I am a stitcher, I would prefer to spend my money on materials and supplies when I am actually ready to start a project, rather than to have my funds tied up on the supplies during the pattern-collecting phase. For this same reason, the more expensive the items in a chartpack are, the more I want to be able to purchase them separately from the chart.
At the same time, I really appreciate the convenience of chartpacks when I am actually ready to stitch. But what I think provides the best of both worlds is what I call a supply pack. It’s wonderful to have all the materials you need — especially hard to find items — made easily available to you. I like being able to buy a supply pack that includes enough specialty floss to stitch a design (and enough extra that I’m not going to run short if I make a mistake; this is very important for a chartpack’s or a supply pack’s materials to be truly useful), rather than having to pay for an entire skein of specialty floss in order to kit a design myself.
For instance, Just Nan and Victoria Sampler are two designers who offer supply packs separately from their charts, and whose supply packs are also of excellent value because they contain numerous specialty fibers, beads, charms, and so on. I collect patterns from both of these designers — but I buy the supply packs when I need them (and keep my eyes open for news of certain patterns going out of print so that I can decide whether or not to pick up the supply pack before that happens). Because I know I can get them separately, I choose not to buy Just Nan or Victoria Sampler patterns from shops who automatically bundle these designers’ charts with their supply packs — creating what amount to chartpacks when I actually DO have the choice of buying the supplies separate from the chart. (In this case, it’s the shop who loses some business from me because they are neglecting to recognize that it’s my prerogative to dictate how and when I spend my money.)
All that said, when a chartpack is in the under $10 range, I will generally go ahead and buy it. It’s been my experience with chartpacks of this dollar value that I’m getting the non-chart or supply items in the chartpack for $4 or less, that this $4 amount is cheaper than what I would pay if I bought the items separately myself, and that the chart and supply pack are probably not available separately. So because I see these chartpacks as a good value even if I don’t get around to stitching those designs for a while (or, ahem, ever), I go ahead and buy them … but I’d still appreciate the choice to buy only the chart in many cases.
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