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How to Price a Quilt Without Underpricing

That $150 lap quilt may be paying you $2.26 an hour. Here is the penny-by-penny math — fabric, batting, thread, the hours — and what the price should be.

MadeKeeper · August 10, 2026

Say you just bound off a lap quilt. Nine-patch top, cream sashing, a backing you almost didn't have enough of. You look at it on the design wall, you think about what similar ones go for at the market two towns over, and you write "$150" on the tag because that number felt fair. Not calculated — felt.

Here's the problem with felt. You already paid for the fabric, the batting, the thread, the binding. That money is gone whether the quilt sells for $150 or $1,500. What $150 actually has to cover, once the materials are subtracted, is every hour you spent at the machine. And most quilters never run that subtraction, because doing it on purpose means finding out the answer.

So let's find out the answer. Not in the abstract — for one real quilt, to the penny.

What the quilt actually cost

A 50" x 60" lap quilt, pieced and quilted on a domestic machine, bound by hand. Here's the material list a maker would actually buy for it:

Materials total: $125.67.

That's the number a lot of pricing advice stops at, and then tells you to double it. It's also the number the IRS actually wants — materials are what goes on your Schedule C as cost of goods, full stop. Your hours don't belong there, and this is exactly where a lot of maker bookkeeping quietly breaks: people either leave labor out of the price entirely, or they stuff an hourly wage into their "cost" and hand their tax preparer a number that isn't really their cost of goods. Keep those two numbers separate in your head, because you're about to need both.

The stash problem

That materials list assumes you bought everything for this quilt. Most quilters didn't — the sashing fabric came off a bolt from two years ago, the backing was a "someday" cut from a stash that's bigger than some quilt shops. If you cost that fabric at $0, the quilt looks cheaper to make and you'll price it lower, which just moves the underpricing from "labor" to "materials" instead of fixing it.

Cost it at what you actually paid, even if that receipt is long gone — check your records or use a reasonable replacement price for the same fabric today, and log it as spent when the quilt gets made, not when the fabric got bought. That $29.21 of sashing fabric was real money the day you bought it; the fact that it sat in a bin for a year doesn't make it free now. A stash is inventory, not a sunk cost you get to ignore — it just has a longer lead time between "purchased" and "used" than most materials do.

The hours nobody bills

Now the part $125.67 doesn't touch: piecing 5.5 hours, basting 0.5 hours, machine quilting 3 hours, binding 1.75 hours. 10.75 hours, and that's a quilt that went together without a redo — no unpicked seam, no fabric run to the store at 8pm.

Multiply those hours by whatever you'd actually want paid for your time — say $20 an hour, which is not generous, it's a warehouse wage — and labor alone is $215.00. Add that to materials and the quilt's real, fully-loaded cost is $340.67.

That's the number the $150 tag was actually up against. Subtract materials from the sale price and you get $24.33 left for 10.75 hours of work — $2.26 an hour. Even a more optimistic flat number, say $175, nets $49.33 for those same hours: $4.59 an hour. Either way, the quilt didn't lose money. You did, personally, one hour at a time, in a way that never shows up on a bank statement because it was never billed in the first place.

Why the usual formulas don't catch this

Search "how to price a quilt" and you'll mostly find two answers, and both of them are built for someone else's situation. The first is the square-inch method that longarm quilters use to price quilting as a service — commonly $0.02–$0.06 per square inch for edge-to-edge work, more for custom — which prices the quilting stage alone, not the piecing, not the binding, not the whole finished object you're trying to sell.

The second is the cost-plus rule quilting guides cite for finished pieces: total up materials and labor, then multiply by 2 to 3. It's not wrong, but it front-loads the same gap it's supposed to fix — the "labor" half of that formula is still just a guess, usually the same felt number as the sale price, unless someone actually logged the hours first. A multiplier can't rescue a guess. It just makes the guess bigger.

And the advice in most of those guides agrees on one thing worth taking seriously: quilters routinely underestimate their real costs by a wide margin and end up pricing under a livable wage without realizing it, because nobody stopped to add up the hours before setting the number.

Build the price up, not down

The fix isn't a better multiplier. It's changing which direction you're working. Instead of picking a sale price and hoping it covers everything, build it from the two real numbers you now have:

Materials (your cost of goods): $125.67 — this is what goes on your tax packet, and it's the only part of this quilt the IRS cares about.

Fully-loaded cost (your pricing floor): $340.67 — materials plus 10.75 hours at a rate you chose on purpose, not a rate that happened to you.

From there you have two honest paths, and either one beats $150:

The break-even-plus-modest-profit path: price at your fully-loaded cost plus a slim margin for booth fees, packaging, and the occasional dud batch — somewhere around $375–$400. You're paid your $20/hour, the quilt covers its own overhead, and you're not gambling.

The market-rate path: the same cost-plus multiplier quilting guides cite (2x to 2.5x of fully-loaded cost) puts this quilt at $680–$850 — in line with what a hand-finished lap quilt commands from a buyer who already values the work, and closer to what your hours are actually worth once you stop treating them as free.

Neither number is "right." What's wrong is picking a price before you've done the subtraction — because then you're not choosing your wage, you're finding out what it was after the fact.

If the number doesn't fit the room

Sometimes $680 is real for your Etsy shop and completely wrong for a Tuesday farmers market table. That's not a reason to go back to guessing — it's a reason to change the venue, not the math. A market crowd might get the $400 version: simpler piecing, fewer hours, same hourly rate. A commission client who came to you by name is a $680 conversation from the start. The hourly floor you decided on stays the same either way; what moves is how many hours you're willing to put into the piece in front of that particular price.

What doesn't hold up is quietly discounting the felt number because a buyer hesitated. That's the $150 problem again, just with extra steps.

Where this lives once, not in your head every time

This is exactly what a batch "make" event is for. You log the quilt — materials pulled from your stash at what you paid for them, hours by stage — once, when you make it, the same way you'd log a batch of twelve candles or a kiln load of mugs. MadeKeeper splits that into the two numbers automatically: materials-only cost for your Schedule C, and the fully-loaded number (materials plus your hours) feeding the suggested-price coach, which shows you retail and wholesale starting points and flags it if you're about to price under what the piece actually cost you to make. Your own labor never touches the tax packet — it's priced in for the coach, and nowhere else. That math is never locked away behind a higher price.

If quilting is your craft — or one of several you're running books for — the quilters page walks through how stash, WIPs, and destash sales map onto MadeKeeper specifically, fat quarters and all.

You already know, in your gut, that 10.75 hours is worth more than $24.33. The point of doing the subtraction isn't to talk yourself into a bigger number. It's to stop finding out what your time was worth after the quilt is already sold.

MadeKeeper is free for 14 days — try it with your own stash and one real quilt before you tag the next one.