hm. it's like the wedding industry i guess. if you brand something for weddings, you can charge a lot more for it than you could otherwise. i think this happens with quilting too. call it a tool for quilting and you have a market that will spend more money for something than it would otherwise.
our national fabric store, fabricland, has started to carry a lot more stuff for quilting. they had the fons and porter mechanical marking pen. is there something really different about this mechanical pencil that would justify it costing $18? the local office supply store had a range of mechanical pencils from $2-$12. so i could buy the f&p leads for $8 and still come out a few dollars ahead. i use #2 leads so i skipped the whole thing, but the point remains.
there are lots and lots of notions that are very useful and no one is to say how another should spend their own money. quilting changes all the time, and some of the quilts we see just wouldn't be possible without some of the new technologies. that's not where my sense of derision came from.
but i do feel that there is a certain amount of advantage being taken, and that maybe if we did stop and think for a minute about what we need and what we want and leave aside whether or not we can afford it (and saying i can afford it as a reason to buy it you know?) we'd probably buy a whole lot less generally.
but this is probably more political than warranted here at qb, so i say hey man, if you want to spend $12 on precut little rubber squares made for quilters, the peoples republic of china thanks you for supporting their manufacturing sector.
aileen