Feels weird that animals can go around building whole parts of themselves out of hard minerals like calcium and various metals. Doesn't seem like they should be allowed to do that
Thinking about how when I was in middle school I thought I was the most original person in the world for coming up with the idea of cave elves in some intense political fantasy story I was writing only to find out that I did not in fact come up with the concept of cave elves and the high political drama of elves bring displaced and crammed into cities and discriminated against was literally exactly the setup of dragon age origins
people just consistently have no concept of what goes into the art they see! like I follow a lot of artists whose jewelry is more in line with your description of what goes into your blankets than your earrings in terms of materials and time (I'm talking like painstakingly hand-beaded earrings with antique beads and precious metal findings, backed with hide that they smoked themselves) and they also get people commenting on their prices being too high :(((
yuuup
i mean time-wise it still wouldn't be that much longer. i also hand-bead details on some earrings and stuff it's still not like... a massively time consuming process or anything. blankets take 100+ hours. this choker took me 30 minutes. the necklace only a little longer, despite all the bead connecting going on there
but the materials cost of using. well. high quality materials is what gets you
there's a reason i use metal alloys and glass beads instead of sterling silver and real stone beads, and that reason is "i do not want to pay for sterling silver and real stones that shit is expensive"
(smoking hides also probably takes longer? although i feel like most of that process would be "waiting")
which is again a double sided issue of "undercharging for precious metals/stones/beads" and "overcharging for metal alloy and plastic" that made a clusterfuck baby somewhere in the middle