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Here's an Excel sheet pricing guide I made after looking through all of my business books and various websites. I finally decided to buckle down and make one because now that we've got a little one on the way I literally can't afford to sell myself short!

I've been using it for a little while and I decided to share because a lot of people have trouble pricing their work - I know I did for a long time and while some of my old prices were close, others were WAY off. It's a real eye-opener, and I hope it helps!

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To use it, all you really need to do is set your desired hourly wage and fill in the price per ring section, then save it. After you make a piece you can then sit down, type in how many rings you used, how many hours it took you (use decimals for minutes / 15 minutes = .25), how much it costs to package if you're shipping, the cost of any extra findings or bits you used (if any) and viola - Your selling price will be at the bottom. While the final formulae are set up for selling through Etsy, I included a "Base Price" for anyone who doesn't, which should give you your base selling or "retail" cost. If you're planning on selling pieces wholesale, that price is usually half of your retail cost.

You don't technically need to fill in the price per pound for your rings, but it's info that can come in handy when you're trying to figure out how to price a large custom order like a shirt. With some column header changes I think this guide could be useful for beaders and many other makers-of-things.

Feel free to play around with that final price, too. If items fly off your table at a certain price (even if it's what the table gives you) you can raise it a bit so that you don't sell out of them right away and make a bit extra, to boot. If something doesn't sell, either find a way to work faster or just nudge the price down a wee bit, but not much. There's a good chance that it's not the price, it's the item itself. I've had pieces (nice ones, too) hanging out in my inventory for more than a year and apparently all it took was the right person to come along and go "I love it!" So be patient with some of them. If you think the design is sound and people compliment it, then you did something right. All you need to do is keep it in the open where the right person can find it.

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Here's how to figure out your basic hourly wage:

First, figure out how much you want to make per year.* If this seems daunting, figure out how much you pay in bills per month (rent, electricity, food, etc.) and then multiply that by 12. Round up to the nearest 5 thousand to account for anything extra (gas bills in winter, car disasters, etc).

Example for Mailler X:
Monthly Expenses: $1,500 X 12 months = $18,000 a year
Round Up: $20,000

Now think about how much time you can HONESTLY devote to making your stuff. Even I can't make chainmaile 8 hours a day, 40 hours a week. Not only would that destroy my hands, I'd have no time to take photos, package orders, upload items to Etsy, keep on top of shows, etc. (remember these tasks - they come into play later)

Let's say that Mailler X can physically work on chainmaile for 4 hours a day. You may think that's 28 hours a week, but in reality it's 20. You need days off in order to keep some semblance of sanity, trust me - I've been doing this for three years and when I started giving myself scheduled days off things started going a LOT better and I actually got more productive! How cool is that?

But back to Mailler X. He can make maille for 20 hours a week. Let'e be humane (and smart, trust me again) and give him two weeks of vacation. It'll account for holidays, travel, and the days he spends selling in person at shows.

20 hours of mailling per week X 50 weeks a year = 1000 mailling hours a year

Now we put that into how much Mailler X needs to make a year so that he can do things like eat and not get evicted:

$20,000 a year / 1000 hours of work = $20 per hour

And there we go! And this is ASSUMING that Mailler X can sell all of that time (because that's what you're paying for when you buy maille) that he spent on all of his pieces. If he's smart he'll add at least $5 more onto that so that he's got a "cushion" to see him through any lean times that'll come his way. It'll also pay for all the time he spends on his business outside of mailling, like taking photos, keeping his books in order, ordering supplies, listing items on Etsy, working on his website, etc.

Sounds complex, I know, but at the core it's a job like any other, and it does require work. Good Luck! ^_^

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*But can't I just use minimum wage?
No, and this is why - Current federal minimum wage is $6.55 an hour. If you had a job working for 40 hours a week, 52 weeks a year, you'd make $13,624. A single person living alone and under the age of 65 needs to make $11,201 a year to be considered above the poverty line.
Granted, chainmaile, beading, sewing, etc. are generally not that hard to do. But if you think your skills are good enough to the point where you can to sell them to other people you deserve to make more than what would keep you JUST above the poverty line, don't you think?

But I don't need to think about any of this because I'm just selling my work to pay for a hobby that I love, not trying to make a living.
Actually, you should. Not only is it just good business practice to charge a fair price - because when you set out things to sell you're doing business, plain and simple - but it's good manners/karma/what-have-you. There are people out there who are trying to do what you do for a living, and undercutting them to make back just your material costs or to make a fast buck cheapens the whole craft.
It could also hurt your sales and your image as an artist/crafter. If crafter A sells handknit scarves for $25 per scarf and crafter B sells them for $10, there's a decent chance that people will think crafter B's stuff is made of inferior quality materials or has much worse craftsmanship. Sure, it's likely that people will snatch up the cheap scarves, but that's exactly why they're snatching them up - Because they're CHEAP. Not because they love crafter B's work or they just adore the pattern of the knit, but because it's cheap. I can't think of a single person who would want to think of themselves or their work as "cheap".
So I would say to pay yourself at least $10 an hour. Even at that price if you make some earrings and it takes you 15 minutes and just $1.00 of materials, that gives you a price of $7.60. People routinely pay more than that for earrings from WAL-MART (seriously, check their website - I'm not kidding). Your stuff is better than that, right? ^_^ Besides, people that go shopping at craft shows are usually looking for something a bit nicer than what they can pick up for the same price someplace on a clearance rack, so bump it up a bit. Set them out there for $10, at least. I'm willing to bet that people will buy them.