Our cabled friends are all set to come back next week! And as always, I’ll make some copies available through the Community Supported Pattern fund.

The Community Supported Pattern fund is the best way I’ve found to balance a couple of conflicting truths:

– One, things are hard right now and a lot of folks don’t have any extra room in their budgets for little luxuries.

– Two, sometimes when things are hard, those little luxuries can mean a whole damn lot, more than they have any right to.

– Three, selling patterns is how I pay my bills, and I need to charge for my work (because let’s be real here folks, if you’re very very very lucky, ‘knitting designer’ gets you ‘I can usually take my cat to the emergency vet without panicking’ money, not ‘I can bribe a supreme court justice’ money).

When patterns come out, I see how much has been contributed to the fund since the last pattern came out, figure out how many copies of the new pattern that covers (always at whatever discount I’m doing for mailing list folks so that it covers as many as possible, always with screenshots so no one thinks I’m being shady), add in some extra copies of my own, and make a code for that many downloads. Then I include info on how to use that code in the email I send out about new patterns.

So the fund gives folks who want to help out a way to do that. And it gives folks who could use the distraction of a new pattern but can’t quite swing it right now a way to get it. And it gives me a way to still get paid for my work. I think it’s a pretty nifty system!

We’ve been doing this since October, and between us, we’ve made a couple of hundred patterns available. I can’t actually tell you how many people have used them (because I don’t check, because it doesn’t seem like any of my business), but I can see that they’re being used, which makes me so happy!

If you want to contribute towards the fund or find out how to get the patterns, you can do that here. And if you work in the yarn industry & want to do something similar, I highly recommend it. It’s been a truly lovely experience!