Community Supported Patterns
Knitting patterns are indulgences, not necessities, but small indulgences can be surprisingly important! Alas, lots of folks don’t have room in the budget for indulgences right now. And I’d like to help!
But writing patterns is my job and how I pay my bills. It isn’t free (I spend tens of thousands of dollars a year on running this business). It isn’t quick (each pattern takes dozens of hours of work). And it’s totally reasonable for me to be paid for my work. But I have an idea!
I can afford to give away a handful of copies of new patterns as they come out. To supplement the copies I give away, I’ve created a pay-what-you-like listing on my payhip shop so folks with extra room in their budget can buy additional copies for folks who need them.
As each new pattern comes out, I see how many community supported copies have been donated, add those to the copies I’m giving away, and set up a code for that many free downloads of the new pattern. Information about those codes and how to use them goes to the mailing list when new patterns come out.
If you want a particular pattern and it’s not in your budget, you’re welcome to use one of the codes. If you want to help provide patterns for someone else, you can do that through that payhip listing.
You can donate a community supported pattern or sign up for the mailing list below.
Potential Problems
I’ve been doing this for several months now, and so far it’s gone very well!
My biggest concern was that I’d get a lot of nasty messages about how quickly the individual pattern codes get used (that’s happened in the past when I tried something similar, and it’s tremendously disheartening). It took time and work to set this up, and it takes ongoing time and work to manage it as each pattern comes out. And in the past, it felt pretty awful to get nasty messages saying I wasn’t doing enough.
So when I set this up, I did the really awkward thing where I just said ‘hey, comments like that hurt my feelings and make me not want to do this, please don’t.’ And so far it’s working, which is kind of amazing! If that changes (or if we run into problems with folks posting the codes on free pattern sites or people stop participating), I’ll have do something different. But so far, everyone is totally playing nice and I think this is working well for everyone!
Mailing List
Want to hear when a new pattern comes out or something fun is going on? Sign up below!
Patreon
Want to support the content I create, get nifty bonus material for some of my favorite patterns, or get every new release delivered right to your inbox? Head over to patreon and sign up!