Public Service Announcement

I seem to spend most of the my blog posts apologising for the lack of blog posts. Must do better...however there is a good reason - I've been very, very busy at the day job, my design work, and keeping up with the shenanigans of the knitting world.

I want to use this post to talk a bit about that last part. I've been extremely lucky in that I've only published patterns through a magazine that's run and funded properly and where the people concerned know what they're doing - that's Knit Now in case you weren't aware. They are run by the lovely Kate Heppell who has a crack team of glamorous assistants in Kath and Olivia, and an awesome tech editor in Joeli Caparco. They communicate properly via multiple channels, they deal with yarn support, payment and everything else promptly and accurately. In short, they are everything you'd want a magazine to be from a contributor point of view. Collectively they are Glinda the Good, the Good Witch of the North, with added cake.

However there are also wicked witches in Knitting Oz and in the past few weeks a great many alarming things have come to light about the magazine empire of AllCraft Media. I'm not going to go into detail because I've not been personally affected and because other people have spoken out articulately and fairly already. But here's a warning to everyone - research who you plan to do business with, read your contracts carefully and be very, very cautious. For the full story check out some of these links:

PomPom
Dull Roar
Confessions of a Yarn Addict
Rock and Purl

And for the definitive collection of information and links: Friends of the group once known as...(Ravelry group)

And note these issues affect people involved in ALL the magazines not just Knit (Yarnwise) and Inside Crochet. It's absolutely appalling.

In other things that are appalling I had to submit my first DMCA notice to Google as a blogspot user was hosting free and unauthorised translations of my patterns. I can't decide whether this means I've arrived as a designer or people think I'm too small to notice!