Pattern it to me!

Huiiii, here we go:
As threatened in my last post about my Save the Children 90th Anniversary Knitting / Crochet Hat Pattern Book, I went ahead and contacted pattern designers directly through Ravelry. I only contacted designers about patterns they offer for free, thinking that they would be more inclined to contribute to the project with no loss of earnings involved.

60 emails later, I've decided that this is enough for now. The feedback rate was roughly 1 in 3, so that I now have over 30 pattern donations (there are a few maybes and some people who still need to get back to me with the actual pattern). My target of 90 is madly unrealistic anyhow, so I've adjusted that to 33 hat patterns plus the few "other" patterns that I already had and don't want to discard. 3x3 is 9, so there's a vague connection to th 90th anniversary.

A few designers raised the issue with me that their patterns were free and they would not want them sold through an ebook. Fair point. I honestly never thought of this. Yet I also think that a book collating patterns is valuable for knitters, and thus adds value to the individual patterns, and also that not everyone is so internet savvy to be on Ravelry and benefit from the vastness of free patterns available. Even I only discovered it about a year ago, if that.

On the whole though, I'm happy for people not to contribute, and my 1 in 3 success rate is much better than I expected.

As promised, I'd like to showcase some of those fabulous people who were so generous as to donate their pattern to my rather idiosyncratic project.

Miss Knitta is reasonably new to knitting, having been sewing all her life. She was tought to knit by her then 10 year old cousin, which is just fabulous! Knitting to me is a craft which mostly gets passed down person to person, intergenerationally, and it's amazing to see it passed on from young to older as well as the usual opposite direction. Miss Knitta now designs both sewing patterns and knitting patterns, and is hooked on "creating fabric from string" as she aptly labels knitting.

Jackie Kelly blogs on The Complete Fabrication on her knitting adventures and more. She's been having a difficult time recently and I can empathise very much what she is going through and how hard it is to blog while something else takes up all your thoughts and yet is impossible to put into words because nothing you say will even start to ease the pain.

Finally for today, Rosi at The Soapy Knitter was so taken by my project that she offered to donate as many patterns as I wanted. Well, she's got 3 hat patterns, all of them awesome, so would I say no? Surely not. There's a wealth of stuff on her website which really you must see rather than me trying to put it into words.