A new Patreon is looking at the financial side of designing knitting patterns. Interested in the outcome, I signed up
Edited to add some facts and figures. As of today (18 January 2017), there are 157 patrons signed up to this project, pledging a total of $578. This works out to just under $4 per patron ($3.68), which means some people have chosen to pledge less than the $4 minimum to receive the patterns.
A couple of weeks ago someone I follow on Twitter retweeted an intriguing tweet from @Knitgrrl, AKA Shannon Okey. It was about a new Patreon aimed at looking at the true cost of producing a knitting pattern and how much money designers make.
The project takes place over the whole of 2017 and the idea is that patrons pledge $4 per week, in return for which they get a knitting pattern, again on a weekly basis. As the experiment progresses, Shannon will look in depth at the financial side – how much patterns cost to produce (photography, tech editing, sample knitters and so on), what was earned from sales on Ravelry as well as via Patreon, who got paid and why, and so on. She will consider whether the summer knitting slump has an effect and if knit-alongs or other events help sales.
Money and creative people is a contentious subject. There seems to be a prevailing belief that we shouldn’t ask for any, that we do what we do out of love and being paid for it somehow detracts from that. This is rubbish. Creative people – whether designers, artists, authors or whatever – need to eat, and our time is just as valuable as the plumber who comes to fix your dodgy piping. You wouldn’t offer to pay them in exposure, would you?
It’s incredibly hard to make a living as a designer and it seems that we’re being squeezed harder all the time. Knitting is a very time-consuming activity and there’s a lot of effort in getting to the final written pattern. This can involve coming up with the idea, making notes, sketches and swatches, sending proposals to magazines, sourcing yarns, knitting a sample, writing the pattern, getting it tech edited and test knitted. And this doesn’t even begin to cover the cost of having a website, marketing, creating and maintaining a brand etc etc.
I’m very interested in seeing how this project pans out. Over a whole year, $4 a week adds up to quite a lot; $208 in fact, which is more or less the same in Sterling following the Brexit idiocy. Will I like the patterns? How will I feel paying this amount of money over a year? What will I think when I find out to whom that money actually goes?
There seems to be a belief that creative people shouldn’t ask for money, that we do what we do out of love and being paid for it somehow detracts from that
The first pattern has already been released. It’s a bobble hat called Signy. It’s available on Ravelry for $6. So what do I think? It’s a nice pattern, but it’s not something I would have chosen to buy. I don’t often knit hats and rarely wear them. I like the idea of wearing hats, but then forget to or choose not to because they’re just another thing to lose. I’m very good at losing things.
The PDF is nicely designed with some good photography. The layout of the text could use some cleaning up; there are some bad breaks, with words hyphenated across columns, making it difficult to read and which, as a magazine editor, I wouldn’t have let through. The three-column layout is quite cramped. But the pattern itself seems well written and easy to follow. Three sizes are given so it should fit most people.
As the project goes on, I shall document what I think of each pattern. I’ll also try to knit each one, or at least the majority of them, and talk about the finished article.
