Knitting Patterns - Again

Following a recent post I want to make it clear that I do not mind paying for knitting (etc) patterns. The point of my post was two-fold:- one: when you buy patterns online you do not know the quality of the item and there is no recourse if it is low quality and two: to compare two different knitting patterns that were vastly different in quality but not in price.

Two things have happened recently. Somebody posted in a group on Ravelry to ask if $6.00 for a pattern for a hat was too much and someone linked on FB to a post written in 2014 by a hat designer about what goes into producing a pattern. I find it interesting that these posts came up within a short time of my post and that they were at opposite ends of the charging debate.

Really what it comes down to, as with any retail business, is what the market will stand. If the designer thinks their pattern should sell for $6.00 and knitters pay that price, then that is the market price for a hat pattern. But if the designer sells only 20 copies at $6.00 but another pattern priced at $5.00 sells 100s of copies, is $5.00 the market price? A difficult question to answer as there are so many contributing factors. Was one pattern featured on a prominent blog/podcast/Ravelry group? Was one pattern by a famous/established designer? In other words we have no idea if price was the only differentiating factor in the number of patterns sold.

From the designer’s blog post it was clear that there were many factors that went into pattern publishing that would be the same amount of time/money regardless of the item. But one thing she wrote in the 2014 post and another thing she wrote recently made me lose some of my sympathy towards her justification of how much she charges. In her post she mentions using open source software. I know programmers willingly make this available but it seems disingenuous to use this in an argument/rant for why patterns cost what they do. Looking at her recent blog posts, she has written that she only updates when she has access to free WiFi. I don’t know if by that she means she buys coffee and uses WiFi or uses WiFi without making any purchase. My thoughts were the latter as she specifically wrote free WiFi. Anyway this particular person has no trouble using what others provide for free while explaining why she charges what she does for patterns and that still isn’t enough.