Sharing

Mr. Mitten here, filling in for Barbara, who is a bit under the weather. I mean that both literally and figuratively -- our current weather is better suited for North Carolina than for Quebec. I should know -- I spent ten years of my life down there. :) It's been really hot and muggy, and now we're told it's a "movie trailer" for what the weather is going to be like for the rest of the summer. Great.

Anyway, Barbara is looking over my shoulder as I am typing this -- she's too pooped to do it herself (or so she claims). :) I'm going to use this opportunity to make a small announcement, while I have the microphone under my control.

We would both like Fuzzy Mitten to be more open about sharing. It's quite frequent that someone asks if it's okay to sell toys made from the Fuzzy Mitten patterns, and though the answer has always been "yes, of course," we'd like to make it more official. The toys that you make from our patterns are yours -- if you want to sell them or give them away, that's perfectly fine with us! There's only a couple of small caveats, described on our new Sharing and Selling page.

We would also like to encourage everyone to share our patterns among your friends. All of the following is perfectly fine:

• making copies of the pattern for your knitting buddies
• bringing the patterns to your knitting group (and making enough copies for everyone who wants one!)
• emailing the patterns to your knitting friends

Everyone does that already, so please do not feel guilty if you have done it before. ;) Most of that falls under fair use, anyway.

However, we still ask you not to do any of the following:

• please do not put the patterns on a website where anyone can download them (unless it says otherwise in the pattern itself)
• please do not sell copies of the patterns (but if you are interested in selling them, we can easily arrange that, too!)

We discussed this quite a bit before deciding to go ahead with the plan, and we both think it's an excellent idea. All knitters are part of a larger knitting community -- sharing, openness, and willingness to work together is only going to foster it further, bringing in new talent and encouraging creativity.

We've set up the sharing and selling page with all the rules, and the link to it is on the front page of fuzzymitten.com. We'll be slowly going through the patterns to add a note about sharing there, too, so look out for that in the future (might take us some time).

Let us know if you have any comments!

Cheers,
-Konstantin and Barbara