Do you have questions about paid knitting patterns? Lots of people do, and I'm so glad you're here to find out more about what goes into creating a new knitting pattern, what costs are associated with the process, and why it's worth paying for a knitting pattern! I hope you'll check out all the information below, and come away feeling like you know more about the behind-the-scenes parts of designing knitting patterns — especially the parts about money.

Wondering about why people charge for knitting patterns in general? Are you someone who thinks "knitting patterns should be free"? Check out the FAQ below for more information about the expenses associated with producing a good-quality pattern, and why compensating designers appropriately matters.

On a philosophical level, the answer to this is "because skilled artistic labour has value". We live in a capitalist society, and therefore people need to earn money to have shelter, food, medicine, clothing, and access to things that make life enjoyable (like knitting!). A person with the skills to come up with a unique design, and also with the skills to clearly explain to others how to make that design into a finished product, deserves to have those skills recognized, and recognition often means "getting paid". Soft skills, and especially those related to artistic pursuits and those considered by society to be "feminine" in some way, are often massively undervalued, and expecting knitting patterns to be free is a great example of this form of devaluing "women's work" (whether or not it's actually being done by women) and treating artistic skills as inferior or frivolous and therefore not worth anything. Don't be a person who contributes to that attitude.

On a practical level, the answer is "because knitting patterns cost money to produce". There is more detail on this below, but one important point I want to make here is that knitting patterns costing money isn't new or unusual in any way. "Free" patterns provided by yarn companies or craft stores, or by bloggers or podcasters, are still paid for somehow, by someone, even if that "someone" isn't you, the crafter. Large yarn companies, especially in the time prior to the Internet, had whole "design teams" on staff, who were paid to produce the "free" knitting patterns printed on the ball band of the yarn or offered in a pamphlet display. These days, those jobs are mostly done by independent contractors, but those designers still get paid! Designers' work has always had value, regardless of whether the product is offered free to the end customer or not.

The work of designing and pattern-writing has been a paid occupation for a long time, and even Internet Age "free" patterns are often not really uncompensated. Bloggers and podcasters make money from ads on their websites and videos and from affiliate links (where you make a purchase on a site you visit via a link from somewhere else, and a percentage of that purchase is returned to the originating referrer as a kind of "finder's fee"), and craft stores make money when a person buys the necessary supplies to go with a "free" pattern they produced themselves. Even paid independent-designer knitting patterns are not new; Elizabeth Zimmerman was selling her printed patterns to yarn stores long before we had the ability to buy digital copies of indie patterns online. The only difference between a paid pattern and a free pattern is that with a paid, independent-designer knitting pattern, the person paying for it is the person using it, rather than a person/company putting up the costs of producing it, then strategically giving it away for free as a marketing cost to help them sell other products or generate ad revenue.

To produce a good-quality knitting pattern, designers need a variety of things that cost money. Crafting supplies, including yarn, needles, and finishing tools are, of course, essential to make the design sample(s); sometimes designers also pay sample knitters to make pieces for them. To write the pattern, you need access to a computer of some kind, plus the necessary software for writing the pattern, creating the pattern layout, making easy-to-read charts, and converting the document to a format others can easily open and read. Photography equipment (at the minimum, a cell phone with a decent camera and with editing options available) is needed to show clearly what the sample looks like, and some designers pay models for this purpose. Services such as tech editing (which can be very expensive) and test knitting (which is often compensated somehow, even if it is mostly volunteer-based) also are required, and some designers also pay for translations to other languages. Platforms designers sell patterns on charge a commission on sales, at a minimum; many also charge a flat listing fee on top of that. Plus, the payment processor (PayPal, Stripe, etc.) takes their cut on every sale. While you can absolutely produce a good-quality pattern with nothing more than crafting supplies, a phone with a camera, and Google Docs, the more a designer is invested in producing a pattern that is of professional quality for their customers, the more expensive that pattern is going to be to produce.

Beyond just producing the patterns, a major aspect of selling knitting patterns (and usually the biggest expense of all) is marketing. While some marketing (such as trying to organically build a social media following) primarily costs the designer a lot of time and energy rather than money, most marketing is something you have to pay for. Ads cost money, and offering giveaways means writing off the value of patterns you give away. If you ask a professional designer what they spend the most time doing, they might say "knitting", because that does definitely take longer than pattern-writing or taking photos, but more often the real answer is "marketing".

Other ongoing costs can include: everything to do with running your own website (such as, but not limited to: domain name registration, email service, web hosting, tools for managing content, a cart system, and either paying someone to manage it or getting the training/expertise to run it yourself), services for managing more direct marketing such as email newsletter senders and social media post schedulers, costs associated with doing work for third-party publishers (such as shipping samples), and branding services such as logo graphic design.

Well, you certainly don't have to! No one is making you do so. But often the answer to this is "because the paid pattern offers something the free ones don't offer". That might be a unique concept you're drawn to, a particular designer that you like, a higher level of quality, more accessible pattern support, and/or supporting a diversity of offerings in the knitting pattern industry. What your reasons might be are entirely personal, but there are definitely some benefits that a paid pattern might offer you that a free one might not provide. And even paid patterns are very inexpensive — easily by far the cheapest part of a knitting project, compared to the yarn and the other necessary supplies — so the "risks" you are taking on by buying instead of looking for something for free are pretty small, and the benefits are potentially significant.

I hear versions of this "paid pattern horror story" a lot, and I actually have a question for you: if you ever went to a restaurant and paid for a meal, and then found that it had an ingredient that was incorrect, or the portions were too small, or it didn't taste as good as you'd hoped, did that stop you from ever buying a meal at any restaurant ever again? (Did it even stop you from going to that exact same restaurant again and just ordering something different the next time?) Restaurant meals cost significantly more than a knitting pattern, and yet having one somewhat-bad experience with a meal doesn't cause most people to decide that they are writing off restaurants entirely, and going forward they will only ever cook at home or accept free meals from friends and family. Why should that be the attitude after one somewhat-bad experience with a knitting pattern?

Even in the best restaurants (and with the most skilled designers), mistakes are bound to occasionally slip through the cracks. It's kind of unreasonable to expect all paid knitting patterns by all designers to meet a standard of being 100% perfect, for every knitter, every single time, or else somehow none of them are "worth the money". And not all knitting patterns, like not all restaurants, are going to be to your tastes — but that doesn't mean they don't suit anyone! If you don't like spicy food, an Indian restaurant might not be a great option for you, but for people who love curry, it might be ideal. If you like knitting patterns that are as brief as possible and all fit on one page, I'll be honest with you — most of mine might not be your favourite style. But for other knitters, my patterns suit their preferences perfectly, or at least well enough for them to have a positive experience knitting their project. It is definitely frustrating when a pattern has an error or you don't like the way your project is turning out; I've been there too, as has pretty much any knitter out there. But it's not like that risk isn't there with a free pattern; in fact, depending on where you're getting free patterns, they might be significantly lower-quality, on average, and (unlike the majority of paid patterns) there might be no way to contact the designer to resolve an issue you have with it and no source for errata, so if there is a problem with the instructions, you're on your own.

If you're very concerned about what the quality of a particular paid knitting pattern might be like, there are some general "green flags" to look for when considering a pattern by a designer you haven't bought from before. For example, things like recent social media activity or a blog/podcast/newsletter with recent updates is a good sign that you'll get a prompt response to a pattern support email. Consistently having test knitter projects for new patterns and/or having some patterns that have been published by third parties (eg. magazines or yarn companies) shows that a designer follows a writing process that incorporates making corrections and getting feedback before publishing.

That said, purchasing a single knitting pattern is objectively not a big financial risk to take. If you love the design, you don't have much to lose by actually buying it and seeing the pattern style and quality for yourself rather than spending a lot of time guessing, investigating, and making assumptions. You never know — it might be perfect for you! And even if it disappoints you somehow, that's not a good reason to write off all indie designers (and especially not a good reason to tell others to write off all indie designers!) forever.

(As an aside, did you know that the number of Ravelry projects for a pattern is usually less than 10% of all the sales of that pattern? Insisting on large number of online reviews or dismissing patterns that don't have "enough" public projects isn't actually a good way to determine the quality of a particular pattern. Doing so just limits your options to only about 5% of all paid knitting patterns out there, and contributes to the phenomenon where a very small number of indie designers get almost all the attention in the industry.)

Perks Of A Paid Pattern: Photo Tutorials

Originally Published In A Knit Picks Book

Have a question about my pattern pricing specifically, or my personal design and pattern-writing expenses? Check out the FAQ below for more information about those subjects. (While some questions below broadly cover some of my store policies, all the specifics about return policies, delivery of patterns to you, pattern updates, etc. are also discussed in detail on my About page.)

I am a very analytical person, and I keep detailed records on my expenses and revenue. I base my own pricing on a balance between what amount per pattern will cover my expenses, what price appropriately reflects the amount of skill required to create the pattern, and what the market will support (i.e., what other designers in the same category are charging). I am also careful to take into account what kind of pricing helps all designers get closer to earning a viable living in this industry by not undercutting them or undervaluing my own labour and time. Over time, I track inflation and periodically update some or all of my pattern prices to reflect the increasing costs involved in making new patterns and supporting and updating existing ones.

No, all future pattern updates are included in the pattern price. For legal reasons, if you purchase on this website you must opt in at checkout to receive email notifications about these updates; however, your original download link will always bring you to the latest version of the pattern, even if you do not opt in to being notified when an update happens (so don't lose that confirmation email! If you do lose that link, though, don't panic, you can always send me an email and I can get the system to send you a new one). Update emails will always say what has changed in the new version and whether there were any errata in previous versions, and opting in to pattern updates does not put you on any marketing-related lists (for new release notifications and discount codes, you can always follow me on social media and/or sign up for my newsletter).

On Ravelry, currently the system does not let you opt in or out at checkout, but you can opt out of update notifications (either just for that pattern or from me in general) from a link at the bottom of the first update email you receive, if you prefer not to get them. Again, even if you do not want to receive notifications of updates from Ravelry, you can go to your Ravelry library and manually update what is stored there periodically so that you always have the latest version available to you. If you buy on this website and request a Ravelry Download at checkout, you will only receive email update notifications through Ravelry (because who wants to get two emails about the same pattern update!), but both the Ravelry library version and your website confirmation email link version will be updated, so you can access the new document either way.

I update patterns relatively often, most frequently to add additional resources and to reflect improvements in wording, clarity, styling, and additional fit options developed in later pattern releases. I also occasionally discontinue patterns, at which point they get one final pattern update where buyers are notified that the pattern is discontinued, then the pattern is no longer for sale and it no longer receives any more updates unless there are errata to report. However, pattern support for discontinued patterns is always still available via email.

All of my available patterns are for sale on this website as well as in my Ravelry store. Some patterns have additional versions available on other websites besides here and Ravelry, either digitally or in print. On individual pattern pages on this website, there are links to whatever additional buying options exist for that specific pattern. If you find one of my patterns being sold on a site not linked from the pattern page on this website, it is a stolen copy and the entity selling it should not be trusted with your personal information. (More about the risks associated with sketchy pattern-download websites in this question.)

Yes; you do not have to purchase the pattern again in order to access it in your Ravelry library. However, you must opt in at checkout to agree to receive an email from Ravelry with the link to connect your purchase here to your account there. Note that this is a manual process for me (each one must be "gifted" through Ravelry's system), and therefore your Ravelry library email may not arrive for up to 24-48 hours after your website purchase. Ravelry's system does not accommodate sending multiple patterns as "gifts" at once, so you will receive a separate Ravelry library email for every pattern you purchase on this website.

In terms of prices, different selling platforms have different costs associated with them, and that is reflected in my pattern pricing. A pattern will cost more on a platform that charges a higher commission or that requires a listing fee, because the expenses of listing there are higher. In terms of currency, in most places I sell my patterns in Canadian dollars, because that is my local currency. However, on Ravelry I sell patterns in US dollars, because Ravelry is an American company and all my Ravelry expenses are billed in US dollars, so also pricing in that currency prevents me from losing income due to back-and-forth currency conversion.

On this website, sales taxes (such as VAT or GST) are managed by Payhip. They collect the taxes and remit them on my behalf. On Ravelry, the system charges the customer the appropriate sales taxes at checkout, then collects that money monthly from the designers and remits the taxes on our behalf, collectively. In both cases, for legal reasons I cannot control how much tax is collected or how it is remitted; the payment platforms are who to contact if you believe they are making a taxation error.

No. There is no way to truly "return" a digital product, and I do not provide refunds except in the case of an accidental double-purchase. If you require technical assistance, need pattern support, or have feedback for me, you are welcome to send me an email so we can resolve the issue in a mutually satisfactory manner.

Yes! When I release a new pattern, it is normally on sale for around a week after it is released. I participate in multi-designer sales (such as the Indie Gift-A-Long) a couple of times a year, and I do broader sales on my own another couple of times a year. If you want to find out when that happens and what the discount codes are, the deepest discounts are available only to my newsletter subscribers, but codes for smaller discounts are also posted publicly on my social media accounts (primarily Ravelry and Instagram).

No. I do not believe "Pay What You Can" is an effective way of making patterns financially accessible (see the question on that topic below for more information on this issue), so I do not use it on any platform. However, when I am donating some of the proceeds from pattern sales to charity, on this website I have it set up to accept larger payments than the base pattern price in case people wish to donate extra. Any extra payment offered goes 100% to the charity, above and beyond the percentage of the pattern price already donated. (This feature is not available on other platforms, so the ability to donate extra on charity patterns is only an option for purchases on this website.)

Yes! I routinely offer patterns of the winner's choice as prizes in various KALs, and my test knitters get patterns for free (you can get more information about my test knitter compensation in a question on that topic below). I also frequently participate in sock-knitting competitions as a designer, and all participants in those events get the pattern featured in the event for free.

That said, I do not offer free patterns as open downloads and I do not intend to do so in the future. This is for a few reasons: first, free-download patterns are the ones most easily used by scammy websites/online shops as a way to defraud people; second, designing and writing patterns is a specialized skill that has value, and posting free patterns makes that labour invisible and contributes to the unfortunate perception that "all patterns should be free", which harms the ability of all designers to earn a living; and finally, from a return-on-investment perspective, I find that offering freebies is not an effective tool for finding new paying customers (believe it or not, free patterns are not even effective at generating low-effort, free-to-the-downloader designer benefits like getting new social media followers/newsletter subscribers or more Ravelry likes/queues/projects).

Although this may be a bit of an unpopular opinion, I believe knitting patterns, as a whole, are already "financially accessible" and that designers are deeply undervaluing our own skills and labour massively to accommodate this "financially accessible" market we are in, even at our regular pattern prices. Even the most expensive patterns out there are still objectively an inexpensive product with extremely small margins compared to similar categories of items such as sewing patterns, and especially when compared to other knitting-related products such as yarn and needles. Plus, there are so many free patterns out there that finding patterns is not a barrier to entry for people who enjoy knitting but who have limited financial resources. For access to higher-quality paid patterns, most designers (including me) offer lots of opportunities to both get patterns at a discount and/or exchange some of their time and effort to get them for free (participate in a KAL, join in an event, volunteer for a test knit, etc.).

I have more concerns about financial accessibility for designers than for customers, to be honest; there are lots of talented knitters out there who could produce fantastic patterns, but who don't do so because they need an income, and it is nearly impossible for most designers to truly "earn a living" doing this because pattern prices are expected to be so low. Suppressing pattern prices in the name of "financial accessibility" feeds the cycle where people in the knitting community think patterns should be free because "designing is just a hobby", which keeps pattern prices low because no one will pay the prices they should actually cost to reflect the expense and work involved in producing them, which prevents people who for financial reasons need to be able to actually make a living designing from getting into the industry, which continues to restrict the designer community to be mostly people who can afford for the work to be "just a hobby", so people in the broader community say it's "just a hobby" so patterns should be free... etc.

For me, that's a bigger inclusivity problem than wondering if there are even a significant number of people who can't afford a nine-dollar pattern, but who can afford the same pattern if it costs six dollars instead. I have doubts that saving three dollars is going to make a significant difference for a customer with limited financial means looking to buy one pattern, but I know that being able to charge nine dollars instead of six for all their pattern sales is a significant difference that might allow a designer with limited financial means to break even and keep designing.

My test knitters all get the pattern(s) being tested in the test knit they are in (often that is one pattern, but sometimes it is more than one) for free. In each test knit, I also draw a winner to receive a gift card from an indie dyer, in an amount that reflects roughly the cost of a full-price skein of yarn of their choice, plus shipping. In order to support testers, I also offer a slot in every test to a knitter who requires yarn support and if it is claimed, I provide that support myself, out of my own yarn stash. Occasionally, I am able to make arrangements with a dyer to offer a discount on yarn for all test knitters, but buying anything is always optional and yarn is always the test knitter's choice. I personally believe that test knitting is the most important part of the process of making a good pattern, and as I have built my business and can afford it, they are always the first ones to get a new benefit or a bonus of some kind! If you're interested in test knitting for me, you can fill out the form here for an invitation to my test-knitting Slack channel.

Rarely, yes, but the majority of the time I buy the yarn and use it when I'm ready. I feel like it is important for me to support indie dyers by paying for yarn I can genuinely say I love and recommend to others, and I do a lot of experimental design work, which means it can be difficult to promise a dyer offering yarn support that a pattern will be ready on a deadline (or that it will look anything like the original concept, or that it will even work at all). For context, in all of my published designs so far, I've received free yarn as yarn support for only 5% of them. 95% of my pattern samples were made with yarn I purchased myself.

No, I do not post any affiliate links. All links from this website to yarn suggestions are genuine recommendations on my part and all the links are "clean", with no tags/cookies attached to them. But I do encourage you to support indie dyers, if you can! We all benefit from having a diverse base of options to shop from in this industry. But there's no sneaky or secretive financial benefit in it for me, I promise. If you feel like you want to tell a dyer you found them from my website, that's 100% up to you.

No, not at this time. I don't want to collect money from people unless I can provide a real, tangible benefit to that arrangement, and right now I don't see how I could find the time to create supplemental material for Patreon as well as doing my regular design work. The best way to support me financially is to buy a pattern of mine that you like, and tell your friends about my designs!

Pattern Free Through Sock Madness

Pattern Produced With Yarn Support

I am not a lawyer or an expert on any area of law, and regulations around protections for digital publications are complex and vary from jurisdiction to jurisdiction. The following answers to questions on intellectual property and copyright are my take on the broad ethics of designing and the best practices for respecting the rights of designers and of our original knitting patterns. None of what I say should be considered "legal advice" in any way.

Yes, like any original document, the exact wording and the original photos in a knitting pattern are unique to that document and the rights to them belong to the designer. This includes both free and paid knitting patterns.

No, if you obtain a copy of a pattern without paying the designer for it, you are depriving them of income for their labour and skills and harming their ability to make a living and design more patterns you might also enjoy having available to you in the future. The right thing to do is to buy a copy of the pattern yourself, if you like it. If you are the "friend" in this scenario, please do not distribute copies of patterns you own to others; help the person in question to find the designer's store and encourage them to buy their own copy. Digital items are not things you can "give away"; once someone owns a digital product, they have access to it forever and therefore they cannot transfer ownership of it to someone else, like you can do with a physical item like a book or a magazine.

In any of these cases, contact the designer and let them know what is going on. Only they can assert their rights to the pattern(s) and try to get something like an unscrupulous Etsy shop or an impersonating social media profile taken down. If it is a physical shop doing it, and you have a relationship with the store itself, it would be kind of you to also communicate to the store that distributing patterns without the designer's permission is not okay, and they should do better to support other small businesses in their industry. Ravelry offers a LYS Sales Program to indie yarn stores to allow them and the designer to split the proceeds from a pattern purchase, so they could actually be earning money off of pattern sales, completely legitimately, instead of stealing from designers.

An important thing to be aware of: if it is a website where you found the pattern, do not download anything off the website in question! It might feel tempting to get a "freebie", but many websites offering other people's paid patterns for free are scammy and will try to get personal information from you, ask you to buy their "tokens" with real money in order to get access to the patterns, add malware to the downloads, or redirect you to malicious sites. You may or may not get the real pattern documents if you do what they ask, but either way it is not a good idea to take that chance on an unsafe website. Besides the fact that you are rewarding people who steal from small indie designers, the amount of money and hassle you will need to deal with if your interaction with the site results in identity theft or credit card fraud will far exceed the small cost of buying the pattern from the designer instead.

To support and protect indie design in general, only buy or download patterns from legitimate sources, and if you don't know if a buying option is legitimate, just email the designer and ask. The places that are most likely to be legitimate are Ravelry (which has volunteers who actively monitor for and remove listings for stolen patterns) as well as Etsy shops or designer websites that are linked directly from legitimate social media profiles (not random Etsy shops selling a whole bunch of different people's patterns; they are pretty much never selling with the designers' permission). Pinterest may or may not have useful links attached to pins (following official designer accounts is the best way to make sure you can find the original pattern at the link provided), and searching Google for "free download [name of paid knitting pattern]" is not a good idea. Malicious websites notoriously are mostly filled with keywords designed to have them show up high in search engine results. They take advantage of people who are happy to get something that should cost money for free... and then they scam those people for way more money than a knitting pattern costs. Don't let them do that to you.

The uniqueness of a knitting pattern and the "validity" of a design being "new" has nothing to do with whether or not it "looks like" something else that already exists, or whether or not it uses techniques that are familiar to many knitters already because they have been used for decades (or centuries) already. The value of that specific pattern comes from the designer's own individual explanations, wording, style, resources, photos, and choices of combinations of ideas (even if most or all of those ideas have also been used by other designers, in other combinations). Just because a motif on a sweater is familiar because it has been published in stitch dictionaries for decades, doesn't mean the overall design is not "unique"; details such as where that motif is placed, how the grading is done, what structural elements are used in the sweater, how the details are explained, etc. are all unique to that document and came from that designer's own ideas and expertise. So the design is "theirs" and they are entitled to present it that way and sell it to others if they choose to do so, no matter how "basic" or "obvious" or "easy to reverse-engineer" an experienced knitter might think that it is. Consider that if it would be easy for you to make the design in question without a pattern, maybe you're just not the audience for that particular pattern. That doesn't mean there isn't an audience for it out there, or that no one should be allowed to charge for patterns intended for less-experienced knitters that are based on traditional concepts.

No. The key to something being a "new" knitting pattern design is not (despite the persistent mythology out there to the contrary) about "what percentage difference from this other design" your finished product is. The important distinction between "modifying" and "designing" is the process and the intent behind the work. If you used someone else's pattern, you did not make "your own design", even if you changed a lot of details. You needed their design and their instructions to make your project, even if sometimes you only used their pattern to determine what not to do for yourself. If you are working off of someone else's concept, ideas, and instructions as a base, that's not your own design, no matter how many tweaks you make or how many details you add. That's your personal take on someone else's design. You didn't intend to write your own pattern, and you didn't follow a design process that was directed by your own ideas. You intended to make someone else's design (even with your own modifications) that came from their original ideas, and you followed that person's instructions (even if sometimes you deviated from them) that were written by them and produced using their design process.

In order for something to be "your own design", you need to do all the design and pattern-writing work yourself, based on your own ideas about what the finished product should look like. That doesn't mean you can't use existing techniques, or that none of what you do can look similar to or be constructed like anyone else's design. It just means that you come up with your own concept, choose the features and details you think it should have, then you write the pattern yourself, from scratch: no copy/pasting from other people's patterns (even with credit/references). You use your own photos of something that was made from your own instructions (even if you improvised/worked instinctively first and then wrote the instructions down later, that's still true; what you knit came entirely from your own brain). You make all the decisions about what the yarn weight and gauge should be, what techniques ("common knowledge" or more unusual) should be used, how to adjust the sizing, what resources to include, and how to use your own experience and skill to explain to others how you made the item in the photos. That design and pattern-writing process, as well as your intent to make something that is entirely a product of your own ideas, is what makes a pattern undeniably, uniquely "yours".

My Basic Vanilla Sock Formula Pattern

Pattern Incorporating A Unique Technique