I'm back on Etsy!

A few days ago, Etsy announced that they had implemented the updates to their site needed to collect the European Union VAT from sales of digital items. Hooray! This meant I could re-open my Etsy shop, which I've now done. I also added three new patterns to my Etsy shop which I'd begun selling since having to put my shop on 'vacation' mode; the Tracery vest:

The Jianzhi cowl:

And the Balthazar's Jumper socks:

And of course I'll be adding more as I make new patterns available. 

You can find me on Etsy at wipinsanity.etsy.com! It's great to be back.

Increased pattern availability!

In my last post, I announced that I was (hopefully temporarily) stopping the sale of my patterns through Etsy and Craftsy due to the new rules for the European Union VAT (value added tax) which came into effect on January 1. This left Ravelry as the only platform I was using to sell patterns, because they (bless them!) had provided a workaround which allowed VAT to be charged to EU buyers and remitted properly without me having to worry about it. I wasn't at all happy about having to shut down operations on those two platforms, because I do get sales through them, which means they allow me to reach an audience that selling on Ravelry alone doesn't provide.

However, in reading all the Ravelry discussion about how this tax change affected designers, I discovered there was another platform which takes care of the VAT for pattern sellers: PatternFish!

So, I got in touch with them (lovely people, very helpful!) and am now delighted to be able to say that many of my self-published patterns, including my ebooks, are now available at PatternFish.

And more good news: Etsy recently announced that they now believe they are responsible for collecting and remitting VAT on "instant download" products sold on their site, so as soon as they actually start doing that for my patterns, I'll be bringing my shop there back online.

And speaking of pattern availability, I have one more piece of good news to announce!

This week I made my Tracery vest pattern available for individual purchase. Do you remember it? It was originally published in The Unofficial Harry Potter Knits, from Interweave Press, and then later in their book, Knitting Wizardry. The vest looks like this:

When the original magazine issue came out, I was extremely flattered at the number of people who expressed a wish to be able to buy the pattern individually...and now, you can! :)

Clever people

Remember this?

It's my "Tracery" vest from Interweave's special issue, The Unofficial Harry Potter Knits. It's a design that I'm very proud of having thought up, but when I designed it, I didn't seriously think that a lot of people would actually make it, because although it's fairly simple stranded knitting with no yarn changes, it looks tremendously complicated and I thought it would scare a lot of people away.

To date, however, there are 51 projects for it on Ravelry! Many knitters are making, or have made, really beautiful vests. But I was surprised by the fact that many of those projects are not actually vests. Knitters have shown tremendous creativity in adapting the chart for their own fabulously diabolical purposes. And I really wanted to share them! (Although you'll have to follow the links to see what they look like, as I'm not sure of the legality of 'lifting' other people's photographs that they've uploaded to Ravelry. Trust me though, following the links will be worth it.) [note: project links removed for safety as they all went to the Ravelry website]

• PunkYarner seems to have been the first person to think outside the Tracery box, and is making a purse.
  
• The hilarious DrusillaWormwood turned her swatch into a cowl for her cat.
  
• Both AmyClaire and pacasha are making some awesome-looking socks.
  
• La-Piccola is extending part of the window motif and is thinking of making it into a short-sleeved sweater.
  
• Both pnjaban and JoycersB made slightly different pairs of fingerless gloves.
  
• The amazing Amberjatko made a skirt!!!
  
• And finally, the very talented (and determined!) MonicaInMd made a full-on cardigan.
  

Three cheers for creativity!

Revelio!

The Unofficial Harry Potter Knits issue, put out by Interweave, is now available (in the US only, very unfortunately), and I can finally TALK about some things!

One design I have in this issue is an amusing little bit of a thing that suddenly came to me as I was trying to come up with ideas for the submission call. I thought of doing Dolores Umbridge's black velvet hair bow, which from the sound of things is about the least disgusting thing she ever wears in the books. (If you can't tell already, I despise her. In fact, I think she's arguably even more evil than Voldemort - he did horrific things either because he was overcome with rage or to further his own ambitions; whereas she wreaked havoc on other people's lives because she got delicious thrills out of it. Sick.)

Anyhoo, a little fiddling with some velvety-ish yarn (I couldn't find anything actually velvet-feeling and black, unfortunately, so I went with the closest thing I could find), and I had myself a sample in a ridiculously short time:

(It's fuzzy at the edges there because I used fun fur to do the bits at top and bottom.)

They sent me some really nice stuff to work the sample in - Plymouth Angora Glitz, which is mostly angora with just a hint of nylon and metallic glitter. Very soft, with a lovely halo of fuzz and a sparkle, too. I held it doubled to get the right fabric density. I think it turned out great:

And modelled on my darling middlest:

The other design I have in this issue has been years in the making. When the child pictured above was just a year old, I had the idea to use fair isle technique with variegating yarn to get the look of stained-glass windows. I used the now-discontinued (of course, thank you Murphy's Law) Schoeller+Stahl Sockina Colori for the variegating yarn and I adored the result:

I sat on the design for a long while, though, because I wasn't confident yet about writing up the instructions and I wasn't sure what would be a good publication to send it to. But flash forward about four years later - I had much more designing experience under my belt, and thought it would be an interesting thing to submit for a Harry Potter collection. (I didn't count it towards my 12-in-12 challenge though, since I hadn't designed it in 2012.) It's certainly not overtly Harry Potter, but it's very thematic to the books. They sent me Plymouth Happy Feet to do the sample in. The choice was terrific, as far as I'm concerned. I think I might like the effect even better than the Sockina Colori:

And the model they put it on is a Ginny lookalike; she looks fantastic in it.

So I'm very, very happy with all of this! (Except for the not-sellable-in-the-US part, which is a copyright/licensing issue, I gather.) I hope you like these designs, too!