Hi sewing friends! 

We have some important news to share. As you know, we’ve been offering most of our patterns for free for many years now. While we wish we could continue to do so, the reality is, it’s come at a significant cost to the business and it’s now reached a point where it’s just not financially possible for us to keep doing this. And so, from today, we’ll be adding a fee to most of these patterns. 

It’s been a difficult decision to come to, but ultimately we know it’s the right one to make. We’ve poured our hearts, resources – and finances – into these patterns over the years, and are proud of the fact that we’ve paid over $50,000 to the incredible indie patternmakers we worked with to help bring these free patterns to life. We’re also eternally grateful to the lovely sponsors who made it possible for us to keep the patterns free for our community for such a long time. These patterns have been downloaded more than 500,000 times, which is amazing! But along with that comes an enormous amount of admin work, troubleshooting, IT support, software programs, customer service support – not to mention all the original production work planning, creating, producing, photographing, copywriting, editing and design – all of which costs time and money.

As you know, we’ve had a pay-what-you-can option on all our patterns for a long time now, and we’re incredibly grateful to those who contributed – it’s helped immensely. But the reality is that only approximately 3-5% of all downloads over the years have been paid.

We also want to acknowledge the value of the work, the value in the end product, and of course, the value in our own work also. It’s tough out there at the moment for many of us with small businesses, and it’s so important to recognise the value of creatives, makers, artists and designers as we all navigate this economic crisis. We all need to do what we can to stick around, and to support those bringing art and craft to the world. To that end, we’ve decided to share 10% of the future sales of previously-free patterns with the original patternmakers. While they were all originally paid for their work, we want to show our appreciation and continuous support of these small businesses by including them in these changes.

Some of our earlier patterns will remain free for now – from issue 24 and before. These will continue to have the Pay-What-You-Can option if you’d like to donate (if so – thank you!). We hope to slowly go back through older patterns and update the sizing – when this happens, they will change over to paid only, as it takes a lot of work to update and regrade patterns. But we’d love for the sizing to be more inclusive, so we think it’s a worthwhile endeavour.

We love and appreciate all the support you’ve shown us and the patterns over the years, and we’re so proud of what we’ve achieved. The best part about this change is that it will allow us to continue to do what we do and bring more patterns to you, our beloved sewist community. Trust us, we’ve got plenty of ideas up our me-made sleeves and we can’t wait to share them with you!

Kelley and the team xox