If (like me) you spend unhealthy amounts of time on Ravelry, you may just have heard some murmurings of a special project organised by a group of indie designers - well, it's time to go public... the Gift-a-long has begun! The Gift-a-long is a collaborative event, hosted and organised by over a hundred independent designers on Ravelry. We've banded together to offer a huge selection of our patterns at a 25% discount, and the Ravelry group will host KAL/CAL threads in different categories, so that you can chat along with fellow Ravelry members whilst you get your gift-knitting/crocheting underway. Best of all, there's a massive selection of prizes on offer, which will be awarded randomly to participants in each of the threads - if you take part in the Shawls & Stoles category, you will be in with a chance to win a subscription to my Celtic Cable Shawls e-book - I've donated 2 pre-orders to the prize pile.
As we designers banded together to plan the Gift-a-long, we realised that there was no way to tag participating patterns in a way that would show up on the Ravelry search engine. There is a long thread in the Gift-a-long group, with one post from each designer who is taking part, but we were lacking a way to actually browse through every single pattern available. I tentatively suggested the idea of making Pinterest boards for each of the categories. Amazingly, a group of designers jumped in to help, and soon we had a team of pinners, supervised by the amazing Ash Kearns, who did a fantastic job of organising us. Between us, we pinned over 2000 patterns into categorised boards, in just a few days. And here they are!:
So, to recap, every single pattern on the boards above is available with a 25% discount, from Nov 1st to Nov 15th, when you add to Ravelry cart and use the code giftalong. And, you can join a KAL/CAL in the Gift-a-long group and be in with a chance to win some prizes. Hope to see you over there!
P.S. Almost forgot to mention... it probably goes without saying, but every individual pattern in my Ravelry store is in the Gift-a-long, and eligible for the discount. If you've bought a pattern from me previously and not cast-on yet, you can still take part in the KAL threads!