Free Pattern

I really love teaching. One of the side effects of teaching is that people always ask if I sell patterns for my quilts. Usually the answer is no. I have one pattern that is commercially available, but I never really wanted to get into the pattern business for several reasons:

• It’s not really profitable unless you get picked up by a national distributor and sell a LOT of patterns.
• There is the computer work to actually write up and lay out the pattern.
• There are substantial up front printing costs. You need to have at least a thousand patterns printed or the cost per pattern is too much.
• There is collating and stuffing the plastic sleeves. Do you barcode them or not?

All in all, this is not something I have wanted to do, but people still ask for patterns. So what to do? Well, after buying a knitting pattern off the Internet as a downloadable PDF file that I could print out on my home printer, I thought, AHA! That’s how I should sell my patterns. 

So as a trial, I’m giving away the pattern to a quilt I used to teach years ago. It’s called “The Old Maid Sees Stars” and is still one of my favorites. It’s a scrap quilt with a white background and lots of orange.

If you go to the new Patterns page on my Web site (www.leefowler.com), you can click on the link to the pattern. 

Please let me know if the pattern prints out okay. We have tried it on a number of systems, and it seems to work well, but there’s always the occasional glitch. If the file doesn’t open in your Web browser, save it to your hard disk and get the free Adobe Reader  (Preview on the Mac will also open the file).

If this trial goes well, I’ll work patterns for some of my most popular classes and put them up for sale on my site. I figure I’ll start with Round Division, and then work on Yin Yang, Rolling Star and Animal Chains.  

I hope you enjoy the Old Maid Sees Stars. It’s a fun quilt.