You may notice a few new things on the Weblog here, one good, one kind of annoying unfortunately, and one hopefully interesting. The first: I added the option to subscribe to comments. When you leave a comment, you have the option to subscribe to subsequent comments to that post, so that you’ll receive an email when a new comment is posted. Hopefully, this will make it easier to continue discussions here on QE without checking back in to the original post if there’s nothing there.

Second: The things that go on behind the scenes are sometimes bewildering, really. I received a not-so-nice message through the contact form about the Quilted Whispers Contest. Obviously, I’ll have to put in a filter for “those words” that don’t have anything to do with quilting. That part isn’t the whole crux of the issue though, it just led me to dig through my stats a bit, looking for an IP trail so I could just ban that obnoxious user if possible, and I found some rather puzzling referral pages there. I found links to this site from another, which would be good, except that this other site has taken my blog posts, in their entirety including hotlinkng to my pictures (aka stealing my bandwidth), Read the rest of this entry »

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I’ve been mulling over the issues of copyright as it relates to quilting in my mind lately. In recent years, there have been some pretty loud rumblings in the quilt world about this issue, as more and more quilters, artists, designers and companies become aware of the law. To me, most of the interpretation of copyright law has been pretty self explanatory and logical really, at least for my purposes. It’s the oft repeated “do unto others as you would have them do unto you” thing. When you purchase a quilt pattern or book you’ve purchased the right to make that project for personal use, or as gifts. Selling the project is generally not allowed, though in some cases, designers have expressly granted permission to make a certain number of projects to sell (sometimes up to ten) for profit at craft fairs and shows.

All that being said, I really feel that if I have made a quilt from a pattern in a book, and I want to sell that quilt, I should be able give credit to the designer and price the work accordingly, taking into account only the time and materials I put into the project. In other words, I would be charging for my time and materials, not for the originality of the design itself. If I sell a quilt that is my own design, I would charge for my time, the materials, and for the originality of the design as well. I would happily grant that privilege to anyone who purchased one of my patterns as well. That is not what the law says, though, so that’s not what we are allowed to do.

Recently I’ve seen more and more questions and issues about showing quilts made from commercial copyrighted patterns. This is where it gets sticky and mean sometimes, I think, Read the rest of this entry »

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