Ding..Dong..The BOX Is Dead!

Yay! At last! The BOX is dead! Never will I let a large box like that be a place to just toss stuff until I can deal with it. I will deal with it all and get it in its place because the few moments it takes to do that are so much better than dealing with tons of tiny things from receipts to skeins of half used floss to old cards, letters, invoices, receipts, beads and other weird stuff. Now the cardboard box is holding all my sorted brown envelopes ready to go to the accountant as soon as I do the totals for each category. Then, I think this new person is going to help me get set up on a better system to look at categories on a quarterly basis and see how things are going.

It nice to be able to focus on the little successes and the little steps forward when it feels like so much of this past week has been backsliding. Its looking as if some of the infringers on multiply.com are indeed Canadians and that makes me both sad and angry. The size of our population spread over the vastness of our country does mean that sometimes stitchers have to travel great distances to reach a store or mail order/on-line order, but the very idea of using our geography as an excuse for their actions is a bit repugnant to me. I can still remember the excitement of reading the r.c.t.n when I first discovered that there were on-line communities where you could talk about your love of stitching, learn new tips or tricks, find out about new releases or designs that were in the works. Sadly, somewhere along the line with the changes in technology, scanned patterns began to be shared as well.

One stitcher sent me a brilliant poster from the French designers association. It showed a blank graph on the poster with the caption “without designers, this is what your pattern would look like!” It was brilliant, simply brilliant.

We say as an industry that we need to encourage the next generation of young stitchers... but who will they learn from? Will their first introduction to stitching be sharing information or patterns? Unless we speak out, unless we make changes to what is acceptable legally, morally and ethically, this type of behaviour may become the norm instead of the exception. At least I know that my children are learning differently, because they are seeing first hand what effect copyright infringements can have.