Support Your Local Yarn Stores, Ravelry, and the Knit Designers!

Did you know that you can now buy Ravelry patterns via your LYS?

Imagine this scenario, you're at your LYS (that's "local yarn store" for you non-fiber artists out there) and you see someone's amazing knitted garment. You ask for the pattern, and the LYS shows you the pattern online. Normally, you'd have to wait until you got home to purchase the pattern online (provided that your LYS didn't have a hardcopy in their store).

But now, you also have the option to purchase this pattern from your LYS via Ravelry. The pattern is automatically sent to your email address so you can print it out from home or just use the electronic copy. (And I know my particular LYS is able to print out copies for those folks who just want a paper copy.)

This ability to purchase patterns from Ravelry via your LYS is awesome for a number of reasons:

1. It allows you to support your LYS and Ravelry at the same time.
2. It provides you instant gratification in getting that pattern immediately
3. AND, you can purchase the correct amount of yarn at your LYS and cast on immediately!

It's great for those folks who might not have a Ravelry account, yet, because all you need is an email address in order to purchase the pattern. Or if you don't have a Paypal account (which is required in order to purchase from Ravelry), you can just pay via cash, check or credit card at your LYS.

Honestly, that's a win-win situation for the fiber artists.

And for the LYS, there are a lot of benefits. By being able to offer up electronic patterns, it frees up valuable retail space that they normally would have to keep on file (meaning more floor space for yarn & fiber). AND they can offer a LOT more patterns from different Designers.

Consequently, more Designers can get more exposure AND are able to sell their patterns across different venues. Both the LYS and Designers win in that department too!

For my own LYS, they put all of their paper patterns on sale so that they could free up space in order to have more yarn on sale. Of course, I benefited from their paper pattern sale as well. I picked up a "few" patterns for my own collection (which I'll scan in later to electronic copy....)

Anyways, go out and support your LYS and Ravelry by buying patterns at your LYS! And if they aren't selling patterns from Ravelry, ask them to do so!