You’re absolutely ruining my reputation.  The story we’ve all agreed upon is that I am mean and sarcastic and totally bereft of feelings.  And something happened yesterday that just totally blew my cover.

Yesterday I brought out the pattern for Cracked. I felt a little weird bringing out a pattern when things are like, well, this, but everyone assured me it was fine. But I wanted to do something a little different because things are so hard for so many people right now.  So I set up a code to let a few folks who really needed a lift but also really couldn’t manage the extra expense right now get the pattern for free.  I set it to work 20 times, and mentioned if anyone wanted to donate extra copies, to let me know and we’d work something out.

And I really sort of expected either no one would use it, or someone would paste it into one of those wretched facebook groups where folks share things that aren’t meant to be shared, and they’d be used up in thirty seconds.  But that’s not what happened.

What happened is some folks who needed a little lift used it, and some other folks who were able to help someone else out started writing to me to donate extra copies.  Like an awful lot of people.  And an awful lot of extra copies.  And people sent the very sweetest notes.  And the whole thing left me just absolutely floored.  Really, I am generally fairly stoic (at least when anyone can see), and I was borderline sniffling at my desk (we’re calling it allergies…that’s my story and I’m sticking to it).  People were amazing.

In fact, there were so many folks donating extra copies that there are some left over, and I want to share it here as well as on the newsletter.  So if you could use a copy of Cracked to distract yourself, but this whole giant disaster means it’s just not in the budget, you can use the code HONOR SYSTEM to download a free copy (that will keep working till all the codes are used up, if it doesn’t work, it means they’ve all been used).

And I think I’m going to try doing this with a few of the next pattern releases too.  I have to figure out the logistics, but right now the plan is to always share it first with the mailing list.  Then if there are extras after the first day I’ll post it here on the blog/ravelry.  Then if there are still extras the day after that, I’ll post it on instagram.

And really, this made me feel the best I’ve felt in a long while.  It was just what I needed, and I can’t thank everyone enough.