Originally Posted by Dorothy Ann
Thank you so much for the mention of the hard work designers put in. It takes weeks of work to finalize a design, find fabric that will be current when the magazine comes out, make decisions about how many bolts of each of the fabrics to buy in order to kit it. And, sometimes it doesn't sell as much as the quilt before it, leaving us with fabrics we have already paid for....we can't send it back. Just one bolt of fabric is from $70 to $80 and my last quilt had 10 fabrics in it. By the way, most of those fabrics required from 4 to 5 bolts to kit a reasonable number of kits. This is my job, I don't have another. Should my ideas and designs be free for anyone to make and sell without even a breath of credit given to me. There seems to be a great deal of anger over the fact that designers want credit for designing the quilts. Thank you so much for your defense of our right to get credit for the design. And you are right, sometimes it is discouraging to not only have people to profit from the fruits of my labor, but to do it knowing it isn't legal.
I can't say that I have seen a whole lot anger over designers wanting credit for their work - just the degree of control they want over the finished quilt. I am just a newbie quilter, but I include both the designer's name and the name of the pattern on my labels and am more than happy to pay a fair price for the pattern.
I also have a friend who designs quilts for a living, and does pretty well at it too, so I understand that designers need to get a fair return for their efforts.