Ninaknits posed a question in the Budding Designers Forum on Ravelry about The Value of Pattern Design. It got me thinking about how to constructively raise the awareness of all the hard work people put into their knitting patterns.

So here’s my idea: awards for the knitting industry as voted for by peers and industry leaders; i.e NOT a popularity contest. Something along the lines of the “1st Annual Knitting and Crochet Industry Awards”. With Knoscars or Ravtas (Although probs best to keep it distinct from Ravelry).

Popcorn and Pretzel by Jessica Spencer

The idea is to follow the movie Academy Awards example and have nominees and winners announced with a big hue and cry. Lots of razzle dazzle and maybe one day a red carpet!

The thinking behind keeping it peer-reviewed is that Ravelry and PatternFish and sites like them are basically pattern popularity contests already, so we don’t need to replicate that. And also, a huge part of what we want to do is celebrate outstanding members of the design world, including tech editors, test and sample knitters, publishers, photographers, all the support crew without whom the really great patterns and collections would just be mistake-riven, badly-shown FOs.

We need a panel of judges that really know their stuff and have experience across the whole industry. Any volunteers? Perhaps the winners of the previous year could be invited to join the panel for the next year. There would be no prizes, other than the kudos (and, I imagine, the associated pattern sales boost). Incidentally, did you know there’s no crocheted or knitted “Oscar” pattern? That I could find on rav, anyhoo.

Categories could be: