the 2015 VAT mess

TL;DR: if you live in the EU and buy patterns from me after 1 January 2015, your purchase will be redirected from Ravelry to LoveKnitting.com and the VAT for where you live will be added to the purchase price. The pattern will still be added to your Ravelry library. Unfortunately, Ravelry promotions that are anything other than one which gives you a free pattern won’t work anymore because of technical limitations.

You might have seen news about various designers stopping selling patterns because of the new VAT (value added tax) laws in the EU.

There’s been a lot of scrambling to get things in order, because it really is a huge and awful mess, but I’m not going away.

Ravelry and LoveKnitting.com are making a joint solution available which will at least serve as a stopgap for the first six months of 2015. There are other options as well (such as blocking sales to the EU), but I will be using the LoveKnitting option at least for now.

I’m really grateful to Casey and to the LoveKnitting people for coping with all of this – it’s been a real scramble to get ready. Casey arranged it right before Thanksgiving, and they’ve been working on it really hard since then. Furthermore, the LK people aren’t charging Ravelry designers any fees for the first six months of this program, which is amazing of them.

I’ve been looking at the yarns and other supplies that Loveknitting sells, and there’s some nice stuff. They also deal in crochet things, despite the name. If you wanted to buy something from them to help repay them for their kindness, I think it would be a nice gesture. They’re based in the UK, but they now have an office in the US as well.