We are thrilled to announce that Pattern 6,000* will be Lucy Neatby's Baby Venus design-- a wee version of her very popular Venus Rising cardi for adults. We're at 5963 now, so we should be there by or around Monday 2 August (a holiday here in Ontario, Canada) if not before. Watch this space! We're very excited and honoured.

*Of course, assigning a number is arbitrary; patterns get activated and deactivated and reactivated regularly, and a firm actual number is hard to establish. But if you don't celebrate an imperfect number, then you never celebrate. And that would be intolerable.

Effective 1 August 2010, all Prism leaflets (not booklets) currently priced at $5 each will increase to $6. Fair warning! Get in there and buy what you need before the price goes up!

Robin Melanson and I went to Stitch and Pitch tonight: Baltimore Orioles vs. the Toronto Blue Jays. Blue Jays won resoundingly (8 - 2, I think). It was a great game for all the good baseball reasons (Jeff proposed to Kim on the Jumbotron and she accepted-- congratulations, you two!-- and there were a couple of great Toronto dingers and some great plays-- and Rachel H was on the Jumbotron too-- and it was a lovely, clear, breezy, summer night-- and did I mention that we won?).

But mostly it was just nice to be out, to chat with local knitting friends whom I hardly ever get to see because I'm in front of a computer all the time. What a great city Toronto is, and how beautiful to walk around in downtown late at night. Took the subway there and back; easy and clean and safe. No G20 strife, no outrageous humidity, no miscreants. Just us millions of people on our own turf, out of an evening and civil and enjoying ourselves.

Oh, and for the record: Robin was working on a cool new hat out of Veronik Avery's Boreale, and I started some fingerless mitts (my own mindless ribby all-purpose pattern) out of an Aran-weight alpaca/silk blend from Lindenhof Wool Mill-- alas, no longer around. If current knitting time trends hold, they should be finished next year sometime.

Q: What happened to blogging?

A: Thought I could manage kids getting out of school late June, having them home for weeks, and going to cottage with family and guests, all the while maintaining a seamless Patternfish experience for our treasured members. This was foolhardy. Next week kids are in camp for quite a while and we should be able to get a lot of various things done.

Q: You're posting a lot of Chris Bylsma, Louet, Prism, Heritage Fiber Publications, Diamond Yarn... what's going on with these guys?

A: All of those excellent publishers and more want us to have their entire PDF catalogue on an exclusive basis. ([Sob] We'd like to thank the Academy... ) So we're trying to get each of them entirely posted and available as fast as possible, while still introducing other new publishers and carrying on with other existing freelancers and companies, too. We have to say, though, that when someone trusts you to take over an entire part of their business, you want to do it right, and quickly.

These companies and other like-minded ones in process do not want to be in the business of managing PDF sales, doing tech support, introducing new site abilities, and so on. They want to sell yarn and/or design patterns with their time, and maybe have a life outside of business hours. We essentially function as their sales arm and provide them with up-to-the-minute data about this aspect of their business. Since this is exactly what our business goals were in the beginning, this makes us very happy. And it means even more that some of them had tried it on their own and seem much happier with us!

One future side effect of this is that if someone's PDF is not exclusive to us, we're going to have to ask them to upload their own and do their own descriptions. Since this is already the case with every other PDF-selling website we know of, it shouldn't make much difference to the publisher. But insofar as it represents a departure from our full-service-for-everyone approach, we feel sad about it. We will advise as to timing.

Q: What's coming up next in terms of features?

A: Phil has promised something to a specific publisher that's really cool and should be available by early August, and there are other neat things in the pipe for everybody.

Have attempted a kind of family vacation at the cottage over the last few days. The astute among you will remember that the internet used to be delivered here twice daily by goat. Said goat broke all its legs earlier this week, and has just been replaced moments ago by a much less expensive and very cool thing called a Bell Turbo Stick, which actually appears to work. Will post and blog more in a day or two when other obligations recede.

Good to see that Kismet operates all over the internet. Another site that sells patterns announced a sale recently, and the site promptly went down for a while. Maybe it's one of the Unwritten Laws.

TNNA (www.tnna.org) is coming this weekend, and on Thursday Robin Melanson and Veronik Avery and I are driving from Toronto, Ontario to Columbus, Ohio for it. It'll take about eight hours, and since road trips with dear friends are one of my favorite things, the trip itself should be a joy, not just the show. We're hoping to meet a whole bunch of people for the first time-- like the wise and informed Therese Shere of Knitfinder, and the madly talented Janet Szabo of Big Sky Knitting Designs, to name just two-- and re-meet other old pals.

Since we have yet to figure out how to upload patterns reliably while hurtling along the Interstate, there may be a couple of sparse pattern-posting days. But have you noticed that after TNNA's, we tend to get some lovely new publishers? Fingers crossed.

Today is Patternfish's 2nd birthday.

We share it with Tony Curtis, Paulette Goddard, John Paul Jones (Led Zeppelin bassist), Suzi Quatro, and our faves Josephine Baker and Anderson Cooper (if they had had children, they probably would have been the most beautiful kids in the world).

We have 231 publishers as I write. We have many many thousands of customers. We have sold tens of thousands of patterns. We have made splendid new friends and gotten reaquainted with wonderful old ones. We have encountered goodwill and kindness and support at just about every turn, which has enriched our work and private lives.

We have grown, and continue to grow, fast. We've been told over and over from many different sources that our timing was perfect-- that print distribution is giving way somewhat to PDF delivery, that we are the best at it, and that we make pattern shopping superlatively pleasurable. We are too immodest not to repeat this. We're also grateful for luck and timing. And for having had motive, means, and opportunity to bring about the opposite (we hope) of a crime.

Patternfish is Julia Grunau full-time, with masterful part-time assistance from Phil Lysons (Minister of Technology), Shannon Shields (Chancellor), Special Guest Star Greg Smith, and newest Patternfisher Gayle Clow (Ambassador, the moderator of our Ravelry group, and our overall internet monitor). I think it's safe to say that we all really like our jobs at almost every moment. We got together for a happy birthday lunch yesterday to celebrate.

Thanks to every publisher, especially the original ones who went live with us two years ago. Thanks to all our customers, past and future. And to everyone else in the industry and out who has smoothed our paths, encouraged us, and done us huge favour after huge favour-- muchas smooches.

There's something about major media types signing up as members that makes our 3rd-party PDF delivery service go crackerdog. It was down for a little while today for only the second time in two whole years. The first time it went down (about four months after we went live) a Major Media Type had just signed up and ordered four patterns. Today, another Major Media type signed up and it cacked again.

Not only that, but the first copies of Vogue Knitting's Early Fall 2010 issue are reaching subscribers, and we are thrilled to be listed in Classic Elite's back cover ad (they say Cover Four in the industry) as the source for the gorgeous Princess Mitts and Princess Muff pictured there. They had let us know months ago that the ad was booked, but they wouldn't have had time to photograph and print and distribute hard copies to all the LYS's for the official magazine launch of 8 June-- would we mind if they used us to deliver the patterns? Mind? It took some arm-wrestling, but they talked us into it eventually. In fact we were gibbering with excitement.

All is now resolved and back to normal, but the timing! The circumstances around getting what you wish for can occasionally be prickly.

We will write a big long post on Thursday, 3 June, for reasons which will become happily apparent very soon.