Sally Melville wrote us to say: "I have done some math to make the Cross-Over-Rib Top work for larger sizes... I am doing this because I wore it myself with a top underneath and then discovered it had more versatility and so would work (that way)-- something I didn't know until I played with my closet!" She expects to post a revised, expanded version of her pattern sometime in the next couple of weeks. We asked if we could blog about this. "Blog away," she replied cheerfully. "That will force me to get to it more quickly." All in favour of this enhancement to one of our most popular patterns, please post encouraging comments below.

After a period of testing the waters, today England's Stylecraft gave us permission to post just about every pattern of theirs we can find. We are beyond thrilled. Look for much more of their fine work, both vintage and current, over the next few weeks.

Patternfish page views since 1 August are over 770,000, and we're up to visits from 115 countries-- now including Macau, Nepal, Kyrgyzstan, Laos, Georgia, and Sudan. Also that hotbed of knitting enthusiasm: Fiji. To say we are gobsmacked would be criminal understatement.

Patternfish Gift Certificates are on their way in time for the holiday season-- we will blog and Twitter and Plurk as soon as it happens.

We are now taking questions from the floor...

Minister of Technology Phil climbed Kilimanjaro last year (we wouldn't let him go now: Patternfish is too important). We had watched him train, have all the shots for Africa, and heard his plans. On his return he showed us pictures. Here's one:

-- in which he's wearing a hat (THE hat, he would say) that I made for him (Wellington Fibres mohair/wool, pattern a kluge of my own)-- at the top of the tallest vertical climb in the world. Not that I am boasting, but clearly the hat was an indispensable part of his success.

Anyway, then I imagined I knew everything about mountain climbing, because I had read Into Thin Air and heard Phil talk about his experience. How much more complicated could it be? So I wrote the following lines for this pattern, wanting to show off a bit:

"You have the skills, and if you're patient and methodical and committed, you can do it. No Everest pyrotechnics with Sherpas and oxygen; Kilimanjaro." Pushed the button: uploaded, for all the world to see.

I was proud, and after an indefinite period of time (hours? days? weeks?) phoned Phil up and read it to him.

"Actually," said Phil calmly, "we had Sherpas. Well, they called them Porters. They were amazing."

"Oh, no! It's out there! What do I do?"

"Say ice ladders. We didn't need those."

I scurried back and changed it. Now I try to be very careful about research. I certainly don't pretend I know what you need to climb mountains any more.

People ask how they can see the most recent patterns.

Our patterns are all displayed in the order of entry. It's like a telephone keypad. On Shop Page 1 (where you land up if you click Shop at the top of the page), the most-recently-entered pattern is in the 1 position; second-most-recent in the 2 position; and so on. As patterns get entered, they push the other ones to the right and down, and ultimately onto page 2 and 3 and so on.

Sometimes people have trouble trying to sign in.

This is almost always because people have forgotten or misremembered their login (in which case, email us at support@patternfish.com, and we'll remind you); or, in some cases, their OS or browser needs to be jolted, reloaded, restarted, or to be turned off and on again. If anything else ever happens, take notes and write to us in detail about it.

There are helpful instructions (really worth reading!) for downloading your patterns in your Pattern Stash.

In most cases, downloaded patterns are processed within a minute. But sometimes it can take longer-- just like it sometimes takes an unexpected while to get ordinarily emails. Don't forget to refresh your browser to make sure you're looking at the latest information. If your patterns haven't arrived safely within half an hour, then contact us.

"So, how's it going?" everyone asks, meaning nothing but Patternfish. Short answer: we're very happy with our performance in the first five months (we're five months old today)-- but we have no idea exactly HOW we're doing, if you know what we mean. Because there's nothing we can measure ourselves against. We don't know anything else like us. And if there were something else exactly the same, they might not share their figures. So we'll just tell you some statistics. All figures given are from 1 August through 2 November 2008.

During that time, we've had over 591,000 page views from 102 countries (who knew Azerbaijan would come on so early?). The average person spends 6 minutes and 39 seconds looking at 14.95 pages per visit (though some countries like Mexico, Iran, Chile, Romania, and Thailand average over 30 pages each-- wow!).

The top fifteen countries for visiting us are, in order: the United States, Canada, the UK, Australia, Sweden, Germany, France, the Netherlands, Denmark, Japan, Norway, New Zealand, Italy, Turkey, and Finland. The United States represent 3 times as many visits as those from Canada (we're #2-- again), but then they have 300 million people versus our 30 million-- pretty good, really!

Fun stuff we track for absolutely no reason: there have been hundreds of visits from West Hollywood and Beverly Hills combined. Does this mean film industry people are Patternfishing? We hope so. Get out there and knit and crochet in public, you actors and film folk! Come out! We don't care who you're sleeping with-- we want to see your fibre and design choices!