The Story Continues....

If you're one of my regular readers you will know that I used to design very regularly for Yarn Forward/Knit magazine and had done a couple of designs for Inside Crochet too. These mags were owned by Kerrie Allman and her husband. I blogged about my history with the company and why I stopped working with them here. If you are unfamiliar with the KAL Media/ACM history of not paying their designers and other dodgy business practice, you may wish to take a break and read that blog post.

There's also a Ravelry group (you need to be a Ravelry member to access this group though). This particular thread on that group gives a clear history of events.

Early in May ACM went into administration. At the time there was speculation about Kerrie and her family trying to start up a 'phoenix' company. The speculation centered around Kerrie's dad setting up a new company to take over the mags (Kerrie's Mum and sister already worked for the mags).

A few weeks ago it was announced that a company called Tailormade Publishing had bought Inside Crochet and Knit which is due to change it's name to Yarnwise very soon and Handmade Living, I think, and some of the old staff have been taken on to run those mags.

The other mags (Modern Quilting, Handmade Fashion and Sew Hip) were sold to a company called Craft Magazine Shop and there's been a lot of speculation of who they are. A few things happened when this was announced which made a lot of people suspect Kerrie was still somehow involved in running these mags. The Sewing Directory blogged about it here. There's also a lot of speculation, facts, and comments on the Ravelry group I linked to earlier in this post. To me it looks like Kerrie is still involved somehow. It doesn't affect me as I'm not likely to buy any of the mags affected as I'm not into sewing and quilting but if you are or know someone who is it may be an idea to bring this to their attention.

Kerrie blogged about this issue here and talks a lot about her grieving process etc. Click forward to the next post and perhaps she didn't grieve so much after all.  I am glad that the knitting and crochet mags have escaped Kerrie now but it does worry me that she may still be involved in running craft magazines.

It's taken me a few days to decide whether or not to blog about this but as I've blogged about this in the past I decided I ought to let you all know what's currently going on. I will submit again to Yarnwise and Inside Crochet and I will start buying those mags again and I hope these mags will now be run in a professional way and that designers will be paid.

it's quite ironic that designers provide the majority of the content for knitting magazines, yet designers are probably the lowest paid out of everyone who works on a magazine. But that's a whole other discussion and i won't start going on about that now.