Stop Thief!

Over the weekend I received a message from one of the tatting elite, the Tatting Goddess. Isn't it funny how every community no matter how small has their own famous names that no one outside the community has ever heard of, but I digress. She informed me that she had seen one of my pieces on a questionable site. Now, I've found my photos being used without my permission before, but so far it's always been in a good way. The pictures linking to my store and credited to me, usually they are accompanied by some kind words as well. This was not the nice kind, it was the kind where someone was actually using my image as a set of pictures to convince people to purchase a disc of tatting patterns from them.

What makes this even sillier, is that the patterns on the disc appear to all be vintage patterns that are all in the public domain. In other words, they are all free patterns available all over the internet. I've seen a lot of people complain of these kinds of image thefts, but I had been fortunate enough to not have experienced this until now. I feel annoyed and I keep trying to decide whether this person thought my design was amazing enough to sell her product or that I wouldn't be a threat if I caught her. I guess it really doesn't matter what they thought, I sent a strongly worded email that I'm fairly certain will be ignored and that's about all I can do. I wish for a moment that I knew a really good hacker to take down the site, but that's probably a little extreme, huh?

The Challenge

Switching Gears now, I think I have gotten enough interest to go forward with my tatting challenge. In the next couple of days, I will be working out the details, tatting up medallions and attempting to con a few folk into being judges (if you're interested, just let me know).
Participates will get to choose from 2 sizes in 2 colors. The small ones are about 2 inches across available in ecru and black and the large ones are 4 inches across and I'm only making those in ecru. I will be charging $5 for each of the small ones and $8 for the large ones and domestic and Canadian shipping will be free. Each person may buy as many of the medallions as they want for the challenge and they may be dyed if desired. The finished pieces will be due by July 31st and will be judged on the usual traits, creativity, function, quality of construction and generally how cool they are. I will be offering up three places worth of prizes. First place will your choice of pieces from my etsy store up to $40 or a credit up to that amount. Second place will be up to $20 and third place will be your choice of one of my pendants .

I'm hoping to have the medallions available for purchase on Wednesday, but no later that Friday. These rules are a work in progress and the medallion listings will hopefully contain the final version. Please let me know via email of etsy convo if you'd like to be on the notification list for the challenge.