If you missed the one last fall, or had a blast participating, Desamour Designs is running another BIPOC MAL for 2020. It started February 1st (sorry I’m late posting this – it was a crazy work week!) and runs through March 31, 2020.
There is more info in the blog post on DesamourDesigns.com, including resources to find patterns, but the only rules are:
- The designer (s) MUST be Black, Indigenous, or Person of Color (BIPOC).
- The designer MUST have 10k or fewer followers.
The second rule is new, and I think a useful addition. Since the goal is to help increase exposure and visibility of people who aren’t seen and/or recognized enough, asking people to focus on BIPOC designers with 10k or fewer followers is a great way to help do that. Not that people with over 10k followers don’t deserve our attention and business. But, it’s similar to the idea of financial aid for college students – it’s trying to even the playing field a bit for talented designers who may not have the same resources to generate exposure. Somebody with over 10k followers has a certain level of visibility already.
In looking around at patterns for this time around, I was a little surprised at times by who already had well over 10k followers, and who didn’t. Number of published patterns, complexity of design, these didn’t correlate that much with number of followers on instagram or favorites/projects in Ravelry (this is me eyeballing numbers, not exactly a scientific study). Of course, not every designer is particularly active on Instragram either, so it wouldn’t be reasonable to expect a perfect correlation.
I’ll admit, I’m cheating just a bit. I’m not starting something new just yet, because I have a LOT of projects going on or which I want to start as well as my promise to myself to spend time spinning each day in February (more on how that’s coming tomorrow).
Instead, I’m committing to finishing my Twisted Lines top by Knidhiknits. If I get that done before March 31, 2020 I can start thinking about a second project for MAL. So, my reward for getting my act together to get this one over the finish line will be letting myself add something to the knitting/crochet queue.
I’m almost at the armholes, so I just need to make sure I’m working on this each day* alongside my spinning.