KSCC Saving Patterns

Despite my desire to grow our own healthy food, and live out in the country with the clean and quiet air, I'm about as far from a Luddite as you can get. I'm a huge nerd and really couldn't cope without my high-speed internet.

I love free-use, open-source software like Firefox. If you're still using I.E. you have no idea what you're missing! Firefox is free to use and download, very simple to navigate, and unlike internet explorer, you can remove it later if you don't like it.

Mine has an extension on it called Scrapbook. It works sort of like your bookmarks do, but it saves the entire site. So you can go and visit it offline later, or if that site goes down you can still access the information. I use this all the time for my KSCC patterns. Saves me from printing out tons and tons of patterns (gotta save the forests!), and I never loose a pattern because someone forgot to pay their server fees.

If you don't want to add Scrapbook, you can print patterns and crafts "to file". You do this by going into print, then select "print to file" instead of whatever printer you use. This allows you to save the pattern as a file on your computer. I believe windows always saves the file as a ".doc" but if you've got the option ".pdf" is the best because it's the most used. 

For paper patterns I always back them up in the computer with my scanner. You don't need an expensive or fancy scanner if you're mostly doing documents (although I have digital copies of my old photos too). That way I don't have bits of paper floating around to loose, spill coffee on, have the kids doodle on; and they are way easier to find! I just name all my patterns with something descriptive like "knit page boy hat" and use the search function when I feel like making one later.

Just remember if you're saving patterns for your own personal use you're not going to have any problems. But you've got to check copyright rules before distributing them to friends (even if you're giving them away for free) and you should never charge people for something you got for free even if you put it on a disk or something.