Stitches

How do you become a published Cross Stitch Designer.?

I love designing my own cross stitch patterns and family and friends think I am very good at it. What should I do now to protect my designs from copywriting, and get them published.? I would like to put together my own website to sell them but am not sure about the legal side of this. All help would be most appreciated

Public Comments

1. I would say write to established groups,clubs they may be able to help. Looks for chat boards get advise save designs till they are safe. Hope that helps. may depend on where you live as well. I have added urls . look for email and ask I am sure they will help. Hope that helps I love Cross Stitch, did my jeans once upon a time.
2. I don't know but i can reccomend a great set of books titles like Crewel World etc which all take place with needleworkers who have the same questions
3. You can send your designs in to cross stitch magazines and they might possibly publish them. But, I am not sure who would retain copyright in that situation. For your own website, you could just create image files of your design graphs and print them out when someone buys one. Be sure to include a copyright notice on the graph somewhere. Generally, regarding copyright, once you create your design, it is copyrighted to you. However, to be able to enforce those rights, you might want to copyright the design through the US copyright office (www.copyright.gov). This would, of course, cost money, as would enforcing any rights.