UPDATE (5th Jan 2015): Celtic Cable Shawls is now available for EU customers to buy from LoveKnitting here - all of my individual patterns are available to EU customers via the integrated Ravelry/LoveKnitting checkout. There is one drawback, which is that LoveKnitting does not currently support Ravelry-based promotions. I have an on-going promotion where anyone who has bought the pattern Taliesin can get Celtic Cable Shawls with the price of the pattern deducted - this currently won't work for EU customers unfortunately. If you'd like to take advantage of this offer and you're based in the EU, please e-mail me/Rav PM me with your Rav username and Paypal e-mail address, and I can arrange a way to send the e-book to you at the discounted price!
This is an announcement for anyone in the EU (not the UK) who wants to buy my patterns in the future (if you're in the UK, or outside of the EU, this doesn't apply to you so you can cheerfully ignore it!).
From 1st January 2015, EU VAT laws are changing - sellers of digital products to customers in the EU now have to charge tax based on the customer's location. Without wanting to get too ranty, this legislation has been very poorly written and badly communicated to the businesses that it affects - it took a lot of us by surprise and for the past couple of months, Ravelry has been working to find a solution. They have teamed up with LoveKnitting to provide a checkout service that will automatically add the required VAT to Ravelry pattern prices for EU customers.
Not every designer on Ravelry will be using this service (for a variety of reasons), but after a lot of thought I've decided it's the best solution for me for now (hopefully this will be a temporary solution and I'll let you know once things change!). What this means for you, as a customer living in the EU (non-UK), is that from Jan 1st, when you buy one of my patterns on Ravelry, you will check-out through LoveKnitting. This process is entirely automatic, but you will be required to make an account with LoveKnitting (you only need to do this once). The pattern will still be saved in your Ravelry library as normal, the only difference is the check-out process.
Ravelry have written an excellent guide for EU customers here: http://www.ravelry.com/content/vat/loveknitting
One small flaw in the system is that at the moment, it can't handle e-books, so for a short while Celtic Cable Shawls will be unavailable to EU customers. There is a workaround which involves putting all the individual pattern files into one PDF and uploading to LoveKnitting - I will be working on this tomorrow and hope to have it available very soon.
Apologies to all of my EU customers for the shortness of notice in communicating this change to you - and best wishes for 2015!