Become the Master of Disaster

Submission guidelines are here to customize your experience and give you the best chance of becoming our next Seam Ripper Champion.  Please read guidelines carefully before submitting.  And, to get an even better grasp of the type of stories that we like and are examples of overcoming fabric art hardships, please check out our past winners in their Hall of Fame.

Normally you must be a member of PYB Designs. However, for this one time, we are opening up the championships to anyone – simply click over to the submit tab and send us an email!

If submitting via email: please view our guidelines here. If you are uncomfortable with technology, simply send us your submission attached as a Word document in an email.  You can send us pictures in this manner as well – but not video.

If submitting via the official form, click here or at the bottom of the page.

Your story must be original. 

PYB Designs is a quality site that strives to bring valuable, fresh, and interesting content to our readers.

• We will do our utmost to make sure that every submission is not plagiarized – but we really rely on the discretion of our readers.
• Submitting a story that we find to be taken from someone else will result in disqualification – and depending on the level of the stolen content may result in being removed as a member.
• If your story has been published elsewhere, such as on a personal blog, website, or on social media, please provide us with those links so that we don’t find them and mistakenly believe it to be someones else’s post.
• If your story has been accepted to a magazine or publication, you must have the copyrights free and clear.

Be yourself!

• Don’t be afraid to let your personality show in your storytelling. Realism is vastly more important to us than perfection.

Be honest.

• If your nightmare project came from a pattern or kit, please feel free to reference it, but don’t focus on the product. This is about your experience – not a company.
• Feel free to be funny, depressed, excited, amused, or wry.

Don’t use bad language or offensive content.

• This is really important. We want our site to be child-friendly, so we will be forced to delete bad language, and may disqualify an entry entirely if it is focused in a hateful direction.

Pictures

• Not having pictures won’t disqualify you – but please be aware that PYB Designs is a visual site.
• Pictures are how we express ideas to our readers and also spread the word on social media.
• So please include:
• A portrait of yourself – if you are not super camera shy
• A picture of your finished product (VERY important, no matter how good your writing is, if you don’t have at least this picture to head your entry with, chances are you won’t win.)
• Pictures of your process – if you have them (FYI these are a lot of fun, but if you didn’t take pictures during the job, it won’t hurt your chances of winning.)

Video submissions

• If you are really into video, we will accept video stories in a YouTube or Vimeo link format.
• Simply upload your video to your video hosting site with the tagline – PYB Seam Ripper Championship Entry (your title).
• We cannot accept raw video files – the data upload is just too much

Final editing

Don’t worry about being perfect in your writing.  What matters is the heart you put into your work, and we will revise as necessary to put the best face on your work.

• We reserve the right to make necessary editing changes to your submissions
• Grammar, spelling, and confusing sentences may be edited without your approval
• If we find a major error or something we don’t understand we may return your submission to you for revision (along with notations)
• If we make major changes – more than a couple of sentences or the removal of certain paragraphs – you will be notified for approval prior to publication

Rights

We ask that you not republish your story anywhere else while it is in current consideration for the Seam Ripper Champion.  Then all rights revert to you.

If you win (Hurray!) then PYB will retain sole publication rights for a period of six months, after which you may feel free to republish elsewhere.

Use the form to submit your story – or follow the guidelines to send us an email submission!

Email Submission Guidelines for Open Submissions April 2019

Email to:

karyl@pybdesigns.com 

Subject Line:

Please use “PYB Open Submissions – SRC” as your subject line.

Email Body

Please send a very short email with all your contact information.

Story:

Please send us your story as an MS Word document in an attachment.  This is the easiest way for us to read and make necessary edits.  Please include your contact information: daytime phone number (optional) email address, and – most importantly – your name  at the top of the document.  Also include this information in the brief email message you send with your submission.  Please.

Your story should be at least 500 words long – this is a little over a page in an MS Word document.  We don’t really have a word count limit, but 2,000 words is a very long article and may be subjected to some editing on our part.  You can also send in a shorter story submission if you have a video to go with your submission.

Pictures and/or Video

You do need to submit one picture of your finished product for us to use as the header picture.  We’d also very much like to have a profile picture of you for your winning entry!  If you don’t have a picture of yourself then please note that in your email.  If you have other pictures, of the process in particular, we’d love to see them and include them if your article is published!

If you have a video – you need to have it uploaded as a YouTube or Vimeo video.  Please send us the link to that video, and we’ll be able to embed it in the article.  We can’t accept raw video files due to the dense data upload/download issues.

Deadline

The deadline for our only Open Submissions Seam Ripper Championships ever is April 23, 2019 – by midnight Eastern Standard Time.

We don’t have an automated email to send you, but if you don’t receive a confirmation email from us in 24 hours please resend the email with the subject line “Haven’t heard back – PYB Open Submissions – SRC” as a reminder.  You can also contact us on our Facebook page for confirmation or for any questions.

Winning

If your story is chosen as our winning submission, we’ll contact you by email and finish up publication details.  If your entry isn’t chosen, but was one of our front-runners, we may get in touch with you to request that you resubmit your story in our next Championships.

Thank you!  We can’t wait to read your amazing stories and see your beautiful pictures.  The next Seam Ripper Champion will be announced by May 2, 2019, depending upon how many submissions we receive.

Memberships will come online soon – you can sign up for FREE to our bimonthly newsletter and be the first to know when our membership option does go live.  Thank you!