Patreon for Tlingit Button Blanket Creators: Formline, Crest Regalia & the Apple Tax

The button blanket sits at the center of Tlingit, Tsimshian, and Haida ceremonial life as one of the most visually powerful forms of regalia in the Northwest Coast tradition. Its canonical form is a Hudson’s Bay Company trade wool blanket — navy blue, occasionally red or black — used as the backing onto which appliquéd panels of contrasting red or black wool melton cloth are stitched in the vocabulary of Northwest Coast formline design. Abalone shell buttons (primarily Haliotis kamtschatkana, Northern abalone) outline the formline shapes sewn onto that backing, creating a shimmering crest display worn at potlatches, naming ceremonies, memorials, and other high-protocol occasions. The button blanket is a post-Contact development distinct from the far older Chilkat blanket — it emerged in the early nineteenth century when maritime trade made glass and abalone buttons accessible, but it adopted exactly the same crest ownership system that governs all high-prestige Northwest Coast art: the Tlingit two-moiety system (Raven moiety and Eagle/Wolf moiety) partitions crests by matrilineal clan descent, so a button blanket depicts the inherited crests of the wearer’s specific clan — Raven, Eagle, Bear, Killer Whale, Frog, Wolf, and many others. Patreon has emerged as a meaningful revenue tool for makers and cultural educators in this tradition: the Native American diaspora communities concentrated in Pacific Northwest cities and urban Indigenous centers in British Columbia show iOS device adoption in the 62–74% range, which means a disproportionate share of every dollar a Tlingit button blanket creator earns through Patreon on mobile is routed first through Apple’s 30% commission before it reaches the artist.

Formline design vocabulary and button appliqué mechanics

Formline is the organizing visual grammar of Northwest Coast art: a continuous positive-space line whose variable width — swelling at corners and junctions, thinning along straight runs — defines and outlines crest figures across every medium from totem poles to button blankets. The formline system operates through a strict hierarchy of shapes. The ovoid is the primary formline element: an oval with characteristically flattened or gently indented sides, used everywhere in the composition as an eye socket, a joint, a fin socket, or a primary compositional container. The U-form is the secondary element, a U-shaped band that emerges from ovoid interiors or fills the negative spaces between primary forms. C-forms and S-forms serve as tertiary filler elements, completing the composition without leaving unresolved negative space. Crest figures are constructed with strict bilateral symmetry — the left half mirrors the right half — whether the figure is shown in profile (one eye, split-form convention) or full-face. On a button blanket, the appliquéd red or black wool melton panel is cut to the formline shape of the crest figure, folded under a 0.6 cm seam allowance on inside curves (inside curves require clipping to the fold line at close intervals to allow the cloth to lie flat), then pinned and slip-stitched to the navy backing. Buttons are sewn along the inner edge of the appliquéd border panel at intervals of 1–1.5 cm, each button stitched through both the appliqué and the backing using waxed linen or heavy nylon thread for durability through repeated wearing and ceremonial folding. The bottom hem typically carries a fringe finish — wool yarn fringe hand-cut to ceremonial drag length or commercial braid fringe — whose weight gives the blanket its characteristic movement during dance. Patreon tiers for button blanket artists frequently offer process documentation unavailable anywhere else: pattern drafting from crest reference photographs, seam allowance marking on formline curves, thread tension adjustments for abalone button weight, and the decision logic for adapting a standing crest figure into the rectangular field of a blanket backing.

Crest ownership, potlatch regalia, and the Raven’s Tail predecessor

The intellectual and legal core of button blanket making is the crest ownership system, and Patreon content that documents this system carries cultural weight that a finished-blanket photograph cannot convey. In the Tlingit system, crests are not free symbols — they are the inherited property of specific matrilineal clans within either the Raven moiety or the Eagle/Wolf moiety. A maker cannot simply choose a visually appealing crest figure; they must hold the hereditary right to that crest through their own clan lineage, or they must obtain formal permission from the lineage that owns it — a process negotiated through clan elders and validated through the potlatch protocol. Contemporary Tlingit, Haida, and Tsimshian artists working in Southeast Alaska (Sitka, Ketchikan, Juneau), on Vancouver Island, in Haida Gwaii, and in the Prince Rupert area have used Patreon specifically to document this research layer: the genealogical work of determining which crests belong to which clan, the consultations with elders, and the cultural accountability that distinguishes a legitimate regalia commission from appropriation. The button blanket itself is best understood in relation to two older blanket traditions it did not replace but supplemented. The Raven’s Tail blanket — the true pre-Contact formal blanket of the Northern Northwest Coast — is constructed through complex two-faced supplementary weft twining in mountain goat wool and cedar bark, producing geometric rather than formline patterning; it predates the formline-bearing button blanket by centuries. The Chilkat blanket, woven in complex warp twining with a characteristic palette of yellow, black, white, and turquoise cedar-bark weft, carries full formline crest imagery and continued to be woven and worn alongside button blankets after Contact. The button blanket offered a faster, less labor-intensive route to crest regalia — meaningful for communities whose weaving knowledge had been disrupted by colonial-era residential school systems — and its relative accessibility made it a resilient vehicle for cultural continuity through the twentieth century and into the present revival.

Apple Tax for Tlingit button blanket Patreon creators

Native American diaspora audiences in Seattle, Portland, Eugene, Anchorage, Vancouver, and Victoria skew heavily toward iPhone: iOS adoption in these urban Indigenous communities runs approximately 62–74%, which means the majority of patrons supporting a Tlingit button blanket creator are subscribing through the Patreon iOS app. When a patron subscribes via the iOS app, Apple collects 30% of the gross subscription price before Patreon processes its own platform fee — a combined deduction that can exceed 35% of the creator’s listed price. At a $200/month creator income with 64% iOS share, Apple’s commission alone costs $38.40/month ($460.80/year) — money that could fund abalone button stock, red melton cloth yardage, or clan elder consultation travel. At $350/month with 66% iOS, the Apple commission reaches $69.30/month ($831.60/year). At $500/month with 68% iOS, the commission is $102/month ($1,224/year) — more than the cost of a full blanket’s worth of Hudson’s Bay wool. KeepTier routes all patron subscriptions through the web browser rather than the iOS app, placing the transaction outside Apple’s in-app purchase system entirely and legally. Because Apple’s 30% commission only applies to purchases made through the App Store’s in-app purchase mechanism, a web-only checkout flow is not subject to it. KeepTier charges creators a flat $9/month platform fee regardless of revenue volume — no percentage rake on top of Apple’s commission, no sliding scale. For a Tlingit button blanket creator earning $350/month from patrons, switching to KeepTier from a Patreon iOS-heavy setup recovers the full $69.30/month Apple commission and replaces it with a predictable $9 flat fee, netting an additional $60.30/month that stays with the artist and the cultural work they are doing.