Thank you so much for your lovely comments about yesterdays post! I really was nervous about showing the photo's - sometimes I think we invest a little too much in the things we make and they end up very personal. I don't know why I feel extra special love for the dolls quilts but I do.
I'm always amazed by how much blogging has changed my life. It really has opened up whole new worlds and allowed me to meet some amazing people and I'm very grateful for that. However, there is one downside to blogging that occasionally bothers me. I often find that there are times that I don't post something that I've made because I am afraid of people thinking that I have copied someone else.
I'm positive that it will have happened to many other people, but sometimes it really gets me down when I have worked on a design and am really pleased with it, only to have someone else post something very similar before I get a chance to.
Most of us have the same books and magazines and read the same blogs, so it is obvious that many of us are going to be inspired by similar things at similar times. However, because most people (including myself) often don't say what has influenced a design it can sometimes appear that we all think we are ultra original and therefore being copied if someone else does something similar. We tend to ignore the fact that our individual design is heavily inspired by a japanese craft book or even by Martha Stewart.
Obviously we all have our own interpretations of the things that inspire us and that is what then develops in to our own design style. And of course to look at somebodies interpretation and then copy it verbatim is not a great thing, but that's a subject that is oft talked about in Blogland and one that I don't feel needs further discussion today.
What I am interested in is something that is a little different. I have been noticing more and more that whilst we are all influenced by, for example, the japanese craft books, it seems that the lucky first person to post their interpretation of a specific item , is then bestowed the title of Originator of the design.
And that from that moment on, if anyone else posts their interpretation of the actual original design (from the book it was first seen in, not the blog) they are then seen to be copying.
I must clarify here that I am not saying that the blogger who got in there first (as so often is the case) bestows themselves with the title of original designer, but that it just seems to happen within the community. All it takes is one person to say 'have you seen so and so's new design' and that's it, it's off and running. And of course no one can then say 'actually that design is by Martha or somebody in Japan' because that seems like you're being accusatory.
Even writing this makes me a little nervous. Of course there may be plenty of people out there thinking that I am only writing this out of sour grapes because I am not original enough to come up with my own designs. And that just isn't the case (I don't pretend to be original). I am writing it because it makes me uncomfortable when I post similar items to other people and yet I know that we have simply been influenced by the exact same copy of Machine Made Patchwork (for example).
I also honestly wonder if we sometimes forget that we didn't come up with the original design just our interpretation of it. I have read blogs that really do seem to suggest that the pattern is theirs when I have a book on my shelf with the exact same pattern in it.
Again, let me reiterate, I'm not saying that there are bloggers out there claiming existing designs as their own (although I'm sure there probably are!) just that there are readers and commenters claiming it for them. And that makes me uncomfortable.
Of course I could just be paranoid. It happens.
The stockings are for sale here . I'll be adding more over the next few days.