Peer pressure
So here I am, happily knitting along on my zippy little scarf, when my friend Camy shoots me a link to the same project on her Ravelry page. She was with me when I visited Loopy Mango, and I knew she bought the same yarn in black with pink rosettes. “Cute,” I think as I look at the photos of her scarf in progress.
I keep reading. Camy starts talking about how she did her scarf. How she decided she wanted longer and narrower, so she used bigger needles and cast on six stitches instead of eight. Suddenly, my scarf looks fat and clunky. Then she goes on about how she decided a serge edge--slipping the first stitch of each row--to give it a smoother line. Now I look at the bumps on the edge of my scarf and convince myself they’d be itchy against my neck. Did I see any of this before? Of course not. Would I have were it not for Camy? I think we all know the answer to that.
When you can whip up the entire project in a single evening, it’s alarmingly easy to talk yourself into ripping the whole thing out and starting again. “It won’t take long,” I coo to myself as I once again wind this into a fiber rosette volleyball. “The thinner, longer scarf will give me more to play with,” I console my now empty needles (still size 35’s--I couldn’t totally copy Camy and switch to 50’s ‘cuz that’d be cheating).
You know what they say: steal one idea, and it’s plagiarism. Steal a couple of ideas, and it’s “research.” Either way, I'm back to square one. Or is that stitch one?
1 comment:
Haha! I can't believe you actually copied me on that. I'm very happy with the changes I made, by the way. With 8 stitches, it was really too short--I know because I knit it almost to the end and figured out I couldn't wind it twice around my neck, which is when I frogged.
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