Since winter holiday has been over and school has begun again, I've done zero knitting.

For those of you who don't know ... and that's probably everyone ... I go to culinary school. Yes, it is loads of fun, but at times it can be soooo stressful! Especially the cooking classes ... especially the one I'm currently in - Advanced International cooking. It's a great class, nice and small (only six of us guys), the food is great (though it is foreign so it wreaks havoc with the bowels) and it's an over all fun class, but god, the work involved!!! Classes run from 6:10p.m. to 11:30p.m. and I have a forty-five minute drive home so I don't even get home until quarter past twelve, then I go to sleep, wake up around 9:00 and do homework and write reports until 4:00 when I get ready for school again!!

All-in-all this leaves no time for any knitting. I check my Ravelry groups daily (between large bouts of homework, as a break) so I still stay up-to-date with knitting ... trends? but I wish I could actually do some knitting. Fortunately, I only have two more days of this class left and then I'm on to a class that will, apparently, only run for an hour or two (choir in background singing "Hallelujah Chorus") and I might be able to do some knitting.

Since I have stayed in touch with the knitting community, I have gained some good knitting patterns that I might use to *gasp* actually knit something to put up on Etsy!! As you may have noticed, that is if you've even been there, my Etsy shop is on hiatus ... on hiatus *scoffs* it's never been able to be on hiatus as there's never been anything there!! Perhaps something might show up in the near (or not-so-near) future, keep checking it!

And now for something completely(-ish) different: I am part of the Etsy group on Ravelry, and I think that someone had posted something that had to do with copyright on patterns. This intrigued me as I've never really thought about it. I mean, yeah, I have considered the fact that someone may have copyrighted the patterns I've used, but I never thought about how the copyright might affect the things I sell on Etsy. So, if anyone (the zero of you who read this blog) has any information that might help me out on this topic, feel free to throw it my way. I'm mostly concerned with free patterns, as that's all I use, and if selling items using free copyrighted patterns is legal. My thought process on the issue is that if the pattern is free, then the fact that's it is copyrighted shouldn't matter and that, because it's free, one should be able to use it as one wishes. Of course, I would give credit to the author of the pattern, but I still think that I should be able to use it as I wish.

On a similar note, another issue I was concerned with is creating my "own" pattern using pictures I've seen on the internet. Okay, my actual question would be this: If I find a knitted pattern online that has no* pattern showing how to make said pattern and I reproduce said pattern, is that in any way illegal, copyrighted or no?

So, that was my first actual, rather lengthy, post ... woot!



*from the research I've done (scouring the website to the point of exhaustion and still coming up with no pattern, link or otherwise)