Back to First Principles/When Does It Become My Own?

Sometimes, you have to go back to the start. I worked on a sock last night, nothing too fancy. It came together, and I like it. Knitter's block dealt with, I think.

On a different note, this raises in my mind a question about how far one has to stray from a published design before it counts as original.

The source project is the Holly Leaf Socks from the Vogue Knitting On the Go Socks book. I posted about this before. Two goes and it was awful on both. They're magnificent, but really not up my alley from a construction perspective.

As I said, I should have known -- knitted flat, with copious intarsia. A total disaster the first time around, and a medium range disaster even in the modified version.

So, back to my revised plan... much simpler, much more manageable. A narrow edging at the top in bright red, the leg in a nice festive green mock cabled rib, and I'm planning the heel and toe in red. I'll probably stick with a single colour of green, rather than the 2-colour foot I was considering -- because really, what's the point of working the damn thing flat and then having to seam it.

But then at what stage is this so far from the source that it's an original design? The yarn is different, the number of stitches is different, the needles are different, there's no intarsia at all, they're worked in the round rather than flat... what is the same is the edging and the basic colours and the mock cable rib stitch.

Hmm....