Academic Dishonesty... and Quilting.

At knitting club last night (yes, they let me come even though I crochet) we got onto a conversation about acadmic dishonesty and plagarism. As someone who has taught or TA'd at the high school, community college, and university levels, I've seen my fair share of plagarism. (And one of the women last night shared a story about her friend, who had a student who plagarised a paper--and it was his teacher's own work!)

But as we talked about stealing someone else's work in the academic setting, I started wondering about the crafting world and the oftentimes touchy subject of patterns and the "borrowing" thereof.

I'm one of those people who rarely sticks to a quilt pattern. I have plenty of books and magazines full of patterns, and I happily give credit when I use a published pattern (or combine two or three of them). But I am often inspired by pictures of quilts that I see when I'm browsing through QuilterBlogs. If I fall in love with the quilt instantly, I'll bookmark that particular post... but far too often, I end up sitting down with my graph paper (or more recently, EQ7) and vaguely remembering something I saw a couple weeks ago and thought was pretty, and sketching out a design that is similar, or just "inspired by."

So the question I have is--is this quilting plagarism? I don't make quilts to sell--only for my personal use or for gifts. And I'm sure many of the quilts I see and love weren't designed by the blogger who made and posted pictures of them, so it would be extremely difficult to go back and figure out who the original designer of the pattern was. And then comes the additional complication that sometimes people think alike--and two people who have never met or seen each other's work may design very similar quilts.

What to do? To blithely quilt on, giving credit when I can, and hoping no one jumps out of the woodwork to accuse me of theft if a quilt I designed was inspired by one of theirs? Or to stress and meticulously document every quilt I see that I think I might ever be inclined to imitate?

I think, for now, I'm picking the first option.