This is a bit of a mini rant so I'll issue apologies up front and feel free to move on if this isn't of interest. I'm sure it can't be just me though who has noticed this. Over the course of recent months I've noticed that there is an increasing trend for people to regard social media as their own personal pattern search engine.

A good friend of mine recently posted a photo of her knitting in progress on Instagram. She is a designer and frequently shares photos of her work, her inspiration and her designs. This however was just the yarny equivalent of doodling. Playing around with yarn and needles for the sheer joy of it. She took a quick snap of the pleasing colours and textures and thought nothing of it.

Then she found herself besieged by requests for the pattern in the comments. "Pattern please" people merrily chirped again and again, and even just the rather curt "Pattern?" - the latter clearly from someone who didn't graduate from charm school recently.

And of course, as is often the way, I found myself noticing this pattern of behaviour over and over again, across all social media platforms. A lovely photo of a finished knit would invariably attract more than a few of these types of responses with varying degrees of politeness.

I absolutely love seeing photos of people's finished work and yes, sometimes a particular pattern intrigues me enough to want to go and track it down on Ravelry, but as a grown woman I'm more than capable of doing that myself - I don't require the original poster to provide the link for me.

I've even seen instances where people get cross with the original poster for not providing a pattern link. "But it's up to them (the original poster) to provide the link", they assert confidently, "It's their responsibility"

I would like to make the case for the exact opposite and suggest that posting a photo of your finished knits bears no such responsibility. 

What on earth happened to sharing our knits for the sheer joy of sharing? In an ideal world we would cast off our latest project and then immediately turn to a friend, loved one or knitterly colleague to show it off to. Often though, we don't have knitty folk around us and so we turn to our online friends instead. Our virtual community of yarny folks who understand and instinctively know just how many hours of work that cabled blanket took to make. But in the excitement of taking a photo and sharing it online we don't always have the time to provide the pattern details or yarn details or go into specifics about what cast on we used. We just want to share our stuff.

And we should feel free to share our stuff without the pattern police popping up to insist that we provide a link to help them populate their own pattern libraries. Let's face it, if you are anything like me your Ravelry pattern library already contains more patterns than you could knit in a lifetime. It's hardly the end of the world if you can't add another one to it.

So knit on with pride, share photos of your work as and when you want to. Share a link if you want to, but don't feel obligated to. It's your knitting and your work and your only responsibility is in helping to make the internet a more yarn-filled and colourful place