So I want to make a matching cowl for my Baa-ble hat, but perhaps make it even more interesting by adding another fibre animal to the line of sheep.

Now one could look for pale imitations, arguably with a rather clumsy alpaca, or one could turn to talented, genuine designers for a truly gorgeous design. So I think I’ll choose one of the very realistic & clever fibre animals from the March of Fibres sweater to ensure my cowl is cuter than cute.

I want to use natural undyed colours of Shetland for a truly authentic Northern Isles cowl, and I know from previous projects that 2 strands of J&S jumper weight will give a nice aran thickness.

Result - I’ve thoroughly enjoyed knitting this design and meeting the challenge of combining a small part of another pattern with it. I can highly recommend both patterns and the yarn I used doubled throughout.

What’s behind my statement, The Genuine Article?

I’ve downloaded another ‘version’ of this design, that purports to be a new, unique design, merely ‘inspired-by’ Donna’s original Baa-ble hat chart. At the moment I’m knitting alternate rows from each pattern and generally they are identical. Each pattern has the exact same number of stitches in the round.

So what I’m ending up with is looking fine and as Donna intended it to look. I am using the delightful alpaca from Liz’s March of Fibres - it perfectly captures the form and personality of an Alpaca in a few deft stitches.

What has been revealed by knitting using both patterns and examining project photographs for the ‘inspired-by’ pattern is that the pattern now available from the other ‘designer’ has been changed some time between cowls that were finished in August and those that were finished this month. Some of these are clearly, from the project pages, from kits sold by a LYS local to the ‘designer’.

The main difference between the early and current versions of the ‘inspired-by’ pattern is that a row has been added between rows 15 & 16 on the original pattern, repeating row 15, and giving all the sheep a, IMPO, weird elongated look.
In addition the speckles immediately above the sheep have been removed so they now start in a harsh straight line at row 23 rather than having the more pleasing speckles scattered between the backs of the sheep.

There have also been some minor adjustments to the rows of speckles and the ‘plain’ rows between speckle rows.

The key point though is that, with the exception of the extra row added between rows 15 & 16 on the original, and my choice to use an alpaca chart that I find infinitely more charming, I am fully able to knit the sheep section of design using both charts completely interchangeably, and the speckled section with a bit of care about which line was taken from which part of the original pattern.

I’ve knitted many sheep in stranded work, some of which are on my project pages for anyone to look at. I’ve also had a hunt through the Ravelry pattern database.
As far as I can see the exact sequence of sideways sheep with big black head, head-on big sheep with big black head, and head on lamb with little black head, with 5 stitches between the feet of adjacent sheep was unique to Donna’s design until the ‘inspired-by’ design turned up with exactly the same chart for the sheep in exactly the same order. (plus one, IMPO, ‘awkward’ looking alpaca & a recent row added to make the sheep taller)

I also note that the editing history of the ‘inspired-by’ pattern page shows all mention of the LYS to have been removed and there have been mass deletions in the thread in the LYS Raverly group that has chatter about Rhinebeck. There are now no posts in that thread referring to the cowl. My personal impression from all this is that the LYS may be seeking to distance itself from the ‘inspired-by’ design.