Martha Stewart Poncho

Are you one of the people who envied Martha her "get out of the big house with a neat ankle bracelet" poncho? People have been clamoring for the pattern. It seems that a fellow inmate had made the poncho for Martha without a pattern. Gasp! She sounds like us wingers out there who just go with the flow. When I looked at the photos posted it seemed to be a basic granny poncho with a funnel neck added to the top and a scalloped edging to the bottom. The "funnel" part being single crochet around the neck opening for a few rounds. The "scallop" being more than likely rows of single crochet double crochet and triple crochets combined into something like sc in stitch, sk next st, (dc 2 twice, tr, dc twice) in the next stitch, sk next stitch and repeat around. Then additional rows around to make the scallops bigger. Kind of like adding a hill of a ripple to the bottom. Yarn manufacturers and crochet addicts alike have been scrambling to come up with their own pattern for a look-alike "Martha Poncho". Yesterday Lion Brand sent out an email to their newsletter subscribers that they were working on a pattern for their version of the poncho, and that it would be ready within the next week. Today I found out that Bernat has released their own pattern for free on the net. And it only makes sense since the original "Martha" was made from Bernat Galaxy yarn! I wonder how LB feels about being beaten to the punch so to speak. It also makes me wonder what differences the patterns will have between the two. I guess we shall just have to wait until the LB pattern comes out. I am also wondering how the inmate feels about being notorious. I mean for something other than whatever got her behind bars. It seems a shame that Martha is getting the fame and credit, in a way*, for something that she herself made. Hopefully she will be happy that something she created has sparked the imagination of the hand craft world. And that the patterns themselves are being shared freely, instead of making more money for someone** who is clearly not in need of funds. UPDATE: Found that Herrschner's is selling a "kit" to make the Bernat pattern. They have a picture of the finished product on their page and it is different than the one that Martha wore. It doesn't seem to have the "thick blocks" in the pattern like the other. Hmmm... Bernat's Martha Poncho Pattern Lion Brand's Version of the Martha is called "Coming Home" Herrschner's Kit Using the Bernat Pattern Lily Chin's Freedom Poncho for Interweave Knits *That it is a shame Martha gets the credit and the glory, instead of the pattern creator. And that even though she says who it was made by (if only in the general terms allowed), it is still called "Martha's". **someone = Martha (Annotations added due to some confusion.)