Who gets credit for design?
 

New issue of a magazine came. A quilter looked at an old block and made a small quilt using the block design, different sashing,and hand dyed material and wrote a pattern for it. Heading says "Designed and made by-------." Don't understand what he designed. Does that mean when I make blocks and use different sashing, material, and quilting motifs, I am a designer? In other words, what makes one a designer?

Good question. Where do you draw the line between a truly new design and just re-hashing someone else's material? If they started by looking at an old block design then I think it should be something like "(block or quilt name) adapted by (designer's name)". I try to give credit where credit is due if it's possible. I don't know the name of the designer of the quilt I'm making right now but I learned from the magazine I found it in that featured the pattern that it first appeared in the 1930s and was published in the Kansas City Star shortly after.
There are literally thousands of quilt block designs out there and I've noticed some are the same construction but they have different names depending on the arrangement of colors. To me it's would be like building two identical cars and giving different model numbers to the red ones or the blue ones. Doesn't make sense to me.
Rodney

I did a quick check in the Oxford English Dictionary and found (excerpted) that a designer is "One who originates a plan or plans...one who makes an artistic design or plan of construction." Even though a block has been around forever, and the concept of sashing too, you had to make a large number of choices about color, fabrics, proportions and scale, etc. etc. -- that makes you a designer, as I see it.

Then I guess we are all designers :)

I agree. I end up tweaking a lot of patterns and I usually end up naming them myself. It is kind of scary when you see that someone else came up with very close to what I came up with. I take THAT as a compliment !!! :)