A case in point is the Bird in Hand mittens, which I saw all over blog land a year or so ago. I bought yarn to make them, bought the pattern and then they languished unstarted. I will probably get to them later this year or sometime next year. Hopefully, if I am smart, before it gets too cold to even think about taking my time and doing a good job. The endpaper mitts were also on my list of favorites, but have mostly met the same end. My queue is full of some other examples of this phenomenon, though I eventually either take the item out of my queue or (slightly more frequently) finally knit it.
A non-knitting example? Harry Potter. While I didn't wait until all of the books came out to read them, I did wait until there was a fairly largish gap between books so the noise about the series could die out a bit. I enjoyed the books a lot more by waiting than reading them at the top of one of the hype cycles.
I know that my gut reaction to something popular is to go far away. There is something about the cult of the popular that makes it (the book, the project, the tv show, what have you) feel to me less like a choice and more like a dictate. Nothing irks me more than someone else dictating what I am going to like. Heck, it is the sole reason why I don't like the Sound of Music.
Umm, and well, the image is unrelated but so necessary.
