Archive For August, 2014
Have you seen New Vintage Lace? I love this book! Andrea Jurgrau takes vintage doily patterns, lifts out and rejiggers their intricate motifs, and reinvents them as stunning hats, scarves, stoles, and shawls. It’s a fabulous idea, really. Those vintage patterns contain motifs unlike any in today’s stitch dictionaries: starbursts, overlapping petals, and lush leaves, […]
You know how I said Stitch-Maps.com would throw up its hands and say, “I can’t do that” when asked to draw a cable cross on a WS row? Well, I’ve been convinced of another approach. Tech editor extraordinaire Karen Frisa has pointed out that a cable cross abbreviation can be interpreted in a couple ways. […]
Cable crosses are typically worked on right-side rows. But what if Stitch-Maps.com is asked to draw a cable cross on a wrong-side row? What should it do then? Take 2/2 RC, for example. It’s defined as “Slip 2 sts to cn and hold in back, k2, k2 from cn” – that is, knit all the […]
With hundreds of possible cable crosses, where should Stitch-Maps.com draw the line? Which cable crosses should it support, at least at first? To figure this out, I pulled a dozen stitch dictionaries, reference books, and pattern books off my shelves. Which cable crosses did they use? The results were interesting, though not too surprising when […]
Like I said, I think most cabled stitch patterns are best charted using traditional, grid-based charts. Then you can use simple, streamlined symbols like these: But with stitch maps? You can’t rely on a surrounding grid for context. In some way, each symbol has to indicate how many stitches are being crossed, and how those […]
When it comes to cable cross abbreviations like 2/2 RC, the StitchMastery Knitting Chart Editor really gets it right. That piece of charting software recognizes a slew of cable cross abbreviations, all in the same form: The first half of the abbreviation specifies the number of strands, and the number of stitches in each strand: […]
The first step in adding support for a new set of stitches to Stitch-Maps.com is figuring out what abbreviations to recognize. Which bits of text should map (no pun intended!) to which symbols? With cable crosses, that’s no small feat! In Charted Knitting Designs, Barbara Walker lists 80 basic cable crosses, and notes many more […]
Musings
By JC | August 14, 2014
Don’t get me wrong. The grand majority of the time, I think that cabled stitch patterns, like knit/purl patterns, are best charted using traditional grid-based charts. The grid provides structure, making it possible to choose symbols that clearly represent the fabric with a minimum of clutter. But I still want to support cables at Stitch-Maps.com. […]