Choosing abbreviations

By | August 15, 2014

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 are possible. When you combine all the possibilities – two or three “strands” (groups of stitches), crossing to the left or right, each composed of 1, 2, 3, 4, or more stitches, worked as knits or purls or something else – you get hundreds of possible crosses. Whew!

The challenge, then, is choosing a system of abbreviations, one with a regular, predictable structure, such that each abbreviation is concise, meaningful, and unambiguous. Oh, and bonus points if the system of abbreviations covers all the major bases.

Looking through my stitch dictionaries and other knitting books, I found way more options than I’d anticipated:

  • A few books spell out all the steps for each cable cross within the instructions for each stitch pattern. Way too verbose!
  • Many books use abbreviations like “C4B” for “cable 4 back.” I’ve never been fond of these abbreviations, as they’re incomplete and ambiguous. Of the 4 stitches in the C4B cable cross, do I hold 1 in back (for a 3-over-1 right cross), 2 in back (for a 2-over-2 right cross), or 3 in back (for a 1-over-3 right cross)? And do I knit all the stitches, or purl the ones held in back, or …? Essentially, abbreviations like C4B are too abbreviated. They don’t provide all the necessary information.*
  • Patterns for Guernseys, Jerseys, & Arans by Gladys Thompson takes an interesting approach. For a 2-over-2 right cross, it uses “s2b, k2, k2ss” for “slip 2 sts to cn and hold in back, k2 from left needle, k2 slipped sts from cn.” A handful of “component” abbreviations combine to create a practically unlimited number of cable crosses, with a minimum of verbosity and ambiguity. Alas, this system of abbreviations is too obscure. With Stitch-Maps.com, I already have my hands full creating a new way of charting stitch patterns and sharing it with the knitting world. I don’t need to champion an uncommon system of cable cross abbreviations.
  • Abbreviations like “2/2 RC” (for “2-over-2 right cross”) have always been my favorites. They’re used in Knitter’s Magazine and other XRX publications, Interweave publications, and the works of Janet Szabo, among others. They’re concise, clear, and unambiguous.

So I’m going with abbreviations like 2/2 RC. They’re not infinitely flexible – for example, they don’t make it easy to say, “cross 3 stitches to the left over 2 stitches, keeping all of them in k1 tbl, p1 twisted rib” or “cross 2 stitches to the right over 2 other stitches, working the last 2 stitches as k2tog.” But they cover all the major bases; they handle all your “normal,” everyday cable crosses. Besides, I’m not aiming to support every last possible cable cross at Stitch-Maps.com. Remember, that’d be hundreds of crosses. And stitch maps aren’t ideal for most cabled stitch patterns anyway.

*C4B, C4F, and the like are common enough that I’ll probably set up Stitch-Maps.com to recognize them, and to interpret them as 2/2 RC, 2/2 LC, and so on. This site site already takes this approach with other stitches – for example, interpreting “yfwd” as “yo” – in the name of accepting a wide variety of written instructions but presenting consistent knitspeak.

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