Posts tagged: charting
Deviating from Plan A
By JC | July 25, 2012
Lately I haven’t been knitting much because another project has grabbed all my interest, but I still need to have something on my needles, you know? So I’m futzing around with a crescent-shaped shawlette. The idea is to have a pretty scalloped pattern along the bottom edge – namely, this one: – and to fill [...]
The Yarn Thing
By JC | June 12, 2012
Did you catch The Yarn Thing podcast this morning? (Yes, yes, I know I should’ve reminded y’all about it yesterday. My flimsy excuse was that I was out of the house and away from all computers practically all day.) Marly and I had a grand time talking about disastrous first projects, not knowing that designing [...]
Myths and fabrications
By JC | May 1, 2012
Tomorrow I get to give a presentation to the Seattle Knitters Guild, and I’m really looking forward to it – but that’s a recent development. For months, I had been dreading the event. The idea of public speaking didn’t bother me – after all, I teach for a living — but the possibility that I [...]
Sucker
By JC | December 29, 2011
I’m a sucker for stitch dictionaries. That’s why I had to get this: Omas has been on my wish list for a long time. It’s in German, and I don’t read German – shoot, I can’t even pronounce the book’s title – but, as you can see above, Lacis distributes the book with an English [...]
To each their own
By JC | November 28, 2011
One of the reasons I love charts is that they’re a sort of universal language. It doesn’t matter where a chart comes from – a publication written in English, German, Japanese, or whatever – I’m good to go as long as I have an English copy of the key, or a few good swatch photos [...]
Unnecessary funkiness
By JC | February 4, 2011
Some of you may have noticed that, of late, the actual knitting content on this blog has been… well… sparse. Practically absent. Partly it’s because my attention has been elsewhere, on a large cough book cough project. Partly it’s because my knitting mojo has been missing: I just haven’t felt like knitting, so I haven’t [...]
Stump the Chart Wizard
By JC | January 25, 2011
When most knitting books go on the road, they go in the form of a trunk show: garments featured in the book are packed up, shipped to a yarn shop, and displayed prominently. Knitters get to see and feel the garments, and sometimes try them on. The books get a kick out of all the [...]
They made it!
By JC | January 18, 2011
All morning, I kept listening for the tell-tale drone of the UPS truck. False alarms made me all jittery, then crushed my spirit. Finally, mid-day, these arrived: Books! Not a mere idea, not a bunch of InDesign files, but real, live, don’t-stub-your-toe-on-the-boxes books! Charts Made Simple was so long in the making, I wasn’t sure [...]
Who woulda thunk?
By JC | December 1, 2010
I had the best time today writing up the pattern for a scarf I plan to knit. This is odd. Most designers (myself included) would say that pattern-writing isn’t their favorite task. Rather, it rates far below sketching or swatching, and somewhere near envelope-stuffing. Apparently, though, it’s been long enough since I last wrote or [...]
Red-letter day
By JC | November 19, 2010
This morning, FedEx dropped off a long-awaited package: print proofs for Charts Made Simple. The color cover was separate from the interior, and the interior had been printed on lighter-weight paper than will be used for the actual book. But the proofs were bound. It’s starting to look like a real book. So I spent [...]