Posts Tagged “geeky”
Cogitating
By JC | April 19, 2015
One of the things I’ve always wanted Stitch-Maps.com to be able to do is highlight the spaces between stitch columns. Or, to put it another way, to break a stitch pattern into its constituent parts. Having Stitch-Maps.com create these visualizations automagically would be awesome fun, not to mention super useful. You could see where to […]
The original plan was to map a doily pattern and convert it to a wedge shape. But once that was done, I found I couldn’t stop fiddling. Looking at the stitch map for the wedge, I noticed that it would be possible to knit Coronet in the round without ever having to shift the beginning-of-rounds […]
Okay, this was the fun part: color-coding the in-the-round stitch maps for Coronet, using one color for the repeated stitches and another for the “extra” stitches needed to balance the pattern when working it flat. I went the high-tech route, exporting the stitch maps as PDFs and tweaking them in Illustrator. But low-tech routes are […]
Over the weekend I was seized by the need to map a lace doily pattern and convert it to a wedge shape. (You know, because I just can’t get enough charting in my life.) I chose Coronet, from Marianne Kinzel’s First Book of Modern Lace Knitting. The first step was converting the lingo. Kinzel uses […]
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 […]