I'm have SO MUCH FUN making computerized charts for knitting!
One of my favorite sources for lace, cables, textured stitch patterns, stuff like that...is Barbara Walker's "A Treasury of Knitting Patterns" and her "A Second Treasury of Knitting Patterns". Barbara researched and assembled samples of hundreds (thousands?) of motifs, and includes black-and-white photos along with written instructions row-by-row. I find those written instructions hard to follow, and impossible to picture. Trying to keep straight a line like "YO, SSK, K1, K1-tbl, YO, K2tg, K1tbl"...I mean, it's all messed up if you miss just one K1! So, I've handwritten my own charts on graph paper in the past, in order to work them out. But now I am using my favorite photo-editing Paint Shop Pro software in a new way...to make these charts.
In addition to making a knitting pattern infinitely easier to follow, my charts are SO BEAUTIFUL ON THEIR OWN! It reminds me of my early days in website designing (1999). Back then, I learned to code html pages, and the impact of seeing blocks of text and pictures lining up in artistic fashion just blew me away. Change a few codes, and everything can be arranged differently. Change a color, change a size. It was a WOW experience. Really, designing web pages became an art form for me...and I stopped making jewelry, which was my favorite artistic expression at the time. Oops, tempted to digress here, stop/stop.
Look at these charts, and don't you agree that they are intrinsically beautiful? So now I have another artform along with knitting (oh yeah, still designing web pages).
No comments:
Post a Comment