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“The happiest of people don't necessarily have the best of everything they just make the most of everything that comes along their way.” - Unknown

Right off the top I need to admit to an oops! Somehow I managed to unlink all the podcast links I had on yesterday’s post. I’ve fixed them now so you can check again! Sorry about that. Not much use without the links, was it?

Still knitting hearts (just finished #6) while trying very hard not to knit on anything else until they’re done. Boy, that’s hard! I want to work on the Unmentionables. Erg. Why does this happen to me every time I get involved in a swap. I have this total aversion to making more than one of anything. The only reason I even finish a pair of socks or gloves is my trick of working on them alternately. If I did them one after the other I would definitely suffer from Second Sock Syndrome. So I’m using a variation of my Alternating Trick on the hearts: knitting until I get bored, stuffing until I get bored, knitting some more, stuffing some more etc. I won’t full them until they’re all ready to go because it’s much easier to do them all at once. Then there will be some tough slogging with the beading. I haven’t even chosen which beads to use yet! That will be the fun part, rummaging through the bead stash.

I also charted out the heart pattern, though it was difficult with such an odd shape. I had to make the second “lobe” separately because it wouldn’t fit in place. It does look like the real thing somewhat though, doncha think?



I find I can follow the chart, weird as it is, easier than the written words because I don’t lose my place so easily. Somehow I can see at a glance where I am rather than trying to remember what line of the written pattern I’m on. Carrying on.

The weather is cloudy and cold today. I want Saturday’s weather back again! It was so nice and warm. Sigh. What a teaser, eh?

It's Officially Spring!

A couple of things I’ve forgotten to mention in past messages:

The rhubarb we left out in the alley in pots got happily adopted by someone. My rhubarb roots on the other hand, are still in a bucket. Hope they don’t either dry out or mould before I can get to them. Oh, and the ones we replanted are doing ok thankfully. They have larger leaves and some new ones peeping up.

Somebody actually bought the super-expensive house next door. The For Sale sign has been gone for awhile and some inspector was checking things out. There are still plenty of things undone, such as repainting the front porch and stairs and finishing the fence and gate. Maybe moving the trees that are parked under the power lines and too close to our yard for comfort? Nah, nobody will notice them until they get big enough to be a problem. And then they’ll prune the poor things within an inch of their lives and they’ll look horrible. We want to know what’s happening with the back fence between our properties before I plant the section closest to it. Don’t want stuff all tromped upon but the dough-heads the builder hires. Time is getting urgent or I’ll be planting somewhere else in the garden.

Speaking of gardening, I got some woad seeds from my friend Chris of Joybilee Farm.

I hope I’ll be able to find somewhere to put several of these rather large plants. At least they’re prettier than my madder! This article on cultivation is by her teenaged daughter Sarah who has done a lot of experimenting with woad. I hope she will complete the planned article series soon. Meanwhile she’s taking her knowledge to the national science fair. You go, girl! I need to send Chris a thank-you gift and I know exactly what it will be. But I have to make it first.

Have I mentioned before that I’ve charted out the shaping for the Hepburn Cardi in pattern? Just so I don’t make any major blunders. I’m not good at winging my knitting when trying to carry on a complex cables-and-lace pattern while doing things like “BO 4 st eor twice and at the same time dec 1 st at neck edge every 5 rows 3 times and then every 6 rows 8 times.” I made that up, but you get the picture. It’s even worse when you have to pick the specific number for your size out of the middle of lists like “2 (2, 3, 3, 5, 7)”. Yes, I’ve used highlighter pen to single out my size out of the blur. But the words “at the same time” get me every time. So I use Knit Visualizer (I’m loving the new version 2!) and chart out each section. Sometimes I have to wait until I get there so I know which row of the stitch pattern to start the inc/dec/BO — but that’s ok. Knit/chart/knit/chart is much easier than knit/frog/knit/frog. Yes, I’m a bit anal like that. I have one last chart to do for the front neck area. I have to wait until I get there, but meanwhile I just have to knit as established for 15”. Easy-peasy. For this part I don’t even need the chart I made. At least until I get to the underarms where I use the same chart I already made for the back.

Well, I’m off to my weavers’ guild meeting this morning. Thank heavens for sock knitting to take the edge off the executive meeting. Happily I have to leave it early for my Library Volunteer job. I like that one. Play with books and magazines and chat with everyone who comes in. Best guild job I’ve ever had.

Happy Spring Equinox!

Never Enough Time

I don’t know where the days go but I sure have fun using them up! I downloaded the demo version of Knit Visualizer and installed it yesterday. Now I know what is disabled — the Save and Print functions. Makes sense if they want people to buy their software. Frustrate ’em no end and they will! I played with it quite a lot and today decided to bite. I just love immediate gratification! Pay by Paypal account, download the program, uninstall the demo, install the real thing and get right into it. 15 minutes tops from decision to function.

Now that I’ve had a chance to play with it and learn its quirks, I’m liking it lots. (Obviously!) I tried a rather complicated shaped edging from Martha Waterman (since that’s the book I was complaining that it didn’t have charts) with embossed leaves. This edging increases and decreases in width and has a bind-off section right before starting the repeat over again. Once you set up Knit Visualizer (hereafter known as KV) correctly for either flat or circular knitting, you don’t even have to think about reversing the wrong side row symbols. The program knows that in flat knitting you’re working a purl stitch on the wrong side but it looks like a knit stitch from the front and so on. The parsing of the typed-in row instructions went very well. Commas or spaces between the abbreviations are unnecessary so it makes typing easy. You have to occasionally change the author’s abbreviations to the more common version, such as Martha’s “dbl dcr” which I translated to “sl1 k2tog psso” and it was accepted. There is no symbol for cast-off or bind-off so I used a half-circle which is one of the colour symbols.

The only problem I really had was where the program automatically inserted the “no stitch” greyed areas. These are filling in the chart where the knitting bulges out and in as the edging increases and decreases in separate areas. Because the garter stitch heading is on the right, I wanted the blank areas split to maintain the leaf shape but the program inserted them on the right. It was relatively easy to go in and cut and paste rows over into their correct position but I wish there was a way to just drag the darn selections around! The finished chart doesn’t quite look like the actual knitted edging but it does give the general idea. Real knitted stitches bias and curve and no square representation can show that accurately. One thing I discovered is that there is an error in the pattern as written! It was obvious in the chart. Heh.

If you don’t want to use the parser, you can just go straight to the symbol selection and paint them into the chart anywhere you want. You can edit any chart, even one that was created with the parser, in order to refine or change your results. Copy, cut and paste all work handily to move things around. There’s even a Mirror function to flip a selection around horizontally or vertically. There is a large selection of chart symbols, including a rather extensive list of cables. The parser is not very good at rendering complex cables so you may need these to chart them instead.

There are several things you can do with your charts when they’re done. In the Chart Properties you can fill in the title, pattern source (so you can give credit where credit is due!) and any notes you like. When you go to print out your chart you can include a number of things if you want, such as title, notes, legend and instructions (not as you typed them in but as the parser renders them from the chart – too cool). You can edit much of the text, except for items in bold face, in the Print window. Very handy! If your chart and accompanying text takes up more than one page, it will tile onto as many as necessary. You can also adjust the scale in the Print Preview window which might enable you to save paper. As long as you don’t make it too small to read properly!

You can export the chart, including the extras that you want, as a PNG file. I thought that was an odd choice for a file format since PNGs aren’t as common as JPEGs but even though it could be a larger file, it’s “lossless”. Since KV works only in black and white (no colour, yet) it’s not a memory hog. Paint Shop Pro or other graphics editing programs can handle PNGs ok. You can also copy your chart to the Clipboard to be pasted into another file such as Word. Saved charts have the extension .KCT.

What would I like to see that isn’t in this program already? Not much. As I mentioned before, dragging a selection around might be handy. Maybe a few more symbols. There are so many different sets in use in different publications! Though the Legend really helps because you can re-define the exact meaning of a symbol. I did that with the symbol “M” which the program defines as a lifted increase. I made it into a “k in the front and back of the same stitch”. Colour might be nice for those who don’t have Pattern Maker Pro like I do. I prefer PM for colour charting especially because it has the ability to make proportional graphs (avoiding the distortions caused by knit stitches not being square) and it also can make a chart from a photograph or other graphic file. I think it will be a long time before KV can do anything close to that, if ever. However, this program is pretty close to perfecto as is.

Here’s the Leaf edging chart without all the accompanying text or I'd have to scale it down and you wouldn't be able to read it. I’ve given you all the clues to the symbols already except for the left-slanting decrease which is a “k2tog tbl” or you could use an SSK. You can work it from the chart now if you cast on 8 stitches and purl one row before starting:


I'm really very fond of leaves.