Ribbed-entrelac hat

I actually finished a garment. OK, it's a hat. Not so big. Such is my attention span.

I'm making another one now. This one is a tad small, but I ran out of yarn. I decided to use red to finish it off, and I think it looks kind of neat. It's a feature, not a bug!

This hat is created from entrelac squares that are done in ribbing. I used 3 by 3 ribbing because it's quite stretchy and I didn't want to swatch or anything. I figured with the stretchiness the hat would fit my head no matter what.

I'm writing up a pattern for it. More pictures of this on my Flickr account, and more info at my Ravelry page (user name "yarnover").

Image by fuzzyjay via Flickr

Image by fuzzyjay via Flickr

Mosaic Knitting Alphabet

I think I posted about this before, but here is a font I created on the FontStruct website called Mosaic4way. It’s a font you can use to create writing in mosaic knitting. I call it Mosaic4Way because you can knit from the alphabet in any direction. Three of the directions (top, bottom, left) are depicted below.

Click on the picture below (or the following link) to be taken to the page where the font is hosted on Fonstruct. You can download it for free and use it freely for non-commercial purposes. You should give me credit if you share any patterns that use it, and ask permission if you want to use it for commercial purposes.



If you need help to install your new font, follow this link to FontShop's font installation instructions.

Here's a screen shot of all the characters in the font (click to get bigger sizes). I can't remember, but I think I did all the Western European letters, so there is plenty of accented goodness, but Eastern European alphabets users are likely out of luck. Hey, but there is a Euro symbol!



Here's some knitting done with the font:

Image by fuzzyjay via Flickr

Image by fuzzyjay via Flickr

Related articles by Zemanta

• The Font Kingdom: Search, Explore, Create, and Download Fonts for Free (techcrunch.com)

Illustrating lace knitting

I posted recently some diagrams I made of Barbara Walker's "Day-flower" lace insertion pattern found in one of her Treasuries stitch collection books.

It took a lot of practice and exploration for me to be able to do that latest, most detailed diagram.

About two years ago I was trying to figure out how to illustrate knitting stitch patterns in the old-school way, where it's all hand-drawn, showing each twist and turn of the knitted yarn. I did develop one method, shown here, that's most suitable for lace knitting, and even for knitted lace, where the shaping is done on each row.

There's a whole lot of idealizing and simplifying involved, but this kind of illustration is at least "topologically" accurate.

The key for me was designing and printing a type of graph paper that represents the approximate 3:4 height-to-width ratio of knitted stitches. Then I had to figure out the rather weird things that yarn overs do to the proportions of the knitted loops.

These illustrations show how an ideal knitted fabric would look when projected on a screen, that is, all of the three-dimensional quality of the fabric is lost. There's no information here about whether stitches are knits or purls nor whether the decreases are right- or left-leaning, only where the yarn overs and decreases are, and how the columns (wales) of stitches slant and flow into each other.

Still, they are much more faithful to the look of the knitted fabric than anything I'd been able to do up to that point. I could even knit from them, but I'm weird that way.

Eventually I started to do this on a computer, like the third illustration here. Still, I like the hand drawn ones because of the roughness. You'll see more examples of this kind of diagram in my Flickr set "Knitting Diagrams."

Image by fuzzyjay via Flickr

Image by fuzzyjay via Flickr