Charting

My next lace project is the Forest Path Stole from IK Summer 2003.

The charts, unfortunately, are a tad squint-worthy. And I like highlighting charts as I work on them, and I wasn’t about to do that in the magazine. Especially not when I have an average of 22 repeats for each chart (taking into account my adjustments for size).

So I ended up redoing the charts on my computer. I don’t have a knitting font or anything, and I don’t even have Excel on the computer I used for the charting (why I decided to use that computer for this is a mystery to me), so it took a little bit of time with a graphics program.

“Why didn’t you just scan it?” you may ask. Simple: the effort it would’ve taken to scan the whole page, clean it up, crop the charts out and resize them legibly is probably equal to the effort it took to recreate them. Really, it wasn’t all that hard for me.

It’s awesome, because now I can print up a page for each tier. Which is helpful because the chart you start with changes with each new tier, and all charts have rows you only need to work on odd- or even-numbered tiers. And I can highlight! I don’t know how dependent I’ll still be on the charts by, say, tier five, but it’s nice to have the option to print multiple copies.