good-natured ribbing

Ahhh… Just what I needed. When ever I find out I’m going on a trip, I use Google Maps to locate all the yarn stores around the hotel I’ll be staying at. Now I can get that, details about the shops, and reviews all in one place. Check it out:

KnitMap – Find Your Local Yarn Shop

Courtesy of the Catalog Card Generator

GNR further extends its unstoppable knitting empire today with the first release of CHART-A-RAMA, a web-and-pdf based pattern charting tool. It allows you to enter a pattern (following a set of rules to enter the stitches on lines) to generate a PDF chart of that pattern. Please go give it a whirl!

Please also post feedback, questions, suggestions, and what-not as comments to this post. We know that not every stitch one could want is represented, we know that the user interface (entering the pattern by the rules… gack) leaves something to be desired, we know that PDF isn’t everyone’s favorite output format. What could we do above and beyond what’s there now? Is this tool helpful at all, what would make it more so? Keep those postcards and letters coming!

For those of you who enjoy making your own patterns or if you have a written pattern with no chart, this Chart Creator tool could change your life.

It looks like the text must be pretty basic (k k k k instead of k4). You will likely need to edit any pattern you wish to chart with this tool. It just might be worth the effort, though!

I came across the Little Knits website recently and thought I’d share it. It isn’t very well designed but there is a lot of nice yarn with good discounts. Unfortunately, you will need to buy at least $25 worth because they have a limit – I know how difficult that is for our Good-Natured Ribbing readers ;)

I was browsing around on blogs for yet more projects and I came across a link to this nifty little tool: THE KNITPRO 2.0. It turns a .gif, .png, or .jpg into a mapped knitting graph! I tried it with the Detroit Piston’s Logo:

But it didn’t work so well with all the detail. But then I tried it with a more cartoon-y image and it worked just fine!

I’m not big into colour-work right now…but if I could do cool things with pictures, I might be!

This may be of interest to anyone creating charts for their knitting. If you know the gauge of the yarn you are going to use, just plug it in and your chart will be proportionately correct.

“Asymmetric graph paper is typically used for knitting patterns. Knit stitches are wider than they are tall. You can set your own width to height ratio here to accomodate the type of stitch used.”

Free Online Graph Paper / Asymmetric PDF Generator