Persistent Knitter

Remember this roving? It became yarn.

(click for bigger. it’s a bit out of focus)

I thought it would be more yellow when I was spinning it, but it’s PINK!

My spunky fiber arrived this weekend.  Poor Hubby thought it was for him because his name is on our paypal account. He opened the box, expecting a book he had ordered.  The look of confusion on his face when my fiber came out was priceless.

Here it is drafted out and waiting to spin:

Here it is on the wheel:

The woolee winder really gives you different layers of color. I just finished spinning some light purple area. There’s quite a bit of brown in it as I’m spinning it, I hope it doesn’t muddy it up too much because the blues, aquas, purples and light colors in it are amazing.

Knitting? What’s that?

I have had a serious lack of knitting time these days.  One of the main reasons is that I’ve been spending most of my free time on Knit Visualizer 2.0.  Specifically adding color to Knit Visualizer.  (I did also manage to spin 2 yards of yarn today., cook a fabulous prime rib, made-from-scratch dinner rolls, pumpkin pie and a few other dinner items for the holiday)

Here’s a sample of what a color Knit Visualizer chart could look like:

Now this is a silly chart. But it shows you several things. Color borders! (you can have many different color borders in the same chart. not shown here). You can have color on both the foreground (text, aka symbols), and/or the background of cells.  When you generate the Legend, you have options to include Colors into the legend.

When you tell KV that color should be included in the legend (which it is by default), it then thinks that each combintation of symbol + text color + background color are separate symbols.  If you only want to see symbol colors in the legend, it will only find unique instances of symbol + text color.  (So in the above example, the second bobble with the purple background wouldn’t be included).

Why would you want to do this? Imagine if you used the diamond symbol in blue and green. you might want to indicate to your knitters that the blue one is different than the red one.  In theory (and probably reality) all diamonds would be one color in the foreground. If you accidentaly had a blue one, then a look at the legend would immmiately show you something was out of whack.

The legend will ignore background color if you want it to because some people want to stripe the background of every other row a different color. That doesn’t have any meaning in how you knit the stithces, it’s just good for keeping track of where you are (of course everyone should have Highlighter Tape!)

So I’m mostly done with color.  There are some minor things to do, like finish the ability to paint JUST the background color onto the chart (leaving symbol, symbol color, borders and border color all alone).  I’m leaning towards doing symbol color at the same time you paint a symbol. If you wanted to change the color associated with a symbol, you’d basically have to repaint the symbol with the new color chosen.  This strikes me as a sort of pain in the butt; but now that the display and storage of color options is set, I can play around with how the tools behave a little bit easier.

Other stuff: being able to select a color already in use on a border, symbol or background so you can continue using it.  Changing the selection so that you can still see the colors in use, but also tell that you’ve got a selection.   I haven’t even started on the code to define your own symbols (unless you count adding a few menus that don’t do anything), although I’ve worked through a lot of use cases, postulating and bugging my friends  & about how they think it should work.

Some other stuff I’ve added  along the way - all your selections in the preview window are now saved even when you quit Knit Visualizer. If you turn off the Pattern text, it will still be turned off the next time you run Knit Visualizer, until you click the radio button to show it again.

I took my laptop with me to knitting today to get some work done before everyone showed up. (It sort of worked :) )
since my laptop has a camera on it, I thought I’d take advantage and take pictures:

(Joanne, Rebecca and Judy)

And you can tell the camera to do stuff like “Sepia tone” when you take the picture:

(Barbara)

Look what showed up in my mailbox today from Tongue River:

Here’s a sneak preview of a new design that will soon be for sale at The Knit Foundry.

Click for bigger - I promise the pattern will include directions for sleeves, and Stitch holders and extra yarn dangling aren’t included :) I wanted to do a sanity check on the fit. Boy-wonder here has a 22" belly (his chest is more like 21"), and I made the sweater to be about 26.5" around. It fits him just wonderfully! 

A bit on the pattern details:
It’s a Gansey, complete with initials in the plain area on the bottom. Large diamonds are the main focus in the center of the body with a small cable and other elements on the side.  The neckline will probably be a simple k1p1 ribbed, maybe folded over, and I am just now designing the pattern on the sleeves.  There is a small gusset in the underarm to give a bit more room to active kids.  It’s knit from the bottom up, and then the sleeves are knit down from the body, so very little finishing. Worsted Weight yarn (from Shelridge, which is an absolute joy to knit with) makes it a quick knit.

I’m still deciding on what other sizes to make the pattern available in (Size shown is around a 3T), and what to name it.  Any ideas on that would be appreciated!