The Prairie Spinner

I finally have the chart finished, in what I hope will be its final version.

The original version is about a year and a half old, and this one is actually very similar; the main difference is in the details of the chart itself.  That turned out to be more interesting than I expected – trying to figure out how to chart a cable cross, knit though the back loop, different color stitch all in one little square of the graph was not easy!

I used Microsoft Excel, and after playing with a few knitting fonts, settled on my favorite, Aire River Knitting Font, for the symbols.  Excel’s cell formatting provided the color and borders.  Tweaking the column width and row height brought me to a reasonable representation of the stitch/row proportions; stranded knitting like this results in nearly equal stitch and row counts, unlike most other stitch patterns.  Then it needed to fit on a single page, but still be large enough for easy reading.

Ithilien Brocade chart image

Finally, wanting to offer it in pdf format, I tried a couple of free online file conversion tools, including my old standby, Zamzar.  I’m always mildly annoyed at Zamzar’s ads, but so far (knock on wood), they seem to be harmless.  However, these tools have apparently never heard of knitting symbol fonts, so after all my hard work, the resulting files looked pretty funky, with non-English letters or little sunglasses instead of  knitting symbols.

Sigh.  So I went to CutePDF to download and install their free pdf creation utility.  I simply opened the Excel spreadsheet and ‘printed’ it to CutePDF, and the symbols came through just fine.

Time will tell whether or not it is a success.  I’m making the chart available here with some trepidation, since I have no idea whether other knitters will ‘get’ the instructions.

Therefore, I hope there will be a few knitters out there who are willing to test drive the chart and let me know if they have suggestions for improving either the chart itself or the (minimal) instructions.

Open the chart file, then save a copy to your computer.

And here’s what it’s supposed to look like (envision your own color scheme):

Ithilien Brocade stitch pattern