Ithilien Brocade chart
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. NOTE: This chart was updated 7/25/2012.
And here’s what it’s supposed to look like (envision your own color scheme):
Ithilien Brocade stitch pattern
thank you very much!!!
This looks so great! No idea when I’ll be able to try this out, but hopefully very soon. Thank you so much for taking the time and thought to convert this to a chart!
Thank you so much! As with Devorah, not sure when I’ll be able to try it, but it looks so wonderful I have to try.
Beautiful! Thanks for sharing 🙂
It is indeed lovely and very generous of you to share.
Thank you for sharing this beautiful pattern!
This is such a nice chart. I tried to download it on my IPad but somehow it doesn’t work. I try it on my pc.
It’s Beautiful! Thank you!
I’ve got some yarn and an idea for a cardigan that I want to use this for. 1 repeat of the pattern will go around the bottom. I haven’t decided what to do at the top but with a fair isle kind of yoke I could do it again there. It will be a little while before I can begin on it but I will let you know.
Oh, that sounds like a great idea! Please do keep me posted!
Thank you for the chart for Ithilien. I have admired it long enough – now I need to figure out what to knit!
You’re welcome – and I would love to see what you do with it!