Category: Knitting Symbols

Knit charting in Mac Yosemite; visualizing knit cables

Some previous blog posts on topic

2013/01/03/chain-cable-hk-experiment/

2013/02/07/hand-to-machine-symbols-4-cables/

2014/07/07/a-bit-of-cables-and-lace-charting-hk-to-mk/

2012/01/28/a-few-to-try/

Updating to Yosemite has provided some interesting issues for me. The first was Safari pretty much becoming unusable. It took a Mac expert and a chunk of his time to resolve the issue. There are still hiccups in other apps. I thought I would revisit some of the methods I have mentioned as usable in knitting charting on Mac via a bit of discussion on cables and visualizing them.

Intwined began having issues in Macs with any custom-built stitch libraries in mid-year 2013. The last update offered and installed in September 2013 has continued to have some functionality issues in later Mac OS versions (Mavericks, and now Yosemite), stripped of any custom stitches built previously, not allowing for their addition. It has become only an occasional go-to for me now. Charts created in the program are easily recognizable.

Inkscape (recommended for creating icons for use in Intwined, a free vector program) will require XQuartz update for Yosemite. Their previous release allowed for its use in Mavericks.

http://xquartz.macosforge.org/landing/

http://xquartz.macosforge.org/trac/wiki/X112.7.8

http://sourceforge.net/projects/sconcho/ is an open-source, free charting software with built-in stitch libraries that may meet many of your charting needs in any OS version

Excel behaves as in the past (my version: Office 08)

Mac Number has once again deleted some familiar menu options, added new ones. My primary font for knit symbols is no longer available, and some of my accumulated knit symbols from other font sources continue to work on the mac, but are unsupported if using the iPad version of the program, where they appear as the original  keyboard strokes, rather than the assigned symbols

GIMP 2.8.4 (2.8.8 did not), HyperDither, appear functional as in past.

Tracking and visualizing custom cables outside the parameters of built-in libraries or fonts/symbols in alternative software, using Numbers 3.5: one of the problems that can be encountered in charting cables is that programs with built-in stitch libraries may not provide for cable crossings specific to your pattern. The charts below have not been proofed executable in a swatch at this point in time, are simply a way of exploring drawing methods, my working notes from some quick experiments, not a step by step tutorial. I have no way of confirming results in previous versions of the software or OS.

available “shapes”

To make them editable, click on the shape, go to format menu, highlight shapes and lines-> make editable. Click on the shape and in turn on the format symbol below in the image below, and windows become available for style and arrangement choices

The knit and purl symbols on the left of my first chart utilizing line with arrow shapes are standard ones. The right side uses a dot for purl stitches instead of a line, and that began to make the whole more readable to me. One drawback is “shapes” do not seem to respond to any copy and paste demands and I had to draw each individually. I preferred to place them outside my chart. Guidelines then appear to suit for easy resizing and the resulting edit may then be dragged and dropped into the appropriate location in the chart, readjusted as/if needed. Color palettes for drawing appear limited to the built-in shades; toggling between available colors may be accessed by clicking on the dots below the pen tool in the first illustration above.  In the chart, purple lines indicate stitches brought forward, yellow the stitches brought to back when working the cables. The number 10 in the left-hand column should be a one.

Cleaning up lines and adding color if needed may be done in Photoshop or GIMP; this makes forward stitches a bit clearer

bucket fill provides an added way to follow the movement of stitches

Utilizing the pen tool in shapes menu to draw custom cable crosses and filling them using the option within the numbers program moves toward an all color chart_ far quicker than using lines and bucket fills. The red segment indicates knit stitches traveling in the back for the cable cross

A lot of information is available on creating reversible cable fabrics using ribbed configurations. I thought I would play with knit/ purl blocks rather than vertical rib lines. The initial chart was begun in Intwined, with bucket tool filled in Photoshop to extend colors within cable crosses. The red border outlines the pattern repeats. Alternate right side rows are shown; all wrong side rows are worked as the stitches appear (knit stitches are knit, and purl stitches are purled). Here the cell colors happen to be reversed from their use in the above, the yellow is used for knit stitches, the green the purls. I opted to indicate knit stitches by color only, no symbol.

This is the resulting swatch, in random acrylic yarn, with varying numbers of rows in between cable crossings my plan is to create a scarf in significantly thicker alpaca yarn, a strictly HK fabric. The photo shows both sides of the fabric.

A hand knit stitch tale 2: a bit of cables and lace, charting, hk to mk

For a while, there was agreement on “international symbols” for charting knits. With the proliferation of programs now and methods for self charting and publishing using fonts and personal icons, things can get a bit confusing. Hand knitting in the circular akin to machine knitting results in stitches always worked on one side of the fabric, another consideration. In the last Russian pattern in the previous post, I was unable to get the repeat to work properly regardless of any common meaning I tried to assign to several of the symbols. I have used Intwined for some charting in the past, am finding it problematic again in Mavericks Mac OS, and my go-to for the moment is the latest version of Numbers (3.2), which appears to include changes that make it even more intuitive and easier to use than the previous version. My symbols library includes the Aire river knitting font and an assortment of wingdings and oddball characters found in some of Mac’s built-in libraries.

my hand knit version

Taking it to the machine: chart’s beginning

tweaking it a bit, taking in consideration only the purl side will be facing

flipping it to achieve the same direction transfers as HK

knit on 260 bulky KM

The large hole at the bottom left of the image is not due to a dropped stitch, but rather to yarn breakage. The sample was knit in worsted weight wool, and I found I needed a far looser tension than I would normally use for the same yarn to allow the double transfers to knit off properly. Eliminating the combinations of knit and purl within any one row as seen in the hand-knit version avoided retooling those stitches as well.

 A revisit on topic, April 2015

I am back now to once again, using primarily excel to create all my charts. Various Russian, German, and one English pub have offered variations of this particular fabric, some needing interpretation, but consistencies in repeats are easily recognized and isolated.

screenshot_11

screenshot_02

this image is from knittingstitchpatterns.com, they call it grand-eyelet-lattice, and provide written instructions for its execution

2838625ae10e2c26a984d498e99d0510

below is another relative, charted in Intwined, with the program’s associated written instructions; repeat is 4 stitches wide by 8 rows tall, border stitches are not represented; cable crosses are reversed after every other eyelet sequence, yet another pattern variable

trellis 3repeats

eyelet trellis how toa chart for same using Sconcho and its built-in stitch library. For software details please see symbols post 

sconcho

4/26/15 a variation found today on knitca, another resource for hand knitting stitch pattern collections; this is their image

lace_6

 1/2/2016 a Ravelry post on the stitch family

A hand knit stitch tale 1

Last year a photo of a model (Jessica Hart) wearing a particular sweater began to appear acrossTumblr and Pinterest. The stitch was interesting, which led me to looking for similar structures, without much success for quite a while

from a sale site for the garment

a published stitch version on russian blog

purling all WS rows produced a very different fabric, I did find a reference in another publication for the dot being a purl stitch on RS, knit on WS, again a different fabric

a translation via ravelry  (see credit in chart) led me to developing the charts and directions below

A: shows the offered repeat in symbols; a multiple of 6 + 7 stitches is required

B: symbols and translation

C: all symbol expanded chart showing both RS and WS rows; I find too many symbols confusing

D: choosing colored squares to represent knits on WS rows; arrows show direction of reading chart during knitting

the resulting swatch: knit side  RS

its WS

a relative, found on a different blog, chart not yet deciphered

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Online Pattern generators, hacks, free KM manuals, and more

I welcome being contacted re any problem links
generators that require color changing every 2 rows using a color changer (or 2 carriages)
mazes on gridded output, easily adaptable to knit http://www.ludiculus.com/maker/mazes.html
more mazes  http://www.billsgames.com/mazegenerator/
maze pattern http://www.unikatissima.de/e/?page_id=2062 blog closed 
cellular automaton http://www.unikatissima.de/e/?page_id=2148 blog closed  
Some unikatissima blog content may be found here, but generators fail as they relied on Flash Player, now defunct mosaic knitting
other generators that can help with shaping garments, or some basic knit motif design
Truchet tiles generator https://dmackinnon1.github.io/truchet/gen.html
knitting pattern http://kpg.sourceforge.net
top-down circular raglan calculator http://kpg.sourceforge.net
Icelandic round yoke design does not work any longer in later version browsers, on Mac even with the installation of Silverlight, on Ravelry, it was noted the program does operate in Internet Explorer http://knittingpatterns.is/#/Design
random square patterns http://www.unikatissima.de/e/?page_id=3638  blog closed

Random Stich lace pattern generator
https://www.knittingfool.com/Reference/LacePatternGenerator.aspx
Text to binary converters
1 https://www.prepostseo.com/tool/text-to-binary-converter,
2 https://www.convertbinary.com/text-to-binary/
3 https://codebeautify.org/text-to-binary

punchcard generator and how to use videos
https://patternpunchknit.com/  beta online tool 11/2022 https://brendaabell.com/knittingtools/pcgenerator/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vBSVIJsSux4
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4rUBb6IUce0  English version
https://www.youtube.com/c/knitlabo/videos?view=0&sort=dd&shelf_id=1
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d8KvFiklGTE

math calculators for knitting
free online manuals, magazines
machineknittingetc.com now https://mkmanuals.com/
hacking
a hacking history https://www.beautifulseams.com/2014/10/29/tricodeur-writeup/
only the intro is in German: a nearly hour-long presentation by Fabienne
another approach for Brother models KH”‘930, 940, 950i, and 970: http://daviworks.com/knitting/ and the associated group on Ravelry 
970 how to hack instructable 
for additional cumulative information, software compatibility and hardware specs see Claire Williams’ website
GitHub
PatternUploader
color reductions/ conversions for large, nonrepetitive images Mac
Splitting large images into multiple segments, a free online tool
https://pinetools.com/split-image
online dither generators
https://ditherit.com 9 dithering types
https://app.dithermark.com  a huge range of possibilities
Hand knitting websites worth a browse:
https://www.knittingfool.com/Pages/Reference.aspx
pattern generators/ web design
open-source charting program http://sourceforge.net/projects/sconcho/
quick screenshot

1/21/2016: Online weaving program by Andrew Glassner ; associated blogpost 

11/26/17 a simple, user-friendly free motif design paint program for Mac, last updated April 2019: Paint Brush

Machine knitting symbols

Brother early “home study”  images and explanations relating to machine knitting symbols, a bit clearer than some of the explanations that were published with the later punchcard books

anyone trying to work from charts such as these in hand knitting would need to consider the appearance of the resulting fabric on the reverse, knit side,  and mirror techniques where needed (see previous post series on hand to machine symbol interpretations

From lace chart to punchcard 5 to electronic

Continuing with the “relatives” of the proposed border chart in the previous post, this gets us even closet to the hand-knit. So, I have a punchcard, a 12 stitch repeat, really want to go 14 wide for the repeat, and now several other issues are encountered. If one thinks about lettering and controlling horizontal direction with a card, one is reminded that the card “knits” the image ie a letter as punched on the purl, back of the fabric, so when the knit side is viewed, letters are mirrored. One solution is to flip the card over horizontally. If when knitting from a hand-knit lace chart the transfers need to be “flipped” to match results, the punchcard does that for you. With the 910 what you see on the mylar is what you get, so if the repeat is drawn for lace as for a punchcard, it will need to be flipped horizontally. Punchcards are sectioned in blocks of 6, mylars in blocks of 5, so if copying a card it may be worth printing it out large scale, and outlining new blocks 5X5 so as to be able to orient lace markings correctly within them.  With electronics one may have built-in functions for mirroring in either direction, I went another route:

This is a section of my mylar with markings for repeats, the blue outline for the 14 st, the red for the 12, suitable for punching on a card.  The first K2Rs reminder may be seen  in the column on the far right, the colored squares and numbers indicate the programmed repeats for each sample

I chose to knit the test swatches using the lace carriage on the right, the knit carriage on the left. First selection row is made with the LC from right to left

the 12 stitch repeat

the wider and longer repeat (with an unintended dropped stitch),  which would create more of a curved edge if used as a border

“putting this one to bed”

Frome lace chart to punchcard 4: a border tale

A forum post inquired on adapting the following border repeat for use on a punchcard Brother KM, using the lace carriage: the repeat is 14 stitches wide as was given below

Because of repeat restriction in punchcard knitting, the best way to match the above chart is through the use of hand techniques. The image below shows needle bed markings (in water-soluble pen) to help in tracking hand transfers; the long line is the location for the center triple stitch after stitch transfers, the dots place the first single transfers made toward the center long line on the KM, away from the single needle space between them

this is the result of the hand transfers; the fuzz on the left is a manufacturer’s yarn knot

a simplified repeat  keeping some of the elements, but missing that center ridge, adjusted to a 12 stitch repeat for use with punchcard; the missing lace hole was an error in punching out the card

the card for it, showing the correction also marked in red

since the intended use is for a border, it is not necessary to punch more than above; the first row for selecting to right with the lace carriage is marked, blue shows location for knitting 2 rows with knit carriage; the sequence is an easy 4 passes with the lace carriage, followed by 2 with the knit carriage

another option’s results, creating the center ridge as in the hand-knit: not identical, but related

the corresponding card: knit 2 rows after every 6 passes with LC, except for the last repeat segment, where LC makes 4 passes prior to continuing with KC and knitting beyond the border

If using cards I would recommend knitting several rows with waste yarn before casting on (as loosely as possible) and continuing in lace. The very bottom will want to curl toward the knit side of the garment, so cast on the edge may require additional treatment to keep it from doing so.

for one more repeat please see next post

From hand knit lace chart to punchcard 2

Following up on the previous post, from-hand-knit-lace-chart-to-punchcard-1, a 24 stitch chart with marked in symbols for conversion to MK repeat: a 24 stitch chart with marked in symbols an isolated repeat segment worked out on a striped template after choosing and marking the transfer direction of the eyelets on the original, green for to the left, yellow for to the right,  marking lace transfers rows for a partial card segment,  the numbers on the left reflect LC passes and their direction is marked by arrows, the numbers on the far right reflect those indicated on a factory-issued blank card, being selected seven rows below eye level by the reader.
DIY offers the opportunity for extending designs, here another lace transfer segment is added, a card would repeat the design twice in width, and twice in height, again showing the shift necessary when marking rows for cards,  The full punchcard for the elongated repeat, with a punching error marked by the red spot, also used to indicate the corresponding spot for the transfer error in that needle spot on the corresponding swatch

Hand to machine, symbols 5: lace

The beginning of this thread explores how lace may be interpreted from hand knitting patterns and charts, and when hand techniques might be used to make the transfers and create the fabrics on the knitting machine. Going from charts to punchcards will be addressed in later posts.

In hand knitting (unless knitting circular), because the work is turned every row, stocking stitch is formed by knitting one row, purling the next, and repeating the 2. Knit rows are often referred to as “right side” ones, purl as “wrong side” ones. On the machine, stocking stitch is produced as the knit carriage knits every row. In hand knitting, eyelets are created by use of yarn overs (whether single or multiple), and a decrease may in turn be formed ( if the number of total stitches is to remain constant) by knitting multiple stitches together to compensate for the increase created by the yarn over. Often the patterning occurs on knit side rows, the purl side rows are frequently simple purls. Instructions, depending on the author or even the time of publication, may read purl odd rows or even rows depending on how the pattern is begun.

Lace is created on the machine by placing 2 stitches on the same needle to be knit together, leaving the empty needle in the work position. The empty needle is filled with a loop when the knit carriage is passed across the work for the first row, then formed into a complete stitch as the direction of the knitting is reversed. Paired decreases with 2 yarn overs may be created by moving 2 stitches onto a center needle, resulting in the needles on either side being emptied, in turn picking up a loop and forming a stitch with the 2 subsequent rows of knitting with the main carriage.

When selecting hand knitting repeats or charts for working on the machine, it is good to begin with a pattern that has a background of stocking stitch only. It is possible to add ribbed stitches, turn the work over with a garter bar or use a G carriage to add purl stitches on the “right” side in place of the simple knit rows, but that may be considered later and will require marking and punching the cards used in a different manner. Many hand knit lace charts are abbreviated if the whole row is intended to be purled, and those rows may be omitted from the chart. If that is so, then when charting for the machine, the chart will be expanded to twice its length.

There are software programs that will now produce symbol charts for text, and vice versa. To start with it, it may be easier to begin with an existing simple chart to explore the process. As with other fabrics, sorting out the correct repeat remains important.

Hand knitting: a brief list of symbols, and a few of their associated directions on the machine:

O generally represents the eyelet  created by transferring the selected stitch onto the adjacent needle, in hand-knitting, it would be a yarn over and creates an increase

/ represents needle O on left transferred to the right, this needle will now have 2 stitches on it creating in effect a decrease, keeping the number of stitches on the machine constant

\  needle O on right is transferred to the needle on its left, and this needle will now have 2 stitches on it

/\ both needles O at left and right are transferred onto a single needle, which will now hold 3 stitches, again keeping the total number of stitches constant.

In machine knitting, all stitches must be transferred for that row before knitting subsequent rows. Transferring the stitches creates a slant on the knit side. For hand knit patterns that include charts to follow, the knitting key should be checked to the interpretation of the symbols provided.

Working with lace transfers is a bit like working with cables crossed on the knit side in hand knitting.

Symbols will need to be interpreted for the purl side of the fabric (reversed for machine knit). There is a “trick” used for lettering on punchcard machines: if graph paper is used, flip it over a light source, and look at the reverse for punching (or punch the back of the card with text in normal orientation).  This method may make it easier when there are slants to track. If the chart is flipped over, the knit squares become purls facing the knitter, and the purl stitches become knits on the front side.

Mark  Os first for eyelets, count over any in-between stitches, if the slant created is to the right (SSK) in machine knitting this would be a left-leaning stitch on the knit side, so the mark would need to be changed accordingly. Sometimes the direction of the transfers does not need to be changed, but the actual placement for the empty needle may have to be shifted over 1. In summary: charts in hand knitting books will need to be reversed to retain the same look on the knit side for machine knitting. Charts provided for machine knitting already take that into account, are usable as they are for hand transfers, and then the question arises as to how to translate them for use with automatic patterning and the lace carriage.

These graphics represent some of the possible elements and symbols in charts; blue is associated with hand knitting, pink is the same element, for use on the machine. Each is accompanied by a sketch illustrating the appearance of the knit on the knit, face side, and on the purl.

With a little software help: I have been using Intwined for the Mac, which has some issues, the latest being its crashing if there is a library of personal custom-built symbols in the stitch library. For now, I have a clean install, minus my machine knitting symbols. This is a chart for a simple lace pattern created with the program

preferences used

the generated hand “long hand” knitting instructions

the chart saved as jpg and “flipped” for knitting on the machine

if the charts are  MK ready, the transfers are made as you see them, multiple pronged tools speed things up

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Hand to machine, symbols 4: cables

The following begins to address cable translations. I posted some content on cables in January 2012, but this content follows the present vein.
Blue dots continue to represent the hand-knit symbol, below them the fabric is illustrated as viewed on the knit side.
The pink dots and the images on either side of them the machine knit, or fabric as viewed from the purl side.
In the column on the far right, the green dots and the images below them represent the opposing twist in HK and are illustrated only on their knit side.

To execute combinations in knit-purl on the same side of the knit on the machine, a ribber is required (or a Brother G carriage). Purl stitches are on the main bed, and knit stitches are created by the opposing bed. To match the hand-knit here, crossings are actually made in the same direction in both HK and MK


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