Charting Cable Stitches

2 over 1 Right (Back) Cross Cable

Check out the Cable Knitting Resource page for a little entry on charting cables.

Copying Knitting Charts from Excel

Another little trick I learned on Ravelry — love those folks!

If you are using Excel to create knitting charts, and you are ready to paste those charts into your pattern in Word, here’s a neat little trick:
~highlight the chart area in Excel
~hold the Shift key down, click Edit, click Copy Picture….
~in the dialog box that opens, click As shown when printed
~click OK
~go to your wordprocessor and click Paste
Voila! A beautiful, clear chart!

Another little tip is to use grey not black gridlines for your spreadsheet so that the lines are visible but not overwhelming. You can set the gridline colour under Tools, Options…, View tab; the colour option is at the bottom of that tab.

Design Journal in MSExcel

No, it’s not your eyes; apologies for the blurriness. It’s a screen capture – not sure why it’s not behaving itself, but it will give you the idea described below.

Another Excel project.

I really should be pattern editing ) but….. I had this idea!!!!!

I’ve been trying to find something to track my project progress, and as I was looking around the internet I thought, “enough of this!” I don’t have enough time as it is. So, let’s see how we can make do. Hmmmmm, Excel……let’s see. So this is what I came up with (bad grammatical form, I know):

I put the date down the left side in ColumnA. Each project has its own column heading.

I have my Design Process Steps (19 at this moment) listed below each project. As I work on a project, I drag the appropriate item from the “Design Process” area up to the cell in line with the current date. For example, if I were working on choosing a yarn for my ?Secret? baby sweater project, I would drag 2. Choose Yarn from the Design Process area up into the row that contained today’s date (making sure I stay in the column that is headed “?Secret? baby sweater”– purple background in the sample above). I then add any additional information e.g. the type of yarn I chose and where I purchased it, the colour, etc. You can create a new line within a cell by pressing and holding the ALT key and then pressing ENTER.

I also use the Freeze Panes option to keep the dates and Project names on the screen as stable headings.

To Freeze the Panes of the spreadsheet, make sure your cell focus is on the cell below and to the right of the areas you wish to remain on the screen. In my example, I want the dates and project names to stay on the screen at all times, so I placed my focus on cell B3. Everything above and to the left of the focus cell will remain stable.

Once the cursor is in the proper position, click Window, click Freeze Panes. That’s all there is to it. If you wish to deactivate this feature, simply click Window, click Unfreeze Panes.

As you progress, you will probably have to insert additional rows (Insert menu) between the Design Process area and your journal area to provide room for all of your entries. Excel always inserts rows above the current cursor position.

A quick way to insert the current date into an Excel spreadsheet: CTRL+;
i.e. hold the CTRL key down and press ;

The main plus I’m hoping for in this new venture is that I have 1 page that shows me all of my projects and I can add the journal entries without having to open separate files for each project. Hopefully a time saver.

Designer Notebook: Metric Conversion

This is more of an issue for those of us who are still in the hinterlands of the internet i.e. dial-up, where conversion charts aren’t just a click away.

So, I created my own metric conversion chart in MSExcel (any spreadsheet will do ) using 1/4″ increments.

The top picture shows the formula and the second picture shows the result of that formula. The conversion numbers for 1/4″ to 61″ fit onto one page when I placed the columns side by side in the spreadsheet.

I printed the sheet and keep it in the front of my Design Binder for quick reference so that when I’m writing up a pattern or drawing a schematic all of the needed conversions are there at a glance.

Why MSExcel creates only so-so knitting graph paper

First, a little about row and column measurement. When you click and hold the mouse pointer on a row or column divider line (e.g. the line between the 1 and 2 or between the A and B), Excel will show, using row height as an example, Height: 12.75(17 pixels). Row heights in MSExcel are measured in points (pixels) and Column widths are measured in characters(pixels). While the points/character measurements are shown first, Excel actually translates everything into pixels.

There are approximately 96 pixels to the inch (2.5 cm) — and Excel does not do partial pixels….and therein lies the problem.

Close your eyes and jump to the next paragraph if you don’t like seeing the math thing:
Sample Gauge: 36sts over 4 inches (10cm)
36 / 4 = 9 sts per inch (2.5cm)
since there are 96 pixels / inch (2.5cm), 96 / 9 = 10.7 (the width in pixels of each stitch)

You can open your eyes now
So, your gauge requires that each stitch (Excel column) be 10.7 pixels wide. Since Excel does not do partial pixels, each of your Excel graph paper stitches (cells) is off by 0.3 pixels.

At maximum, the gauge could be off by as much as 0.5 pixels. On a graph for a sweater that is 120 stitches across the front and 120 stitches across the back, this discrepancy results in an error of over 1 inch (2.5cm) in the total garment circumference.

Depending on your garment design, it may be close enough for charting designs, but if you want to use it for actual stitch counts, decreases, etc. there’s enough error here that it’s only really useful if your gauge divides out to be an even pixel number.