I've blogged about using Microsoft Visio to do my charts here before. At great length.

In short, I've devised a set of stencils (shape templates) that covers many of knitting's basic stitches. I assemble them like a wall of alphabet blocks to make my charts, and have used them to build all the knitting and embroidery pattern graphs here and at wiseNeedle.



That ever insistent inbox of mine has disgorged a couple of requests for my Visio templates, so I've decided to post them here, free for the taking. Eventually I'll remove them from this blog and file them up on wiseNeedle where they will enjoy a more permanent home.

To use these templates you'll need a full registered copy of Microsoft Visio 2000 or later (up to and including the latest Office 2003 edition) - any flavor, for Windows. Sad to say Visio is not a inexpensive tidbit of a program one can pick up on a whim. It's a major tool used in offices and schools, mostly for engineering and other planning type drafting, and is priced accordingly. Still, I am sure there's a subset of technoknitter nerds who like me use the thing in home businesses, or who have access to it during lunch hours at work or as a student in a media center.

I might have tweaked the symbols a bit since I last updated this set, but nothing major has happened to them. I include three templates - one for basic symbols, one with cable crossings, and one with an extended set of increases and decreases, all bundled into this handy compressed *.zip file. Download it, then copy the *.vss files into the Visio template space on your local hard drive (probably the same place as the folder entitled "Visio Extras"). If you do that you should be able to access them off the standard Visio stencil menu.

Yes, I know that there are whole companies that do nothing but sell Visio template solutions, and here I am giving one away. It's "teachware." If you use it, teach someone else how to do something (especially something knit, stitch or fiber related), and I'll consider myself well paid. You may use my templates to create original knitting and stitching charts of your own. A credit for the tool would be nice if you publish any of the resulting charts, so that others can find it and use it too. You may not however repost these templates on another site nor may you claim them as your own. (If you do, major demons of vile vengance will haunt your dreams forever, should your kneecaps escape me and my trusty stick.) Linking back here is fine and dandy.

When you try out these templates you'll find that the symbols are not use constrained. You can stack the stitches any way you want, there's no effort on the part of the template to limit use to "knitting legal" configurations. But I did include a minor bit of shiny with the template symbols themselves. For most of them (except for some of the really esoteric cable crossings) hovering your cursor over the symbol in the template stencil window will pop up a how to knit annotation for both right side and wrong side application.

If you do play with these, please let me know. Suggestions for additions, improvements, or other use case advice are most welcome.