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.

Several people have asked about the blocking board Laura used for her Paisley. I've sent the question to her, and will post any reply.

In the mean time, here's another suggestion. When I'm not being lazy slinging things down willy-nilly on towels, I do follow a bit more of a method. First, I clear out furniture in the room with our largest area rug (I've got no wall to wall carpeting). Then I lay down a heavy cotton quilt type blanket to protect the carpet from any moisture, and to give me more depth into which I can pin. Finally I cover the blanket with a rally check patterned sheet, one of two I stumbled across in a discount store. Once all is smooth and ready, I pin out my item, using long rust-free pins:




The item above is my Spider Queen shawl. It stretched out to be about 7 feet across. I began with a rough estimate of how large my finished item should end up being, then I started at the center points of each edge. I pinned them first, working from side to opposite side and tensioning the piece across between counterpoised pins. Then I stretched out the corners and did them, too. After that I just zipped back and forth across the piece ping-pong style, pinning in the middle of each remaining unpinned length until I had placed a pin in each of the edging's points:



About the only caution I offer (beyond being prepared for the labor intensiveness of this effort) is that the cheap Dritz pins I used were long enough and rust-free enough, but they were too thin and too fragile. They bent going in and the little bead heads pulled off when I pulled the pins out. Not fun.

I know that rally check print sheets are not an every day item, but any even check or Tattersall or windowpane style plaid will work equally well. So would yard goods in gingham or similar "graph paper" type patterns.

My friend Kathryn gently chides me about blocking my Kinzel Rose of England, languishing in my Chest of Knitting Horrors? since 1991. While the method above would work for that piece it's not on my current schedule. ROE was the first bit of lace knitting I ever attempted. It's a testament to the precision and logic of that pattern that I was able to do it with no prior lace experience.

At the time though, I wasn't very appreciative though of my materials. I used a mish-mash of size 30 white crochet cottons from various makers, bought at different times. You can see where each purchased lot begins and ends, some by slight color difference, some by texture. I got about four courses of leaves into the final outside area and stopped at the point where I ran out of thread (again) and when I was no longer able to delude myself that the thread lot problem wasn't noticeable. I'd need to figure out where I was, buy more mis-matched cotton, finish out another course of leaves, and do the final crochet-off finish before I could even think of blocking. Either that or ravel out a course or two of leaves and finish the thing from that point. So you can get an idea of what the (eventual) goal is, here's Judy Gibson's ROE.

I know some people are asking about when I will be blocking my Alcazar shawl. I'm afraid the Larger Daughter took a fancy to my loud rally check sheets and took them off to sleep away camp. No large item blocking will happen here until she and my sheets return.

I get a big kick out of seeing what others have made from my patterns or pattern pieces. It's a bit like meeting up with old friends years down the road and finding out what they've been up to. I'm delighted to be able to show off any photos of their work here in the Gallery section.

My latest vicarious bit of happy warmth was provided by my knitpal Laura Need. She decided to do the Interweave Knits Paisley Shawl from the Spring '05 edition, but to finish it off with the simple edging I noodled up. She sent me the picture below and gave me permission to post it:



Laura used Zephyr, and her Paisley pinned out to about 46 inches square. She did a much more even job of the knitting and blocking than I did. Plus she had the wisdom to use a solid color. You can see the difference:



Laura's paisleys and eyelets really pop out. You can see the edging especially well. The piece's texture patterning isn't fighting for your attention with ground color variations. That's a big improvement. I took the lazy way out of blocking, using my wires rather haphazardly and patting them in place rather than pinning them down to tension the work. She did it the more labor intensive way that produces better results - pinning out the individual points evenly on a dimensioned blocking surface. (Hers also pinned out to be six inches larger than mine.)

All in all I'm extremely impressed and quite pleased that Laura found fun in my minor contribution to this pattern. A great job!

Here's a curious piece that came to me from the same grandparents as my fly bowl (I've been told that it's actually a bee dish, not a fly bowl).



This is an original pen and ink line drawing that appears to depict a piece of stumpwork embroidery. It bears a sigil of the letters HCs (possibly CCS) but has no other signature on it. It hung in my grandmother's library for years, and always held a certain fascination for me when I was a kid. At that time I didn't realize the embroidery connection. At seven I liked the whimsical little animals in the corners, and the fact the central figure was a queen. Anecdotal family tales say the title of this piece is "Queen Esther."

Years later when I began embroidering in earnest (started on that path by the same grandmother), I stumbled across the stumpwork style and recognized the drawing for what it was. I'm torn. I'm not exactly sure if this is a copy of a piece displayed in a museum, or if it's a freehand drawing inspired by that style. I rather suspect the former. There is supposed to be a stumpwork piece depicting Queen Esther n the collection of the Massachusetts Historical Society, but I haven't seen a picture of it, so I can't say if my pen and ink drawing shows that particular artifact.

Stumpwork (raised or embossed embroidery) was popular in the 1600s, tailing off into the early 1700s. It has enjoyed a couple of minor revivals since. It's characterized by three dimensional effects, and is gaining interest right now, in part fueled by the popularity of ribbon embroidery and Brazilian embroidery, two other more modern styles that also employ three dimensional effects. There are also traditional forms of padded stitching practiced in Thailand and Cambodia that also use heavy stitching on separately embroidered motifs that are affixed to a ground over stuffing.

In stumpwork, much of the stitching is done over raised grounds, separately stitched and sewn onto a backing fabric. These motifs and slips are stuffed underneath with batting or even little wooden forms. Additional raised effect is provided by the inclusion of detached stitching, much of it based on detached buttonhole, hollie point, or other "free" lace stitches. On some pieces, further embellishment is provided by the liberal use of gold and silver threads, sequins, spangles and even beads. Some say that the little wooden forms used for stuffing are the "stumps" that gave the work its ungraceful name, others say that the name is a corruption of the word stamp, as many of the faces of the figures were printed by stamping rather than being stitched. It's heavy and encrusted looking except in its very lightest manifestations, not well suited for wearing. Instead it was employed mostly for decor - panels, mirror surrounds, book covers, cushions, and most especially small chests (cabinets) that were covered inside and out with the stitching.
Creating a cabinet was a crowning glory for the amateur needleworker of the late 1600s. They were expensive to do, required better than average skill, and represented a sort of needlework "graduation" for teens just about done with the course of informal study that passed for most girls' educations at that time.

There are several articles on stumpwork available elsewhere on the web, but precious few pictures of historical examples: This one has a useful bibliography, Janet Davies has some photos of artifacts that show the dimensionality of the stitching on her stumpwork and raised Elizabethan embroidery pages, CameoRoze also offers up an article on the modern revival of the style. In a Minute Ago also offers up a nice round-up of stumpwork and related styles as they are practiced today.

In the mean time my Not Embroidery hangs in my bedroom, where it complements a larger blackwork panel.

Four motifs done. My guesstimate is that four represents about 15% of the total finished area. That means I'm looking at something like 26 or so in total, with some of them being halfies.



It looks like the trillium background shapes will form rings around the star motifs. I'm really looking forward to seeing that develop. My next step though may be to work out the half-width motif set. That would include a half-hex, three normal triangles, one normal square and two half-width squares.

UPDATE - Looking for past posts here

I do try to post stuff here that I hope is useful. I also realize that much of it might not strike a reader as being useful today, but might stick in memory somewhere and pop up when the specific need is encountered. I've gotten a couple of questions (including a comment early today) about how to find past posts. I've tried to provide tools to do that.

First, for the knitting projects and some broad subject areas, I've set up category tags. You can see them in the right hand sidebar (you might have to scroll right a bit because of an over-large graphic I posted last week). Projects all are named something like "Project - Lacy Scarf" and index all the posts that mention each project. The broad subject categories also work that way. Clicking on the "Reference Shelf" tag will bring up all the posts that I thought people might find especially helpful, likewise "Embroidery" should find all the posts that discuss that subject.

Some particularly popular posts have merited direct access under the major category "References," also in the right hand sidebar. Yarn Labels 101 and 102 for example are two posts that get lots of traffic from people just becoming familiar with yarn labels and how to read them.

Finally for all those search needs that keyword indexing didn't anticipate, there's a search box in that same sidebar. You can type a word in there and bring up all posts that mention it, or you can click on the "advanced search" tag right below that box to do more complex multi-word or time-limited searches. Typing "booties" in the search box should find the posts I did on A. Krekel's pattern for booties that really do stay on.

I know I said I wasn't going to bore anyone with further progress on my North Truro Counterpane, but I did get to an interesting point yesterday, and my inbox has been graced with several questions.

First, the show and tell:



As you can see, I finished a couple more side squares of Motif #3, and seamed in most of the other little triangles that I knit over the weekend. That let me join #3 onto the two units I had already completed. I like the accidental trillium flower of negative space that forms where three motifs join. I'd love to say that was intentional, but it wasn't. There's lots that science doesn't know about this designing stuff, yet.

Now for the mailbag:

Aren't you going to have a bushel of ends to deal with?

Two bushels. Even though I'm knitting the squares out from the hex center, there's two for the center hex, plus two for each for six squares, plus two each for six triangles, minus one for the hex end I use to do the first square, and one for the end that doesn't get started at the outset of that first square. 24 in all for each motif. As you can see in the pix, I like to leave them long so they're available for sewing the motifs together. As I get further into the thing, I'll know WHICH I need to leave particularly long, and which I can plan to be shorter. Still, I plan on darning in ends incrementally as I go along rather than waiting for the end of the entire project.

Why aren't you blocking the motifs before sewing them together?

Good question. Sometimes I do block the motifs before I assemble them. This time I didn't. This particular no-name yarn and needle combo seem to produce motifs that lie relatively flat, showing the openwork well without the block. I suspect my squish problem WOULD be partially fixed by blocking, but leaving the hex motif live on the circular as I finish out the squares isn't exactly conducive to the knit-block-assemble production method. Plus pinning out each night's production means leaving the ironing board up to do the blocking, and I don't want to trip over it for the next umpteen months.

Are you going to leave the edges wavy?

I could. You can see that the lower edge makes a nice gentle wave. I could leave the thing raw, edge it with I-cord, or sew on a (yet to be designed) complementing edge strip just as it is. But I probably won't. Just on the principle that the biggest fun comes from the most abstruse and useless effort, I'll probably do up half hexes and half squares to produce a nice straight edge, then affix that as yet mythical edging to it.

Lovely crib blanket! You're nuts for spending so much effort on a baby blanket.

Huh? This is destined to be an oversized Queen-size spread for my own bed. (I've knit a blankie for each of the kids, why can't I have one, too?) If you think I'm addled for attempting this as a mini-throw, I'm sure you think I'm a gibbering raving loon for doing one that big.

I was busy this weekend past.



I worked out the plain triangle and made two. Both are sewn into the growing group. One is indicated by the arrow. I do have a bit of a scrunch problem, but probably not so much that it can't be ignored. The sides of my triangle are less tall than its base is wide. Therefore, when I'm sewing the bases of the patterned triangles onto the sides of the plain one, I have to squish them up a bit. You can see the slight rumples that result.

I do however like the way the points of the stars align. While the orientation I tried last time had more movement in it, because the stars were offset, this one will have less background area.



For those who have asked how I add arrows or other annotations to my photos - I use Macromedia Fireworks to slim, retouch, or otherwise manage my images. I cheat - the arrows are Wingding font "letters" added with the text tool.

Shoe size chart

Some people have pointed out that their European shoe sizes are off a bit from the chart shown yesterday. Mostly at the upper end. The chart's represented equivalent for US shoe sizes Women's 9 and above seems to work out one unit larger than people are reporting. So a 10.5 would be closer to a 42 than a 43. Grains of salt are advised.

I came across this on an Adidas shoe box, and thought it might be of interest to sock knitters, especially those knitting socks as gifts knowing nothing but foot sizes. It's a chart showing adult men's and women's shoe sizes in the US, the UK, France, and Japan. I've added the red line to show my own giant size - US Women's 10.5 (Euro 43, if such a beast exists).

Now by the official centimeter length my giant size works out to a squidge over 28.5 cm. I find my own wool and wool blend socks fit best if they are about 25-27 cm when measured from heel to the tip of the toe: stretchier, finer yarns at the smaller end, less stretchy or heavier yarn at the top end. The one pair of cotton socks I made was about 27.5 cm, to allow for that yarn's lack of stretch.

Why do I make my socks shorter than my actual foot length? If your feet feel like they're swimming in your socks, your socks are too big. Socks NEED to stretch just a bit for optimal fit. Otherwise one gets bunching and foot blisters where the fabric accumulates in folds inside the shoes. Too big socks also wear out faster. All that sliding and rubbing oversize socks do inside shoes translates to extra friction, and friction is a sock-killer.




Click on image above for full size chart