Blog surfing again

Here is another great blog on using Adobe Illustrator to make colour charts, this time in the form of a video.  Enjoy!

Part 5: Making templates with basic garment shapes

This is the final part of my series on using Excel to chart knit and crochet designs.

Making a template spreadsheet of basic shapes that you will use over and over again will save you a lot of time in the initial set up. My suggestion would be to open a blank spreadsheet, and, one per worksheet, outline (with the line drawing tool) some basic flat shapes - sweater, sock, mitten, etc. Whatever will be of most use to you. Or collect these basic shapes as you develop your own library by copying and pasting into a specially designated "Template" spreadsheet for easy access.

Here is a basic sweater front and back shape.

This example is not done to any realistic scale (six shoulder stitches would be a seriously chunky yarn!), so you may wish to make your initial template a little closer to a realistic gauge. Once you copy your template into a working spreadsheet for an individual design, you can easily add rows and columns and edit the aspect ratio of the cells so that your schematic will be to scale from your swatch.

Look carefully at existing schematic drawings in published patterns for help with representing your design in a flat pattern visual. There are also many books available - one of my favourite resources is Deborah Newton's Designing Knitwear.

I hope this series has been helpful and provided you with some ideas for using Excel in creative ways!

Workin' it

Computers and spreadsheets are great, but sometimes plain old paper and pencil are the best design tools going.  I used to keep swatches in a binder along with yarn notes etc, but the swatches add a lot of bulk, so I had a brainstorm one day – make a colour photocopy of the swatch to put in the binder.  Not only does it cut down on the bulk in the binder, but printer/scanner/copiers make pretty much actual size photocopies of things, so measuring gauge right on the paper instead of a 3D stretchy swatch is a great way to get an accurate measure.  AND, I can use this colour (or black and white) copy of a swatch and design right on it.  I’m not going to say right now what the design is that I have in process, but keen eyes might be able to guess the inspiration.

 

Namaste!

Happy Mother's Day!

Beautiful flowers from my awesome family J !

Catch Up

Just a few catch up items today.

First, I've finished and photographed the Calico Afghan kit from Mary Maxim. I absolutely love the colours, and really enjoyed working on it.

Second, I was "blog surfing" a few days ago and I stumbled onto "Tales of a Techno-Hooker", and a really great series on how to chart crochet symbols using Adobe Illustrator. I don't own or use Adobe Illustrator, but it's still a very interesting read to compare that with Excel.

Third, I hope to finish my series on Charting with Excel sometime in the next week or two, so watch for that. There is just Part 5, on reusable templates, left to write about.

And lastly, I'm very much looking forward to the season finale of Lost this week, although at the same time sad to be entering another eight or nine month hiatus until the final season starts at the beginning of 2010. I think I can say without a doubt that it is, IMHO, the best tv show ever made. Ever. AND, I am keeping my fingers crossed on this, I really really hope to get to the theatre at the end of the week to see the new Star Trek movie. I can hardly wait!

Later!