Shelda's Adventures with Lace

A chart is a chart is...

For some time now I've been working on re-charting Marianne Kinzel's "Springtime" pattern, but not in a terribly focused way. I have been learning a good bit about using Excel for charting, and the process is coming easier now. But I'd really like to get this finished, so I've been doing some charting sessions, blocking out an hour or so and working on it steadily. Amazing how much that helps!

I wanted to chart this design myself for at least three reasons: first because I find Kinzel's charts visually hard to read, particularly at a glance as I'm knitting along. I like knitting charts to have blank squares for the knit stitches, and the charts from this book have a vertical line that symbolizes a knit stitch. A blank square in Kinzel's charts means no-stitch (used for spacing purposes). I find charts with nearly every space filled with a symbol to be visually overwhelming (and thus confusing). So that reason is about ease of use.

The second reason is because I would like to have the shoulder shaping and back panel of my intended Faroese shawl completely charted out. Since I'm so happy with Myrna Stahman's charts (in Stahman's Shawls and Scarves), I plan to emulate them. I want charts just like Myrna's charts! And now that I'm knitting "Elizabeth" and understand how the charts work, that will be easy to do.

And thirdly, I am just plain having fun learning to chart lace patterns on the computer. I never much liked doing this by hand with a pencil and graph paper, but I find this intriguing and a skill I'd like to master. Each to their own!

And I'm finding out some interesting stuff as I go along, not always what I would have predicted. I have now charted out the basic repeat of the main body of "Springtime." (This lace pattern is by Marianne Kinzel, and is available in her First Book of Modern Lace Knitting, Dover Publications, New York, 1972.) Btw, I wrote to Dover and secured permission for adapting Kinzel's pattern for my shawl. Here's a snap (click on the photo for a larger version).

I used my own symbols to chart this exactly as Kinzel has done, using grey squares for the no-stitch symbol that allows the elements of the lace to line up. Kinzel uses one symbol that is very like another symbol, but is knit differently, so I placed the same symbol inside a pink box to remind myself there was something different about it. I could also choose another symbol, and perhaps I will at some later time.

I still find the no-stitch blocks somewhat distracting, and I wanted to see what the chart looked like if I eliminated them. I thought this was going to be easier for me to read, but that turned out not to be the case. Here's the result of removing the no-stitch blocks from the left half of the chart. Chaos reigns!

So I've scrapped that plan. But that means my first chart of the main diamond for the body is now "good to go." Now I will work on the accompanying plain mesh diamond that Kinzel uses for the bottom tier of her tablecloth. I also plan to use it for the bottom repeat of my shawl, and to develop a half-diamond to use to fill in the sides of my back panel. There's also a triangular edging that I will need to chart, based on the top half of the main diamond pattern. I think it's going to be a lot of fun to watch all this come together!

Posted by Shelda at August 7, 2003 12:35 PM