Friday, December 23, 2011

Stranded Knitting Charts

 
I'm not quite sure what all I'll bring to this blog, but to start, I want to post a couple of free charts. Free is always good, right? I'm planning a series of posts on gauge to help with conversions, designing, and custom fitting. I'll also post some other patterns from time to time.

The first is a little chart that I made in response to this Ravelry thread. The original poster had seen a beautiful stranded Norwegian sweater and wanted the name of the pattern. No one had a name, but  I was able to come up with a chart for the pattern, which features a stylized tesselated fish.


Stranded Fish

The next one was inspired by a beautiful sweater I saw in a National Geographic catalogue. I loved the color combination. I think it would be beautiful with  a long repeat tonal dyed yarn as the main color. Or you could make it with three different shades of the turquoise, Fair Isle style. This is long enough for an entire woman's sweater at 8 rows per inch. You could repeat one or more of the patterns to make it longer for a man or if you just like your sweaters very long.
Sweater Panel

Estonian Motif
I copied this one from an Estonian Mitten. You can see the mittens here. Muhv has graciously permitted me to copy her combination of traditional stitch patterns for the cuff she added to her mittens.   Use the 44 x 24 stitch vertical repeat between the green lines as an allover pattern or the entire chart as a mitten back. The 44 stitch horizontal repeat ends at the pink line on the right.


An Assortment of Diced Pattern Motifs


When I made my husband his “Liev” sweater (http://www.ravelry.com/projects/ifdefelseif/-04-liv), I wanted to replace the floral motif from the original pattern with something less obviously feminine. These are the motifs I came up with when I was deciding what to do. As far as I know, these are “original,” or at least, I wasn’t referring to any sources when I charted them. I ended up using the very simple one in the lower right corner. You can choose a single motif from this selection to use in a diced pattern, as a motif in a repeated band, or you could even use some or all of them as they are presented.