And the Pattern Writing Slows to a Crawl

Some time ago, I designed a lovely pair of gauntlets that almost, but did not quite make it into one of the online magazines.  At the time, I was all fired up to do the "icky" part, but since the design wasn't accepted, I blew it off until later.

I had these plans to submit it elsewhere, but have been forced to admit that I will not be getting that done.  Instead, I'm going to publish it on Ravelry, and here, along with my other designs.

Here's a preview:

The hold up?  Testing you ask?  Oh no.

It's the pesky turning of lovely charts into written out words.  In theory, the lovely charting software I'm using will do that for me.  Alas, it doesn't do it very well, and I keep finding errors in it's written pattern.  And even if it were accurate, few of us want to read a pattern that says:

k3, p2, k3, p2, k3, p2, k3, p2, k5, p2, k3, p2, k3, p2

We want to read a pattern that says:

(k3, p2) 4x, k5, p2, (k3, p2) 2x.

And so, I've got to go fixing all the little repeats.

Silly me, I've gone and designed a pattern with lots of litte repeats.  While it makes it easier to knit, it makes it slightly more painful to convert from chart to written words. 

It continues to boggle my mind that it takes four pages of text to provide the same instructions you can put into two charts that fit onto one page.  But so it is.

I'm slogging away,  half way through Chart B in a pattern with four charts of about 32 rounds, and three charts of about 7 rounds.

Once I've gotten that done, I WILL need a tester to make sure that it works in written format (I've already had the charted version well tested).  Any volunteers?

Comments

[Cgirl]

People who are unwilling to learn to read charts should just be out of luck.

[kmkat]

One chart = a thousand+ words.

I am tempted to volunteer to test knit, but my mental queue of other must-knit projects keeps getting in the way...