Creating your own knitting charts

Yesterday I had the urge to start knitting again.

I learned it about 12 years ago and had a lot of fun studying the different techniques and patterns. The first project I finished was a lace pattern shawl named Glam Shells. It took me about two years to finish it (mostly because I didn't work on it for a long time) but now I am the proud owner of my own hand made shawl.

After that I stopped knitting.

I started a couple small projects over the past years but nothing to impressive or practical.

But yesterday I had the urge to start knitting again.

So what is the plan? Obviously I have to figure out what I want to do first. So I started drawing some patterns on a piece of checkered paper. While it is pretty soothing to draw on a piece of paper it has some drawbacks as well. I quickly ran out of space on my paper and trying to correct a mistake made with ballpoint pen gets ugly pretty quickly. I was not even trying to do something impressive. Just stitches, purls, yarn overs, and knit two together combined to a simple diagonal pattern.

When I got back home I didn't start knitting right away. Instead, I had a better idea. I could write a quick and simple tool to draw my charts digitally. A couple of hours later I had a first version that displays a pattern with arbitrary size which can be drawn on with the mouse. This morning I continued and added a download button for a minimal html of the chart along with a bit of polish.

The result can be found here.

Oh, by the way. While developing the tool I created the chart I want to knit too.

Noob out 👋