Creative Knitting – Beyond Knit and Purl

For  about a year I have been mentally trying to put together my ideas for an Afgan that would depict some of my fondest memories of living here in Idaho.  It would, of course, have to include the wildlife, Christmas in the snow with the grand kids, and scenes of our beautiful surroundings.  All these thoughts came together this past week, and I spent 3 days drawing the picture motifs, using Pattern Maker ( a cross stitch software program); by the way, this program works great for charting knitting, too.

My building block for this project was a 12 inch motif framed with maple leaves (from the tree in our front yard).  From that point on it was simple a matter of inserting my picture ideas into the center of the block, and saving each block into a separate file.  Below is a picture of a portion of the Afgan chart.

This Afgan with be 5 blocks across and 6 blocks long, giving me nice size reversible double knit blanket, in cream and burgundy.  Now all I have to do is knit a swatch, calculate the yarn required per stitch and I am on my way.

So…… why did I post this?  Just sharing an idea, hoping it might spur someone to do a similar project.  Hummmm….. what do  you think?

Here is a PDF file of the final digital results – Idaho Memories Afghan

Do check out Pattern Maker, and if you are interesting in doing a project like this, I will be happy to help you get started.

I estimated the yarn requirements at 15 skeins of sports yarn for each color on a number 4 needle (6 sts per inch).

Knit-tweaker

PS. For you experienced “charters”  this is just a pictorial chart of the desired results, my knitting charts are set up to match the gauge.  I also do this with Pattern Maker.