Yesterday during the attack of Life that kept me from blogging, I did
find a minute to answer a question about winding balls from hanks. I
tried my best to describe how to do it, but was very frustrated not to
be able to show how. So this morning The Small Child and I dug out some
scrap yarn and took some pictures.

Start
by spreading out the fingers of your left hand (right hand if you’re a
lefty). Stash the free end (as opposed to the end attached to your
hank) between your index and middle finger.

Wind the yarn in a figure 8 around your thumb and little finger until you’ve got a hefty butterfly going.

Once it’s too big to wind this way, take it off your fingers and fold
it in half. Note that I’ve still got the free end between my
fingers. The end that I’m winding is hanging down in front.

Now hold the folded butterfly in your left hand, with your finger sort
of encapsulating the thing. (When I teach kids to do this, I have them
think about holding a baby bird in a sugar cage.) Winding your yarn
around your fingers, begin to build up a ball. Wind a bit in one
direction, then shift your grip and wind in another.

The goal is to make a very soft, squishy ball so that the yarn isn’t
flattened or stretched out. When my fingers are full (like in the
photo above), I pull my fingers out, rotate the ball in my left hand
and start winding again in a different direction.

Eventually the ball will outgrow your grip size and you won’t be able
to fit it between your fingers as you wind. Don’t worry. Continue to
wind LOOSELY until you’re through, preferably over at least one finger
to introduce extra "give" into the wind so the yarn isn’t stressed. If
you want to use the thing as a center pull, avoid capturing the free
end as you wind. (It’s just above my thumb in the photo
above). Keep going until you’ve finished.

The end product. A nice fluffy ball. You can see the center
pull end trailing off past my thumb, and the outside end trailing off
the bottom.

Even though I have a ball winding machine, I wind more than half of the
yarn I use this way, mounting the hanks on my swift, but making the
balls by hand. The biggest exception is lace weight yarn.
Anything that comes in hanks of more than 700 yards is going to take an
eon and a half to wind by hand. That’s worth hauling out the
winder and wrestling it into submission.

After Friday’s post on using Microsoft Visio for graphing knitting patterns I received some questions:


What’s Visio?

Microsoft Visio is a professional level drafting/drawing program –
something I’ve co-opted into serving as a pattern development tool, not
something that was designed for that purpose. It’s main use is
technical and scientific illustration – Gantt charts, flow process
models, flowcharts, conceptual diagrams, infrastructure diagrams,
business graphics, organization charts and the like. For example,
network planners use it to lay out routing diagrams for offices, as it
not only can handle a dimensioned architectural drawing, but it can
also keep count of the networking hardware placed on the drawing,
producing a "need to buy" list as the plan progresses.

In my work life, I’m a proposal writer working in engineering and
telecommunications companies. I use Visio extensively to do?
technical illustration and project planning. Visio isn’t the sort
of thing that most people have lying around the house, but because I
have worked as a consultant I have had to buy my own copy. I use
Visio Pro. Visio Standard (the entry level version without some
of the industry-specific bells and whistles) is about $200.

http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/FX010857981033.aspx

What’s a stencil?? Can I use these with other programs?

One feature of Visio (both versions) is the ability to establish a
collection of standard shapes, and call that collection up when
needed. These collections are called stencils. I created a
set of stencils for Visio that contain knitting stitch and graphing
symbols. I attach the stencil to the active drawing, and then
using all of Visio’s drafting features – draw up my chart.

Visio stencils are unique to that program, and cannot be used with
others. There may be (emphasis on uncertainty here) one
other program that can import them, but I do not own that program and
have not tried it. It’s called SmartDraw, and the suite edition
that includes templates sells for just under $300. It purports to
import Visio output, but there’s nothing there that says it takes the
stencils directly. I suspect that you’d need to take the sample
Visio drawing I include in my template set, then use it to create a new
SmartDraw symbol library. As far as lower cost/hobbyist targeted
programs with the same functionality – I don’t know of any that import
Visio stencils. Please chime in if you do.


Can you do everything in Visio that dedicated programs like Aran Paint or Stitch and Motif Maker do?

No. I’m NOT using a program that knows the slightest thing about
knitting, or that is optimized for this sort of thing. There are
no limits that keep me from using impossible combos of stitches, and no
tools that let me do things like replace all the red stitches with pink
stitches everywhere in the active document. There’s no
blank canvas that can be flood filled by a background stitch.
Instead I have to build my diagrams stitch by stitch, adding my stitchs
(or groups of stitches) like a kid laying out a doll’s dance floor of
alphabet blocks.

What I do have is an unlimited size and shape canvas on which to work;
and the ability to group, layer, copy/paste, rotate and reflect my
custom symbols as needed. If I’m doing colorwork, I have an
infinitude of possibilities, and even do color matching by Pantone or
other color codification system. I can make up custom symbols on
the fly, adding to my library as I go along and am not limited to the
symbols present in a knitting font package (in fact, I don’t even
bother with one). I can also export my designs to all standard
web graphics formats, or paste them into other documents as desired.

Is Visio easy to use?

While large parts of the thing would be intuitive to anyone familiar
with other drawing programs, Visio isn’t the easiest program to learn
if you’ve never used any drafting program before. There are lots
of inexpensive training courses out there, some web-based, and some at
local community colleges. Or if you’re adventurous you can do
what I did – just start monkeying around with the thing.

Can I do the same thing with other drawing programs?

I’m pretty sure you can, although not every drawing program works in
exactly the same way. ? In ages past, I co-opted Aldus Superpaint
(on my late lamented Mac) for doing stitching and knitting
diagrams. That one was a hybrid drawing/drafting program. I
set up a series of ground textures that corresponded to filled and
unfilled grid squares (some with specific symbols in them). Then
I created a paintbrush the same size as one grid square. By
selecting the background fills and using the paint brush as a stamper,
I "daubed out" my charts. This is how I did all of the charted
illustrations in The New Carolingian Modelbook.?

I also have convinced Canvas to serve as a knitting/stitching design
aide, but that was a bit more painful. The version of Canvas I
used did not have a robust stencil capability. You could make
libraries of symbols, but they weren’t as accessible as in Visio.
I ended up making one document with reference copies of my
symbols. Then in a new document I established a snap-to grid
equal to the size of a stitch square, and copied/pasted the symbols
from my library document into my new design. It worked, but it
was cumbersome.

I also know that some people use non-drawing programs for this purpose. Others have written quite extensively about creative adaptation of Microsoft Excel and other spreadsheets (and even MS Word) as stitch chart creation programs.

If you’ve smacked another drawing program around for this purpose and
have some hints to share with others please feel free to add your
comments to this pile.

I’ve blogged about using Microsoft Visio to do my charts here before.
At great length.

In short, I’ve devised a set of stencils (shape templates) that covers many of
knitting’s basic stitches. I assemble them like a wall of alphabet
blocks to make my charts, and have used them to build all the knitting
and embroidery pattern graphs here and at wiseNeedle.

That
ever insistent inbox of mine has disgorged a couple of requests for my
Visio templates, so I’ve decided to post them here, free for the
taking. Eventually I’ll remove them from this blog and file them up on
wiseNeedle where they will enjoy a more permanent home.

To use these templates you’ll need a full registered copy of Microsoft
Visio 2000 or later (up to and including the latest Office 2003
edition) – any flavor, for Windows. Sad to say Visio is not a
inexpensive tidbit of a program one can pick up on a whim. It’s a major
tool used in offices and schools, mostly for engineering and other
planning type drafting, and is priced accordingly. Still, I am sure
there’s a subset of technoknitter nerds who like me use the thing in home
businesses, or who have access to it during lunch hours at work or as a
student in a media center.

I might have tweaked the symbols a bit since I last updated this set,
but nothing major has happened to them. I include three templates
– one for basic symbols, one with cable crossings, and one with an
extended set of increases and decreases, all bundled into this handy compressed *.zip file.
Download it, then copy the *.vss files into the Visio template space on
your local hard drive (probably the same place as the folder entitled
“Visio Extras”). If you do that you should be able to access them off the standard Visio stencil menu.

Yes, I know that there are whole companies that do nothing but sell Visio template solutions, and here I am giving one away. It’s “teachware.” If you use it, teach someone else how to do something (especially something knit, stitch or fiber related), and I’ll consider myself well paid. You may use my templates to create original knitting and stitching charts of your own. A credit for the tool would be nice if you publish any of the resulting charts, so that others can find it and use it too. You may not however repost these templates on another site nor may you claim them as your own. (If you do, major demons of vile vengance will haunt your dreams forever, should your kneecaps escape me and my trusty stick.) Linking back here is fine and dandy.

When you try out these templates you’ll find that the symbols are not
use constrained. You can stack the stitches any way you want,
there’s no effort on the part of the template to limit use to “knitting
legal” configurations. But I did include a minor bit of shiny
with the template symbols themselves. For most of them (except
for some of the really esoteric cable crossings) hovering your cursor
over the symbol in the template stencil window will pop up a how to
knit annotation for both right side and wrong side application.

If you do play with these, please let me know. Suggestions for
additions, improvements, or other use case advice are most welcome.