Experiment with intarsia design

A few blogs back I mentioned that I had had a 'Road to Damascus' moment when it suddenly hit me that designing charts for knitting (especially intarsia) ought to be no different to designing a tapestry... or even to working with pixels.

This is an idea that I have been interested in for years, having experimented with paintings that mimic the effect of enlarged pixels. So this really caught my interest... but I digress.

This post is simply to share my first stab at kntting up my very first intarsia design. I have completed a test knit for my bare trees chart... pics of the chart and the test knit are below.

I should mention that the sample did not turn out 100% as I intended, but I do quite like it and will probably turn it into a bag, once I can muster the inclination to knit the rest of it...

The sharp eyed among you may notice that my knitted tree points a different way than the chart... this is a schoolgirl error! I made the mistake of casting on in the same direction that I planned to knit my first row. (I should either have cast on from the opposite end or started with a purl row in order to get my tree to point the right way... doh!)

The chart itself was designed using my faithful old friend, Excel. I simply created a grid of squares and coloured them in, in stages... essentially just like drawing.

A good lesson learned from this test is that my test gauge did not perfectly match the size of my squares. The next time I do this, I will first of all plan the yarn and knit a gauge swatch, then size the Excel squares exactly according to my knitted swatch... this way I can ensure, while drawing, that the design proportions I am seeing on screen are exactly as they will look when knitted in the proposed yarn.

Anyway this experiment has got my creative juices flowing and I can see lots of potential for designing charts, either for intarsia or just regular stitch patterns...