Tiger changes its stripes
I started a post last night, full of links to movies I’d seen recently, etc. Right when I decided to save it, Typepad was declared unavailable: of course, with my perfect sense of timing I chose to post just when they were doing scheduled maintenance! So here I am again.
At the top in the picture to the left is the Shepherd sock I made sometime back on size 1 needles, cuff down, with 60 stitches. You can see the 1×1 ribbing and the regular heel flat. For some reason I didn’t take to this sock: the fabric was a little loose and I could feel the purl bumps, and the ribbing was too tight.
At the bottom is the second sock, also with 60 stitches but toe-up and on size 0 needles. Isn’t it strange how minimal pattern variation results in such differences in striping? The white stripes are much more prominent and I like that, so I’m going with the newer iteration. Will frog the first and reknit. Also, it looks like these will be longish socks, because there’s an awful lot of the yarn left.
Aside from this soothing stockinette, I’ve been trying to write up the pattern for my cabled rangoli hat after getting a few requests for it. I read fleegle’s post about charting with Excel, and downloaded a few fonts that she mentions there. Since I recently moved to a Mac and left my stitch and motif maker software behind in my past life, I was excited at this prospect of not buying more charting software. From Fleegle’s review Knit Visualizer seems very nice indeed, but I don’t know if I want to put down $135 for it just yet. For some reason, though, even though I downloaded the fonts and they show up in my font list, I can’t see them or use them. Restart? did it. Reinstall? did that too. Swore at the machine? Of course. Finally, one of them did show up, but with a tremendous reluctance to behave properly. Admittedly, I am not an Excel whiz, but I cannot figure out why some of the symbols don’t fit into the boxes, or why some of the boxes don’t appear clearly. Maybe it’s just the type size? I tried increasing the box size but that didn’t work. Some symbols are also lighter than others. But there are upsides to this experiment. I know I am really late to this party, but I was insanely pleased when I realised I could chart simple patterns with the Wingdings font.
Still, do bear with me; I’ll put the chart and pattern together soon, in words if not in pictures.