Wednesday, February 3, 2010

A-Knitting We Will Go

After the flurry of creative activity before Christmas, I've been relaxing with the next afghan.


I was shooting for 60" square, but it seems to be coming in at about 58" wide. It goes more quickly than the King-Sized Afghan, which is now serving as a very warm bedspread.

The new afghan has only eaten 3 balls of yarn so far and is only 14" long, so it still works as take-along knitting.

The other thing going on is this gauge swatch:


When I made the Twilit Forest Poncho Sweater, I dusted off my old perl program that does the number crunching for poncho sweaters and updated it so that it matches my current sweater design process.

Then I knit this gauge swatch. It's the raw material for a light zippered jacket, in a lovely spiral rib pattern that I used for Malcolm's Christmas concert vest. It will be a raglan with a little knot cable in the raglan lines and probably a fancier cable framing the zipper.

Yeah, well, I decided that, before I knit this sweater, I'd go ahead and port the poncho sweater program to Python and then expand it to do raglan design too.

The basic porting took a long weekend (and kisses to my wonderful husband for providing key support in getting started on this), and then I started looking at what I would really want a number-crunching sweater design program to do.

So I've been working on my vision for a top-down design program that would do the math to build sweaters the way I knit them. I have visions of neckline and sleeve variations, hooks for the sweater types I want to support, and a general mulling over of the best ways to specify and implement my ideas so that the program can do a lot of what I do when I design a sweater.

I'm excited about this. I've started an open-source project for the KnitFitter, and I invite anyone who is interested to pop over to sourceforge and take a look.