Marnie, speak! Good girl.

My final installment of the Illustrator for knitting charts series, is now completed. I think that those of you who feel comfortable with the first two tutorials will find this one pretty straightforward, with just a couple new skills to apply.

For those of you who haven't seen the other tutorials, I highly recommend you watch them before trying this tutorial.

Illustrator for colorwork charts, has all sorts of introductory information on using Illustrator which will be applied through all the subsequent tutorials.
Part 1
Part 2
Part 3

Illustrator for stitch pattern charts, builds off those basic skills and adds custom made shapes.
Watch it here.

Lastly, here is Illustrator for cablework charts where we expand on making custom shapes and build a more complex chart. I've created this last tutorial in High Def so you can enlarge these and really get a good look at what I'm doing.

Part I

Part II

Download the chart I built here and play along at home.

Next up, I'd like to do a tutorial or two on InDesign and features that may be useful to designers. If you have any questions or requests, please don't hesitate to leave me a comment. And of course, any hints or tips you want to share would be great.

I used to blog the most inane little bits of my life, at times, and now there is facebook and twitter to handle that task. But when it comes time to post, there are always such a varied assortment of things I want to tell you about that, for the life of me, I can't think of a decent title. Sorry about that.

Anyway, first and foremost, thank you all who purchased patterns from January 15th-31st, of this year. Your donations allowed me to make a total of $736 in donations to Doctors Without Borders. And lest you think that an impressive number, I've seen other knitters reporting several thousand dollars in donations from their own sales. It's amazing to see how a multitude of small gestures can add up to so much. Really, it's a metaphor for life and it reminds me that no bit of good is too small and every effort is meaningful. So thanks to all of you who donated personally or bought patterns from a participating designer. It's enough to make my crotchety little heart soften a bit.

In doggy news, the pups still love the beach with the white hot passion of a thousand suns

See all the pictures here.

The beef crunchies I made have upped the excitement for training time.

They work hard and they play hard. Awww

And lastly for your moment of pure comic relief at the expense of what little shame I may have had left, I got an honorable mention (as did the beautiful Stitch Diva,) in the Regretsy Skants contest.

Yup, this get-up doesn't even touch the wackiness the winners hit. Mine looks downright tame by comparison.

I've finished the pattern for Hair Apparent and added it to the collection of Help For Haiti patterns. Like all my more recent patterns, 50% of the price will be donated to Doctors Without Borders for any sales from January 15-January 31, 2010. 75% of any sales of my older self-published patterns, retroactive to January 15th, will also be included in the donation.

Not to get sappy, but I've been following a few Ravelry threads and the amount of money knitters have been able to donate is awe inspiring. If you are interested, check out the tally Yarn Harlot is keeping or browse the other patterns in Ravelry that are marked for donations to Haiti. The good godless folks of LSG alone have raised $40,000. It's a great reminder that many people making small gestures can add up to a lot.

I hope that any of you who have been on the line about sending a donation, will consider finding a charity you respect and sending an amount that you can spare. And for the loads of you who have clearly already reached deep into your pockets, despite the poor economy, I just want to say how moved I am by your generosity. Ok, sappiness over. Thanks for humoring me.

Hair Apparent

This ultra easy pattern can be worked up in a productive weekend or gradually completed over a week. There's a fun little braided brim and I've included a full photo tutorial at the end of the document for those who feel it may be beyond their skill level. I've also included both stripe instructions and both snap and button options. The hat is available in 5 sizes from premie to adult. The pattern is 4 pages plus a cover and is laid out so that secondary info (tutorials, gauge, schematics, etc) are on separate pages from the actual pattern instructions, so you can print out only the info you actually need and save paper and ink.

The price is $3.
Find out more about the pattern here.

It's been a long time, but I've finally added another installment to my Illustrator for Charts series.

Standard caveats: This tutorial is shown on a Mac using Adobe Illustrator CS3. If you are on a different platform or a different version of Illustrator, some steps may be different. I do not offer Illustrator support. If you have any questions beyond what is shown in this tutorial, you will need to refer to your user guide. But, if you have any tips, suggestions, or corrections, feel free to leave them in the comments.

For those who haven't had a chance to view them, there are three very detailed introductory tutorials for colorwork charts. These will give you a strong foundation for building charts in Illustrator and the skills learned there will be applied to this and any subsequent tutorials I do. You can view Parts 1, 2, and 3 if you haven't already.

This next tutorial expands on those skills to create your standard, non-cable stitch patterns charts, including knit and purl, and lace patterns. We'll learn how to make some commonly used stitch symbols using shapes, and the pen tool.

If you would like to download the file I created in the tutorial, I have saved it to be compatible with versions of Illustrator as old as version 10. Download it here. You are welcome to use this file for any commercial or non-commercial purpose.

At some point, I want to conclude this series with a tutorial on cable charts. They are not hard but have a few additional considerations we haven't had in these previous tutorials. If you have any other requests, don't hesitate to let me know, in the comments.