design

I came up with this cute little "micro" turtle pattern late last night and thought I'd share it for the other turtle fanatics out there (and perhaps for the KYS Tiny Swap on Ravelry!)

Are you fascinated? Are you craving the pattern? Do you need a new cat toy or little critter for a kid (big or little) in your life?

Then grab this pattern!!! As soon as I've got it in Ravelry's database, I'll link to it there as well.

I'd like to give a "shout out" to Raynor, for her "Tiny Turtle" pattern, which was the inspiration and starting point for my little(r) guy! Stop by her blog 'cause she's got more free patterns than I do!

Micro Turtle Knitting Pattern by Anne Kaelber is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.
Based on a work at knittedtoybox.blogspot.com.

I received a question regarding my plans to sell the pattern for the Trinity Wedding Shawl I'm designing for my mom. I had enough to say on the matter, I thought I'd make it a full blog post.

I am hoping to sell the pattern, once I've completed the design. This is my first pattern, so I'm struggling with the charts and how to get them to come out nicely. The ones I've been able to print are, in my opinion, too small for actual knitting---the chart is too tiny by the time I can get it to fit on the page.

So, I've been breaking the pattern up into pieces and trying to reduce the "fiddlyness" (I made that up) of the actual knitting process. I dislike having to stop, put my knitting down, count out spaces, then begin knitting again. And there's a lot of spaces in this pattern. I've taken borders and figured out repeats, so I could make smaller charts for those sections (a smaller chart ends up with bigger squares to show the pattern in). That is helping to reduce how much I have to show on one chart.

I was hoping to have an entire row showing at one time, but I just can't get it to happen. So, I'm putting half a row to a chart and then deciding whether to have that chart go for the whole section or half a section.

The very last problem is the other end of the shawl. If you know knitting charts, you know that you start knitting from the bottom of the chart and work toward the top. In my spreadsheet program (sigh Yes, that's what I'm using) that means the pattern starts on row...oh, let's say 250 and works to row 1. Now I need to insert above row 1 and take rows 250 to something like row 185 or so and flip them so that row 250 is also row 1 and row 185 is now just above the old row 1. Confused yet?

Fortunately, I'm married to a rocket scientist. Randy should be able to take the rows I specify and spit them out in reverse order into a new file. From there, I can import them into a chart, then copy/paste into my current chart and voilá the full pattern....which will need to be broken down multiple times.

All this still needs to be done....plus my own test knit of the pattern to see if I was smoking some really good (imaginary sigh) weed when I designed it in the beginning.

But, once all this is done, I do want to pack it all up into a PDF and offer it for sale. Maybe I'll make enough money from it to actually buy some software to design the other shawl ideas I have in mind. snort, laugh, giggle Yeah, I doubt it too. Non-open-source software is expensive!