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Knitting Stories
I’ve got an app for that..
Every knitter knows you have to put your phone down in order to knit. But how many stitches do you manage to work before you pick it up again? There is a sense in which us knitters steer a slightly awkward path through the world of apps and tech tools. Our talk tends to focus on the benefits of a slow and phone-free analogue pastime.
But reality can be a more mixed-medium picture. The vast (vastly vast) majority of us depend on platforms like Ravelry or Etsy for buying our patterns. We while away hours on Instagram looking at new designers’ releases and what other knitters are making. YouTube is often our first stop in fixing a mistake or learning an unfamiliar technique, and the pile of parcels Bronte and Susan wrap to send out to you each day also tells a story of a very digital way of shopping.
So at the risk of bursting that wholesome analogue bubble, I’m coming out as a technophile. Let’s lean into the screen (only briefly I promise) and take a closer look at some of the new and game-changing digital tools that have turned up on the YarnSub.com website recently.
But first an introduction to YarnSub..
Think of a yarn. Any Yarn. YarnSub finds it and tells you what fibre is in it, how much a ball of it weighs, how many meters it’s got, and what yarns will work as a substitute for it – and to what extent they’ll work that way. It is quite simply, brilliant. With the possible exception of Ravelry, I don’t think there’s a single other knitty platform we depend on in the shop, quite as much as Yarnsub. The distraction-free interface makes it a breeze to use, and the way in which the database keeps up with new and discontinued yarns, is breathtaking.
A fun fact about the knitted stitch is that it almost always takes up the space of a rectangle, not a square. If you draw a box around a stitch, it will usually be wider than it is tall – the clue to this difference is in your gauge information which usually gives a lower number of stitches to 10 cm than rows. This starts mattering if you’re charting your own design. If you draw it on regular squared paper, it will knit up looking differently proportioned from your drawing – usually a bit truncated or squashed. Thankfully Yarnsub have created a tool to print out charts that match your own personal gauge – with rectangles that have exactly the same proportion as your stitches.
Having knitted and blocked your swatch, you can use this tool to help you work out your exact gauge and how many stitches and rows you’ll need to get a specific size piece of fabric. You can measure your gauge over however many stitches you like, put the number of stitches and/or rows into the tool, and it will tell you your gauge in centimetres or inches. And if you don’t have a ruler? This is actually my favourite bit – Just count how many stitches fit into the width of your credit card. Once you’ve got your gauge, you can use the tool to calculate how many stitches or rows it will take to get a certain width/length of fabric. Or it can tell you how wide and long your fabric will be given a specific number of stitches and rows. Perfect for re-thinking a pattern using a yarn that gets a different gauge.
Knitting increase and decrease calculators
If you always have the correct number of stitches and your pattern explains clearly how to distribute increases and decreases on shaping rows, you won’t need this calculator. For everyone else, the Knitting Increase and Decrease Calculators are pure gold. The calculator has been designed to help you out when you encounter an instruction like “decrease 12 sts evenly across a row”, which is essentially leaving you to work out the distribution of your decreases. But it’s also the perfect solution to working out how to get back on track from a stitch count which (for whatever reason – I won’t judge) is not the one given in the pattern.
The calculators sort it out for you by working out how often you need to increase or decrease to get to right number of stitches. Type in the number of stitches currently on your needles and the number of decreases that you need to accommodate, and it will give you a formula. Same for increases – except this tool knows that the instructions will be different depending on whether you do a “Make 1” increase or a “Knit Front and Back” increase. The Make 1 increase is formed between stitches, so doesn’t use a up a stitch itself, whereas a KFB uses up a stitch while increasing. The tool knows that you need to knit a different number of stitch between each increase to take that into account.
You’ve spotted the most beautiful variagated skein of hand dyed yarn, but really not sure you’ll like it so much if the contrasting colours start to pool together while you knit. This ingenious color pooling tool allows you to see what certain kinds of multi colored yarns will look like when knitted at different stitch counts. You create your colourway on the digital skein, select between flat knitting or knitting in the round, and then move the width slider to see how the colour patterns change. You can use the tool for planned pooling, or to get an idea of what a favourite hand-dyed skein might look like at your planned stitch count, or to design a custom colorway to dye yourself, or just for the fascination of watching the patterns change. The same skein can give you very different results knitting in the round for socks compared to knitting flat at sweater-width! 
And finally, this one comes from a different design stable altogether, but was too good to leave out..
Yes, I also like a printed pattern, but if it’s going to be on my phone – which realistically it will sometimes need to be (train journeys, knit nights – normal life chaos), Knit Companion is my pattern-reader of choice. Clever slideable vertical and horizontal lines make light work of marking your place on the page in text or charted instructions. KC dovetails with Ravelry and other cloud storage so you can open directly from your online libraries. But mostly there’s just the sense that every feature has been shaped by the way we actually knit. So it let’s you scribble your modification notes on your patterns. The split screen option keeps the techniques and abbreviations with you whichever page of your pattern you’re on. And the app now also boasts 1500 KCDesigns – patterns published by an impressive array of designers, which can deliver a personalised version of the pattern with e.g. your size highlighted.
With enormous thanks to Wendy Peterson for developing the tools and heling me to get to the bottom of them!