crochet graph tips wanted

When cahnging colors , always make the last loop before the change in the new color mirjam

Marsha,

I've done graphing for crochet, and I found after doing a gauge swatch that most of my crochet work is square, so a square grid works really well for me. Others have suggested taking the square graph paper you find in just about any store and putting it in your printer and printing the picture over it.

Others have said they scanned in graph paper into some drawing program like Paintshop and turned it transparent, then imported the picture they wanted to graph, and then meshed them together and printed them together and worked from that.

I use Design-A-Knit (AKA DAK), which lets you select the grid size you want, and you can import pictures and other graphics for it to chart. I found that doing a chart larger than the finished size and slowly paring (5 stitches and 5 rows at a time works with little adjustments for me) it down works really well for either knit or crochet chart design if you can't draw it directly into the graph, since I can't even draw an accurate stick figure freehand. If you create a sweater to put it on and plug in your gauge, looking at pattern pieces shows you roughly what the pattern will look like on your finished work. The only drawback to my version of DAK is that it's hard to see a single image centered on a piece if that's what you're designing.

I can also use DAK to change from a crochet graph to a knit graph or vice versa using the resize feature, so I can create both a crochet and a knit graph for a project. You can see some of my charts online for a Star Wars project I've got going on to see the diff between knit and crochet graphs, as I use a 30 x 30 graph for the crochet squares and a 23 x 35 graph for the knit squares.

are other programs that do the same thing as DAK, not sure ofthe cost of those, but DAK runs a couple hundred. HTH

Leah