In Which the Pirate Designs for Machine Knitting.

Inspired by Sockmatician’s Sanquhar Scarf, but unwilling to do that much double-knitting with sock yarn, I decided to design something similar to knit on the machine. I began by using Excel as graph paper to fill in squares, which is probably not how its developers ever imagined a spreadsheet application would be used, but it works!

Then Michael helped by writing a magic spell – er, I mean, a program – that would convert the Excel spreadsheet to a bitmap, with one pixel per cell. I loaded that bitmap into the knitting machine software, transferred the pattern to the machine, and 700 or so rows later, voila! a scarf! (At least, in theory. I may have messed it up a few times and had to start over.)

I’m including my initials into the “cuff,” as was traditional for mittens. I’ll put them on the other end of the scarf too!

With machine knitting, it’s often easier to begin again than to try to correct errors:

My plan is to knit the second side of the scarf with the colours reversed in order to mimic the double knitting look, and then seam them together. The floats will then be safely sandwiched between layers so they can’t snag on anything, and the finished scarf should be thick and squishy.