OK, so I promised a peek at Thor’s stroller blanket, the one I knit and am currently in the process of finishing so it looks more like a blanket and less like a rolled up dishcloth.

I work (part of the week) in a predominantly Chinese neighborhood, and this pregnancy was looking like it might really be a keeper right around Chinese New Year.  This is the Year of the Tiger, and for a few weeks there were all these amazingly cool woodcuts and prints and paintings of tigers everywhere I went.  I’m not a fan of horoscopes in general, I mean if Thor was due in the Year of the Rat, I probably wouldn’t have felt the urge to commemorate it in knitwear, but Tigers!  Cool!  Nifty art!

Plus, it seemed like a good thumb in the eye of fate, putting all this money and effort into something that would ONLY be appropriate for this pregnancy, for this baby.  And yes, despite common sense, I do feel the need to stick a thumb in the eye of fate every so often.  Fate’s fucked with me quite a bit in the last few years and I feel entitled to get some of my own back.

Anyway.  I found a great graphic on the front page of a Chinese language newspaper that I immediately knew was the “right one”  It was nearly square, it was a nice balance of light & dark, and best of all, it had a little baby tiger in it as well.  So I photocopied it.

Then I took the photocopy home and scanned it using my ancient scanner.  I then proceeded to try to make things as complicated as possible, by emailing the file to myself at work so I could open it in MS publisher and print it out in poster format, full size, over 6 sheets of paper.  I thought I could trace it onto graph paper, but after about 10 minutes of squinting at the oh-so-faint lines, I realized there must be a better way.

So I went back home and opened it in Adobe Photoshop Elements instead.  But what to do with it then?

During this time, my special, fancy yarn from Denmark (yes, I am that much of a yarn geek) was stolen from our stoop, backordered at the warehouse I’d bought it from, and finally showed up again.  I had to knit a swatch (a sample) to see how many stitches I could expect to get per 4″ x 4″.  This was important both so that I could figure out how many stitches to use to make it the finished size that I wanted, but also because there are more rows of stitches in a square than there are columns and in order for the final product to end up the same shape as the pattern, I would have to adjust the pattern accordingly.

Once I finished the swatch, I stretched the PSE file by the same factor that my swatch had come out to, so that although the pattern wouldn’t look square, the finished product would.  I think my swatch came out to a factor of 4:3, so I altered the image size accordingly.

Then I was absolutely stumped.  I tried out a few demos of knitting software, but none of them did what I needed them to do – namely to take a scanned, altered image and turn it into a two-color, b/w graph.  What I needed was actually closer to cross-stitch software, so I looked into cross-stitch software too, and just found it all too awkward and inconvenient.  I want instant gratification (and preferably instant free gratification,) thank you very much!

While I was Googling, I saw a listing for “using PSE to chart cross stitch”  A-ha!  So I read their tutorial, which was, of course, for a different version, using PSE for windows, not mac, but I got the general gist of it.

I already knew how many stitches across I needed the blanket to be (225) because I’d knit a swatch, so I multiplied that by a factor of 10, and constrained the pattern to keep my original proportions, but to be 2250 pixels across.  Then I applied a pixillating & mosaicizing filter to the image so it got all blocky.  I went all the way down to a “5″ in order to try to keep the sharp edges that I wanted in some of the detailed areas.

In here somewhere I tried to get it to go to just black and white with no grayscale, but couldn’t do it.  I had to eyeball it as I knit which was sort of a pain in the ass.  If I were doing it again, I’d figure out how to clarify the image while still in PSE so that it would be an easier pattern to knit while watching Star Trek DVDs.

Then I created a layer (something I still can’t get the hang of without using step-by-step directions.  Why does PS have to be so damned un-intuitive?)  to actually mark the grid lines around each pixel.  I made a 10×10 image and zoomed in to 1600%  With the foreground set as red, I “drew” a right angle one pixel wide.  Then I set this pattern to duplicate ( like wallpaper) and applied it to my image.

Then, it took me WAY longer than it should have to print this out on several sheets of paper.  Why oh why doesn’t PSE have a poster-printing option?  I had to select different parts of the image to print and then fuss them together with scotch tape and much counting of grid lines.  It was a hassle, (especially because I suspect there was an easier way to do it.)

Then, I started knitting.  Now, the thing about this yarn (Kauni, rainbow colorway) is that it’s a very gradual variegation from purple to blue to green to yellow to orange to red.  I wanted to make sure there was always enough contrast to see the design, but part of the fun of this was that it was going to be somewhat random.  So I just started knitting.  I got about 5 inches into it when both the back ground and the design started getting too close in color to tell apart anymore.  So on the day of the LOTR-a-thon, I ripped it all out and started over.

As I knit each row, I used a red marker to cross out the line I had just done, as well as to define the gray edges of each part of the design.  ie: did I want that stitch to be background color or design color?  I got it right most places, though there are a couple of spots I may go back and stitch over to make it prettier.

This was a lot of knitting, but it went so fast compared to the stupid cross stitch projects I usually do that it felt like it was flying by.  I was super relieved to see that the places where things were supposed to be circular actually turned out circular after I knit them.  My math skills are crap, and my math visualization skills?  Let’s just be generous and say that they’re painfully slow and I usually end up getting things horribly wrong.  But not this time.  My stretching solution worked, and the proportions were correct by the time I finished.

So, now I’m going off in search of backing (this is a 100% wool blanket, not the softest) and edging so that at least part of it will be nice for Thor to touch.  Of course, if he gets his daddy’s sensitivity to wool, this will get hung on the wall, but I’m hoping that gestating in the Sprogblogger “nothing itches me” womb will give him some immunity from such discomforts.  Once I find the perfect backing and edging, I’ll sew them together probably throwing a few quilting lines of stitches throughout the pattern in order to keep the blanket from shifting against itself too much.  And I’ll sew the edging on.  And then it will be done.

And then I can start a new project.