Wednesday, May 6, 2009

Why Knot?

I love the Internet. While lounging around in my ratty shorts and t-shirt, I can go anywhere and discover just about anything except how to get rid of giant spiders that steal my stash, hoard my needles, and filch my patterns Harry. During one of my epic wanders, I stumbled upon a truly cool site called clanbadge.com.

Daniel sells a font that charts Celtic knots. I cannot imagine how many hours went into the design, but the results are simply amazing. The site is a bit confusing, so here is the link to the Charted font.

For example, by typing the following into Microsoft Word:

qe
zc


And then applying his font, I get the following little design:


Well, that might be interesting to cross-stitchers, but maybe not so interesting to knitters. That is, until I apply some knitting symbols to the design.

Naturally, the first thing I thought of was lace. There are several ways to treat the motif. It can be outlined with yarnovers thusly:



Or the interior can be filled with a small pattern:


Of course, these designs can be knitted without any holes at all. Cable lovers can go insane knitting something like this:


For those who like colorwork, a bit of paint to the following would make an interesting (and confusing) sweater motif.


If you want to purchase the font for charting, make sure you buy the Charting font. Daniel also offers several other fonts, for example outline, 3D, and inverse, and filled. This page shows some beautiful examples of Celtic knots applied to a variety of crafts such as woodworking, quilting, metalsmithing, stained glass, and ostrich egg carving. Daniel offers a pattern pack for the chart font and there's a page of fancy knots that users have posted, which you can find here.

I would love to continue this post, but unfortunately, Harry just pulled the plug out of the compu

10 comments:

Susan (and SmokeyBlue in spirit) said...

You are so bad. I do not even want to go to the price page or close to the make your own page.
I have a zillion things to do and 3 zillion in the queue.
However I do have design and knitting and spinning ADD........

Dave said...

Oh wow, that cable dragonfly is so cool.

Soo said...

I'm with Dave -- the cable dragonfly is amazing!

I feel cables might become my 'thing' next year. It's been far too long since I've tackled something with lots of texture.

Carol said...

This makes my brain hurt. And since I am currently occupied making my brain hurt with crochet, I'll pass for now. And probably for a long while....

florencemary said...

Hmm, I think I just might be Carol's long-lost twin.

I like to use charts for lace knitting, but my brain would just go into shutdown mode if I tried an original pattern myself. I think it's all those little cells - I start thinking Excel, and maths, and then I start hyperventilating.

Thanks for the headsup though!

Shea said...

If you only knew how deep I've gotten into cables lately. They're evil and addictive enough as it is, and now you've gone and thrown this out there for me to drool over.

Suzann said...

You are an evil evil woman. I don't do much color work, but I like the looks of it better then cables.
My brain is hurting.

Laritza said...

Clever! Love the knots.

Lacefreak said...

I used to do a lot of cable knitting before I stepped off the cliff that is lace knitting. That program is really clever though and I love that dragonfly!

Opal said...

oh how wonderful! the dragonflies are lovely.