Charts.

It is hard to write a dishcloth project up into a blog post but here it goes. Evelyn Clark, the designer of the Flower Basket shawl, designed a dishcloth pattern with a greyhound on it, a few days after seeing the pattern, a request went out for donations for a Greyhound raffle fundraiser. I of course put the two together and volunteered to knit some for charity.

I downloaded the pattern, looked at it and there was no chart. It was written out line by line. I thought about it and went, this isn't going to work I need a chart - isn't that funny how we get set in our ways. However, thanks to Ravelry I had come across a link to a chart generator, I went and dug up the post and checked out the links, created my chart.

After making the chart I proceeded to make 6 dishcloths, not being a big dishcloth knitter I didn't realize how little time it takes to knit these, and ran out of yarn while I was on vacation - so what is a knitter to do but to make an intarsia dish cloth with some of the leftovers.

If you ever need to generate a chart, this is the one I used
Chart Gen.
However, I have also found these tools but have not fully tested them out: Jacqui's Knitting Chart Maker, Chart-A-Rama, and Knit Pro 2.0. Chart Gen, Chart Maker and Chart-A-Rama all translate written instructions into a chart - each one has a slightly different input mechanism and format that it wants. Knit Pro takes a jpg or gif and turns it into a chart (I have not used this site). However I may in the future.

When I was working on the Serenity socks, I went back to Chart Gen and charted the instructions for the leaf on the heel.