A More Accurate Knitting Graph Paper

I am a lifelong knitter. I am also an avid user of Adobe Illustrator. Occasionally, my two loves collide and the result is something useful and unusual. This tool is one of those results.

In my knitting life, I sometimes do a type of knitting called Fair Isle. In popular culture, this is associated with Ugly Christmas sweaters. But in the knitting world, this has been a sophisticated and much loved technique that has existed for centuries before. Do a quick search for stranded color work knitting or fair isle knitting and you'll find hundred of beautiful designs.

The essence of Fair Isle is that it follows a color chart to indicate which color of yarn to use on which stitches. Usually, two strands of yarn are used on each row, and the unused strand of yarn is held at the back of the work. Usually, the color charts for this type of knitting are created in a spreadsheet program.

As a knitter, the issue that I've run into is that knitting stitches are not square. It's simple enough to make the spreadsheet cells roughly proportional to the dimensions of a knitted stitch (roughly 1 wide by .75 high). But once those designs are knitted, the result can be disappointing, because not only are knitted stitches not square, they're not rectangular either. They are horseshoe shaped. Many times, illustrators will draw them as Vs because that's the part of the stitch that is visible from the front of the work. This is especially apparent when using fair isle to design letterforms. Shapes that would normally have lovely curves and smooth diagonals, can have jagged edges.

You may notice that the Vs in the knitted piece below are actually upside-down; this is because this stocking was knit from the top-down, so the knitting is actually upside down while being knitted.

Traditional graph-paper style charts cannot account for this end result. So help knitters better visualize how their final designs will look when knitted, I designed an accurate fair isle chart, made not of rectangles, but of actual knitted stitches. 

This is a BLANK fair isle knitting chart (available in both landscape and portrait).  This chart comes with two versions: one has gridlines and the other does not. On the gridded version, every fifth row and column is a darker shaded outline.

It works for both top-down as well as bottom-up knitting. If you are a knitter and want a better type of knitting graph paper, then this is for you! 

If you are a knitter, please visit my KnitSwag Etsy shop and see all the other lovely knitterly items I have for sale. I have designed them with you in mind!

Stockinette Stitch Knitting Fonts

In my career, my time is spent at the intersection of two industries, of multiple programs, and generally wherever two typically unrelated topics converge. Those areas are often of the greatest interest to me, because they remain largely unexplored. Come with me friends, as I take you on a tour of a bit of that dual existence in my life: at the intersection of multiples worlds, where knitting, font design, and graphic design software merge.

It's important to understand the reasoning behind the necessity of creating this knitting font. Upon searching for Knitting fonts online, you'll come upon a mish mash collection of cross stitch letters, letters made to look like string, and stitches that don't line up... the list of inaccurate knitted alphabets goes on and on. As a knitter, I think it's important that if you're going to design a "knitting font" that you get the details right. Most of the knitted fonts that exist don't get the details correct, and obviously made by non-knitters.

Here are some of the issues I've encountered:

1. The alphabet is actually not a font, but a vector stock art alphabet.

2. The stitches aren't curved like actual knitted stitches are. They're made of straight lines.

3. The letters are regular letter shapes, used as a clipping path for a raster image.

4. The stitches don't line up. The left and right hand side of the stitches should be on the same vertical plane. While the technique below adds visual interest, it is not representative of the true shape of knitted stitches. Plus, the stitches look like little grains of rice. This example, however, does an excellent job of incorporating both sides of the stitch into the design of the letterforms (and not chopping off one half where it is deemed unsightly).

5. The right and left side of each stitch are joined. Knitted stitches are not little hearts. Knitted stitches are actually horseshoe shaped, and mirror each other on around a vertical axis, with a little bit of space in between each half of the stitch.

5. No background stitches. When knitting letters in a design in a physical piece of knitting, they are integrated into the fabric itself, they don't float magically in the air. Hence, the need for background stitches. The background stitches are just as much part of the design as the letters themselves. While it's true that the letterforms can be used without the background stitches (as in the example below), for maximum usability, as well as accuracy in representation to a physically knitted fabric, there should be background stitches available, either as alternate characters, or as a second member of the font family.

6. Spaces not handled properly. When uses spaces in a knitted design, there are background stitches in the fabric. This font gets a some of the other technical details correct, but it makes no account for the spaces between the words. 

Knitfont

Once spaces are added, things break down. The background stitches are gone. We can work around this using some special characters and GREP Styles in InDesign, but in this particular font, the character sets don't match, and the necessary glyphs weren't made to allow the background stitches to be used. 

7. Stitches chopped off. Here in another font that makes a fair attempt at knitted stitches. Like the font above, it has no background stitches. 

Xmas Sweater Stitch

If you look closely, it's clear that the details are wrong. In the corners, the side half of the some of the stitches are chopped off. While that does make the diagonals look a little smoother, it's not technically accurate. This was obviously not designed by a knitter.

8. Incomplete character set. This is the closest one that I found to an actual knitting font. The shapes of the stitches are correct, the stitches line up, the style of the letterforms is accurate for what knitters use; it's pretty great. It's even in a style common to what a knitter would actually use when knitting names into a garment. The issues that I encountered are that it doesn't have a full character set, and there are no background stitches built into the font itself. So when using this for graphic design it must be used in conjunction with the vector background that is packaged with the font. 

Christmas Font

So why make a my own custom knitting fonts?

While I can manually create these fair isle letters in Illustrator each time I need them, it's a tedious process to do just every once in awhile. I wanted an alphabet that I can quickly use whenever I need to plan some knitted lettering. For example, I've been making family Christmas stockings for over a decade. I've lost track of how many I've made. It would be really great to just type up my name chart quickly each time I go to start a stocking, rather than get out graph paper and draw it.

By incorporating advanced typographic features like ligatures, I can have more flexibility when working with a set number of stitches. Take these stocking for example. Each name needs to fit within 28 stitches. That's why in the BAILEY and the ASHLYN stockings, the Ys are different. Bailey's name is 6 letters long. Ashlyn's name is 7 letters long and required the stitches to have tighter tracking. The Y is very closely aligned to the L in front of it. Having ligatures and alternate characters in the font allows this to happen either automatically or manually.

Kelly's Christmas Stockings

Plus, if I have these alphabets as actual fonts, I can quickly and easily typeset knitting letter charts for other knitters on my Etsy shop. I can also use these fonts to personalize my KnitSwag products.

I wanted my knitting fonts to meet the following criteria:

• Accurate curves (to reflect the way the yarn forms each stitch)
• Stitches aligned to a grid (not offset in any way)
• Proper gauge (not too horizontally or vertically compressed). They should be about a .67 height to width ratio.
• Incorporate the use of ligatures so that character placement can be adjusted to fit a set number of stitches
• Available in different number of stitches high, in order to be used for different types of projects
• Available in both Regular and Bold versions
• Uses a second font with each font family, for background stitches
• Has a complete character set, including punctuation, numbers, and most special characters

How I made the fonts

I used Adobe InDesign and IndyFont Pro to create my custom knitting fonts. IndyFont Pro is a dream come true! It lets me use the software that I know and love to create fonts. The free version lets you create a single character (for bullets), but the Pro version lets you create full character sets. It's well documented, and the user manual is one of the best I've ever seen!

So far I've created two versions of stockinette stitch fair isle knitting fonts: an 8 stitch high and an 11 stitch high version. They are the only knitting fonts of their kind! I'll be designing more in the coming weeks. Would you like to have a custom name chart in these fonts? Head on over to my Etsy shop and I'll set you set up! I made these fair isle alphabets with specifically with knitters in mind.

Knitted Branding: Interpreting a 2D Vector Design with Double Knitting

Last year, my niece and her husband took over a coffee shop in a small northwest town. They named their new venture "Arrow Coffee," and had plan to rebrand it as a northwest themed coffee shop. As the family graphic designer, I am often called on to help with designs. Around that time, an illustrative designer, Von Glitschka, started a satirical logo design service called 5ive Minute Logo. He draws the logos on his iPad, as a creative exercise. Not being a logo designer myself, I thought it would be fun to see what Von could come up with. Surely his 5 minute logo would be more creative than anything I could design. If my niece didn't end up using the logo, who cared? Because it only cost $5!

Besides the $5 fee, Von only asks for three things:

• Name of Business
• Type of Business
• Valid Email Address (so he can email the logo back to you)

So I paid the five dollars and waited in anticipation for what he would come up with. A week or so later, I got my completed logo. In only 5 minutes of drawing, Von came up with this.

His name is Chief Piping Hot

Though my niece didn't end up using the logo, I liked it so much that I decided to make a knitted version of the happy coffee cup. I thought it would be a fun challenge to convert a 2D design into a 3 dimensional knitted sculpture, devising the pattern as I went along.

Around that same time, my mom gave me a classic knitting book as a Christmas gift: Notes on Double Knitting by Beverly Royce. Double knitting allows you to knit seamless tubes on a pair of straight knitting needles, without the use of double pointed or circular knitting needles. I thought it would be fun to tackle this double knitting technique, creating a 3D knitted version of the Arrow Coffee logo.

With the exception of the face, I made the entire project using double knitting, including the feathers and the arrow. When I started the black hat (coffee cup lid), I didn't have the illustration handy and I couldn't remember what color it was supposed to be. For some reason, black seemed like the logical choice. Later on, when I realized the original illustration had a brown hat/lid, I was a bit disappointed that I had gotten the color wrong. However, it turns out that in real life, brown coffee cup lids are a special order product, and that's why we never see them. Black and white lids are the only standard lid color choices.

But back to the knitting: The only part of the sculpture/toy that was not double knit was the smile and the eyes, because those didn't need to be tubes. I knit the smile flat, and then stitched it on. For the eyes, I crocheted some small black circles and some small white yarn buttons for the eyes, and sewed them on like I would regular buttons.

To make the cup more able to stand upright, I stitched in some white plastic canvas into the base of the body and some black plastic canvas onto the underside of the lid. I was able to find plastic canvas in different sized circles, and just trimmed them down to the size I needed.

I had a bit of a hard time figuring out how to stuff the body. Regular poly fiberfill just made the piece lumpy. And also, the white body was knit a little too loosely (that was the first piece I made, so I didn't know what size needles I should use to get the gauge that I wanted), so the fiberfill started poking through the stitches. As a side note, double knitting has the effect of loosening your gauge, so use needles at least two sizes smaller than you normally would.

Another challenge was figuring out how to get the arrow to be straight across the coffee cup. Because if it was simply attached on either side of the cup, there was a tendency for the arrow to sag. So the arrow needed to be in a single piece, physically going through the pillow.

It seemed that I needed a custom pillow form made, so I began the hunt to find someone who did sewing. You might think it would be easy to find a custom sewing service (not a tailor shop), but it's actually quite difficult. Neither quilt shops, craft shops, nor sewing machine centers offer custom sewing services. After a few months of asking around, I found a local lady that did sewing and asked her to see what she could come up with. I dropped off my knitting with an explanation, a shrug of my shoulders, and a hearty "good luck." A month or so later, she found a solution and was ready for me to come and pick up the pillow.

For the body, she ended up rolling up a cushion from a piece of lawn furniture and using that as the pillow form. It had the softness of a pillow, but offered the smooth, lump-free texture that I couldn't get with the fiberfill. For the arrows, she ended up using my original idea, which was bamboo shish kabob skewers, inserted three-at-at-time,into white plastic drinking straws, which were them inserted straight through the body of the cup.

In order to make the feathers stand upright, I stitched them together, then wove a black twist-tie into the edge of the red feather. Then I stitched the end of the twist tie onto the top of the lid. That gave me a way to bend the twist tie into the correct angle so that it would hold the red feather upright.

Normally, I only knit afghans, so this sculptural project was a fun change. It will probably be a few years before I decide to knit another pillow/toy/sculpture, but when I do, it will be helpful to have double knitting in my bag of tricks.

Number Knitting #1: My Quest to Republish "Number Knitting: The New All Way Stretch Method"

For around seven years now, this blog has focused primarily on the software I use for my publishing and design business: InDesign, Acrobat, and occasionally Illustrator and Photoshop. Once in awhile, some knitting related articles have snuck in, but they have always tied into the design software.

As of lately, my loves, publishing and knitting, are beginning to merge on an entirely new level. I have set out to republish an out-of-print knitting book from 1952. And it's quite an endeavor. It's not so simple as scanning the old book, running OCR, and giving the text a facelift. Oh no! If it was that simple, I could have this project done in a matter of weeks. Instead, recreating this book will take a year or more, perhaps several... and that's if I hustle, and get lots of help with the knitting.

The book I'm working to republish is called "Number Knitting" The New All Way Stretch Method." Most knitters (even very experienced ones) have never heard of this book, because it only had one printing, and it the the only knitting book that the author ever wrote. So once it was printed, that was it! It is very hard to come by, and if you can find a used copy for sale online, it will likely fetch around $150. But I have seen one for sale for as high as $900. I have never seen more than one for sale on Amazon at any one time.

But as this blog is still a graphic design blog, I'll keep all the really publishing-specific content regarding the book here on my blog.

Because I aim to document the process of recreating this book, I'll be sharing milestones along the way. Here are a few milestones thus far:

• December 2015: Scanned in book (a library copy)
• January 2016: Received my own purchased copy of the book!
• January 2016: Began knitting the pieces in the book
• February 2016: Submitted request to US Copyright Office for a copyright renew/transfer search
• April 2016: Received word back from the Copyright Office that the copyright was never renewed or transferred. (So the original copyright protection expired in 1979.)
• April 2016: Started knitting "Lambs and Butterflies" form the original patent application

Lambs and Butterflies pattern from original patent application

Are you interested in helping me knit the pieces from the book? Join us on Ravelry.
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Number Knitting #4: Virtual Coloring in Acrobat DC Using the Drawing Tools

I am currently working to republish "Number Knitting," an out-of-print knitting book from the 1950s. Last year, I scanned in the entire 275 page book, and have spent this year adding the patterns to the Ravelry database.

One of the reasons this book is so interesting to me is because it is unlike most other knitting books. The knitting is based on seven shapes. The author, Virginia Woods Bellamy, is considered by many to be the inventor of modular knitting. By combining these shoes in a variety of ways, you can make anything from blankets and placements to baby's clothes and evening wear. Like most women of her era, she obviously had a background in sewing, and so her garment patterns are constructed very differently than most modern-day knitting patterns. She constructed the shapes much like a seamstress would cut out shapes of fabric.

Number Knitting Shapes

Mrs. Bellamy also created a new form of charting, which greatly simplifies the instructions. The charts in the book were all hand-drawn; the darkness of the gridlines is equal to that of the main shapes. Because of this, it's easy to get lost in the chart. To complicate matters, additional lines within each shape also serve to denote color. The more lines each shape has, the darker the color. This chart represents a scarf to be knit in dark blue and light sand colored yarn. extra vertical lines (between the gridlines) in shapes and 3 indicate to use a darker yarn.

Golf Scarf

The chart for the Golf Scarf project is fairly easy to understand. But as the book progresses, the charts get decidedly more complex. Take the chart for the Winged Blouse for example. What in the world?! This could definitely use some design improvements to make it easier to see what's going on.

Winged Blouse

And how about this one? This is a blanket to be knit in four different colors. But it's tough to envision what it should look like.

Abstract Rose Chart

I decided to come up with a way to color-code the charts so I could, visually, keep better track of the pattern. Since I have the entire book as a PDF, I want decided to do the color coding right within Acrobat, so I could keep the book as a single file. I've explored various ways to use PDF commenting in other knitting patterns, such as this example where I demonstrated how to make virtual sticky notes for keeping track of your place in a PDF pattern.

I'll be using the same technique here, only instead of using plain rectangles, I'll be using the polygon tool to outline the different shapes. The first four units are all supposed to be knitted in the same pink color, so I used the polygon tool to outline those four as a single unit. I decreased the opacity to 37%, so I can see the chart through the pink shape.

Units 5-12 are all dove blue rectangles, so I used the rectangle tool to make those. Something I've noticed is that whenever I have a comment selected, it always turns darker... until I click away. Strange!

For the next four units, the pattern calls for a blue green, which isn't available through Acrobats DC's new color picker (it only has 18 color choices). So I opened up the Properties dialog box (available through a right-click contextual menu), and I chose a custom color that looked nice.

Finally, the remaining border units are to be a rose color. I needed to break this into two sections so that I could effectively knock out the center portion of the chart.

So there you have it! Using Acrobat's drawing tools are a great way to do virtual coloring on a PDF. While I am using Acrobat for this tutorial, these tools and capabilities are exactly the same in Adobe Acrobat Reader.

In addition to coloring the charts in Acrobat, I have also been going through the book and recoloring all the black and white photos. Slowly but surely, I am bringing this book back to life!

Abstract Rose Coverlet with Bias Edges

Would you like to help me reknit the patterns from the book? If so, check out the Number Knitting patterns in the Ravelry database, and let me know which ones you'd like to knit. I'll get you the pattern straight away!

Edit 8-4-17: If you would like this feature in Acrobat, please vote for it here on the new Adobe User Voice site.

Edit: 9-13-918
If you need an easier way to create highlighting objects in your PDF, check out my article on Bluebeam Revu. It's an amazing program designed specifically to meet the needs of users in Architecture, Engineering, and Construction. The drawing tools in Revu have a "highlight" checkbox, enabling any shape to act as a highlighter.

Number Knitting #3: So Why am I Republishing "Number Knitting?"

So why this book? What's so special about it?

This book is based on a method of knitting that's actually patented! It's based on garter stitch knitting. Many knitters are familiar familiar with the garter sticth pattern of the famous Elizabeth Zimmerman. What's so amazing about "Number Knitting" is that the author was a contemporary of EZ, yet most people have never heard of her. 

Why the Long Production time?

The reason for the lengthy production process is the very nature of a knitting book: it is a book of instructions on how to make a particular knitted object. In the case of this book, it is around 275 pages, and contain instructions to create 75 different projects. The projects range from small objects, like a placemats and scarves, and go all the way up to very large objects, like a huge lace shawls and complex jackets and coats. The small items could take a couple of evenings to knit, but the large objects could take many weeks, or even several months.

Snowflake Scarf

Snowflake Scarf

Gold Butterfly Stole

Gold Butterfly Stole

Hampton Shirt

Hampton Shirt

My goal is to knit all the items in the book, so that I can take new color photographs. In the meantime, to help generate some interest, and to begin to bring life back to the patterns, I have been colorizing them in Photoshop, according to the colors listed in the book.

Tropical Leaf Car Throw

It's a momentous task, and I have hundreds and hundreds of hours ahead of me. If you are a knitter, and would like to help reknit the items in the book, please consider joining our Ravelry Group. Ravelry is social media and portfolio platform where we discuss all kinds of knitting related things for this book project: things like technical questions regarding various ways to join pieces together, how to interpret the knitting charts, etc. (For you non-knitters reading this, Ravelry sort of like Facebook+Behance+Amazon+Pinterest+Messages, with an inventory database system thrown in the mix. It's amazing!)

Using InDesign Tables to Design a Geometric Color Block Pattern

This article is about how I designed a knitted afghan to mimic the floor tiles on the Fox News network.

Fox News Floor Tile Afghan

For years, I have been fascinated with garter stitch, which has a magical 2:1 proportional ration of rows: stitches. I wrote about this quite extensively in one of my other blog posts, Data-less Tables: InDesign Meets Knitting. While that article focused on diagonal lines and triangles, this post will focus on stripes and squares.

I have provided instructions for two ways to create this pattern:

• How to Create the Squares Using Knitting
• How to Create the Squares Using Adobe InDesign

The project we'll be creating is basically a bunch of squares set in a checkerboard pattern. And instead of cold hard floor tiles, our result is a soft, fluffy blanket. Knit as it as big you want, just by adding more squares...or in my case, knit it as big as you can until you run out of yarn. Then try desperately to find more yarn of the same color (which is impossible when the two colors of yarn you used are either backordered or discontinued). Finally, knit a border of your choosing and stitch it on. For my border, I chose Twin Leaf Lace from Nicky Epstein's Knitting on the Edge. I wanted to add the border on all four sides, as was done on the floor tile design at Fox News, but again, I ran out of yarn. So my blanket just has a border on two sides. I still think it looks pretty.

How to Create the Squares Using Knitting
First let's look at how the individual square is constructed. It consists of five stripes, with the top and bottom stripe being a little bit thicker than the center three stripes. I want my squares to be about 7"x7", and I have already determined my gauge to be five stitches/in, so I need somewhere between 30 and 40 stitches in my square. The trick is figuring out the number of rows for each stripe that will give me the correct stripe heights, and yet still have the overall shape be perfectly square. After doing a little math and making some sketches, I determine that the top and bottom stripes need to be 8 ridges (16 rows), and the center three stripes each need to be 5 ridges (10 rows). The total number of ridges is 31 (62 rows). Since in garter stitch, the number of ridges is equal to the number of stitches, we'll be knitting a square 31 stitches wide.

So the basic square pattern goes like this:
Cast on 31 stitches.
Knit 8 ridges (16 rows) in black.
Knit 5 ridges (10 rows) in tan.
Knit 5 ridges (10 rows) in black.
Knit 5 ridges (10 rows) in tan.
Knit 8 ridges (16 rows) in black.

You can bind off on the last row and have a complete square, or you can leave the stitches live and knit one live stitch from the first square together with the last stitch on each row of the next square (which you'll knit at a 90 degree angle to the first square). I like to leave my stitches live, because I find that knitting the live stitches together makes for a smoother join than binding off and then picking up the bound off edge.

Knit each square perpendicular to the adjacent squares. Be sure that when you're starting a new square, that you have the right side facing you. Because garter stitch is so rhythmic, so soothing, that it is all too easy get in the groove, happily knitting away...and then when you're done with a square, realize that you've knitted it onto the afghan with the back side facing forward and then you have to rip it out and redo it. This is especially problematic when knitting late at night, in a dimly lit living room, after a long day of mentally challenging work. Pay attention when starting a new square and double check your work! Reknitted yarn never looks as good as yarn that's only been knit once. But hey, if (when) you mess up, at least garter stitch is easy to pick back...it's a lot more forgiving than brioche or spanish lace.

How to Create the Squares Using Adobe InDesign
Step 1: Like any graphic design project, I first need to consider my final output size and create an appropriate sized document. My final output of this design will be laser printers, outputting standard sized paper. So I first create an 8.5" x 11" document.

Step 2: Inches are my preferred unit of measurement, but I want to use the same numbers for my measurements that I am using for my stitches. Since I'm using a 31stitch pattern, I need to now choose a unit of measurement where I can have 31 units (whatever my units end up being) and still have my objects fit on a standard size page (which I set up when I created the new document). After  a little experimentation, I figure out that millimeters will work well for this purpose. 31 mm is almost 1.25", so I can fit several squares on the width of an 8.5" wide page. Now I simply go back into the Units and Increments section of the Preferences dialog box and change the Horizontal and Vertical units to millimeters.

Step 3: Next, create a square text frame equal to the width of two squares. Because each square is 31 stitches wide, our text frame needs to be 62 mm high by 62 mm wide.

Step 4: With your text insertion point in the frame you just made, insert a Table 10 rows by 10 columns. We'll be merging some of the rows and columns to create the final design.

Step 4: Because we'll be using this table to create blocks of color with very specific measurements, we don't need any of the strokes. So select the entire table and set all the strokes to 0.

Step 5: Start setting up your column widths. Because the first stripe is 8 ridges tall, we need the first row to be exactly 8 mm high.

Step 6: Next set the next three rows to be exactly 5 mm high.

Step 7: Set the fifth row to be exactly 8 mm high.

Step 8: Merge the first five cells in the first row.

Step 9: Do the same with the next four rows.

Step 10: Add colors to your first five rows.

Step 11: Repeat steps 8-10 for the lower right set of cells to make up the second square. You can either merge the columns manually, or simply copy and paste from the top left square. But be sure to note that the copy and paste function does not copy the width and heighth of the cells. It only copies the content (which in this case, is how the cells are merged, as well as their fill color). 

Step 12: Set the height of the cells to match the square in the top left (8, 5, 5, 5, 8). You'll notice that the table now perfectly fills the 62 mm square text frame.

Step 13: To create the next two squares, merge the rows similarly to how you merged the columns for the first set of squares.

Step 14: Set the column width to the same measurements used for the first set of squares: 8mm, 5mm, 5mm, 5mm, 8mm.

Step 15: Add fill color to the second set of squares. I find that the easiest way to add fill colors to a cell is by dragging swatches and dropping them on whichever cell you want to fill. It just too easy to accidentally select too many rows/cells. Interestingly, you can also drag and drop swatches onto frame strokes, but it's a lot harder. You have to position your mouse just right, and if your table is the same size as your text frame, chances are pretty good that you'll drop the swatch a little too far over and inadvertently fill the cell instead of coloring the object stroke. So I like to stick with using drag-and-drop coloring just for fills.

Step 16: Step and repeat to quickly make the afghan design bigger. By creating as a grid, and setting the horizontal and vertical offsets to exactly the same size as the table, we can instantly make the design huge. Go to Edit > Step and Repeat.

Step 17: Now that the square/table design is done, I would finish designing the rest of the page, adding a pattern name, knitting instructions, a photo of the completed afghan, and contact info. But if you've gotten this far, you're probably a designer and already know what to do next. If you're really obsessive particular about small details, you can even rename your swatches to indicate what colors of yarn you used.

If you like this article about InDesign and Knitting, you may be interested in one of my other articles, Using Teacup PatternMaker to Mimic Knitted Garter Stitch.

I also figured out a way to create this same pattern using Teacup PatternMaker.