Wednesday, January 20, 2010

Charts vs written instructions: Barbara Walker

I was reading in Annie Modesitt's blog about charts for lace and it occurred to me that there are few (if any?) charts in the first two of Barbara Walker's Stitch Treasuries. MHA gave me vols. 1-3 of these for Christmas this year. I've been poring over the first two and, although I am certainly comfortable with reading written-out instructions for knitting patterns, I find charts much easier to read as a general rule. My question to the world is: Has anybody taken on the task of charting all the instructions in the Barbara Walker books? It strikes me that this would be a monumental task ... but also a tremendous gift to the knitting world if this were done.

I began looking through Google results for "Barbara Walker charts". I found this gem: The Walker Treasury Project, a blog-form collection of color photographs of all the patterns and stitches in the Walker Treasury books (including Mosaic Knitting). I gather that the third book, which I haven't gotten to yet, does include charts. I need to keep pressing on. However, I still wonder if anybody is working on charting the patterns and stitches in the first two books, and whether the fourth one, and/or Mosaic Knitting, include charts.

I discovered that one person, at least, has done some work on it: Lucia, the Knitting Fiend, has a couple of charts she worked up in her blog's stitchpatterns category. I am wondering if there is a community project in this, and whether others would be interested in starting to collect charts they have done of the uncharted material?
 

No comments: