Making Colorwork Easy With knitCompanion

Hi, I'm Mary Beth Temple. And if you're like me and you love to knit color work, but sometimes find the counting a little tedious. We're trying to figure out which color matches the one in the chart. I'm gonna show you how to make your color work knitting easier by using knit companion. This is the delta cowl and I have knit one sample already. So this is completely finished, but I wanna change my colors and I wanna have an easier time counting and not have to have that chart in front of my face all the time. So we're going to set up our chart on knit companion to make our lives easier. I have already uploaded my cel pattern to knit companion and set it up as a project. So now I'm going to go in and isolate the chart and set that up as a separate piece to do this. I'm going to go into set up and click. Yes, so that it keeps going and then I'm going to use the plus sign and right here it says chart piece. So I'm going to select chart piece because I wanna isolate the color work chart. Now, it wants to know what page is the chart on that I'm looking for. And in this case, it's on page six, I've selected page six and I'm going to hit next. The next thing I'm going to do is select the area of the chart and you can see that we have a little arrow going here. It's telling me that that is the next step. So I'm gonna use my finger. I'm using my ipad. You can use your mouse if you're on a Macbook or a different kind of computer. But I'm going to select using my finger. I'm going to select the area of the chart. It doesn't have to be perfectly symmetrical on both sides. But you wanna make sure that you have incorporated all of the chart information into the area that you've selected. I don't need the color key because what I'm going to do is make the colors in the chart reflect the colors of the yarn that I'm using. So I've made sure everything is inside that cropped space and then I'm going to tap my wand, which is right here. Now, it's reminding me review results. There are adjustments you can make if the grid on your charted pattern does not line up with the grid that you're presented with. So it's telling you check the grid matches, adjust if you need to. So I'm looking at my chart right here. Let me expand it a little bit Now you can see that the grid lines that NT companion has added match up exactly with the grid lines that were on the pattern. So I'm really happy with that. So I don't need to make any adjustments to that at this point. Now, for this color work pattern, I'm going to knit every single row. So I want to have the first row set at one because row one of my chart is the first row that I'm going to knit. If I had a chart where I was doing work on one row and then the next row was say a solid color or there was nothing interesting happening on the second row. I could change this to twos. So it would show me alternate rows as the marker moves up. But we don't wanna do that today. We just wanna leave it checking uh beginning with the first row and counting one row at a time once. I'm sure that my chart looks exactly the way I want it to. I'm going to hit knit and now we're all ready to knit. You can see that I have my marker is down here at the very bottom. And the next thing we're going to do is customize our colors and the visual representation that we're getting of the chart to make sure it gives us the easiest knitting experience possible for whatever you would like to do, you can customize this. So it makes you happy everybody has a different preference. The next thing I'm going to do is adjust the stitch marker and the row marker, I'm gonna show you a couple of tips so you can adjust it for your own personal preferences. Now, I'll tell you the truth. When I was looking for the stitch marker, I couldn't find it the first time. And that's because it's right there and because we have this color work chart here, which has a lot of blue in it. That little blue line was very sneaky and it hit on me. So I'm still in the knit setting. I haven't done any changes yet, but there is my stitch marker. Now, this particular project has a stitch repeat of 18 stitches to me. Personally, I don't wanna move the stitch marker. I want to look at that group of 18 stitches at the same time because it helps me visualize where things go in relationship to the knitting that I have already done. You can, if you want move the stitch marker to different places in the chart that makes it easier for you to count. But for me, I tend to put it right off to the side. Now, it's kind of hard to see on my little ipad here, but there is my row marker and it's way down here and it's yellow. And to me, that's not really a pleasant color for me to look at. Also. It's kind of hard in color. Work for me to see that as opposed to everything else. So I am going to advance the row marker so that I can get it up a little higher to show you more easily. And then I'm gonna show you how to adjust it. So if I want to advance the row marker, I'm going to tap right where the numbers are. So you can see that I am moving that row marker up, I'm going to keep going. That's go up here. So that's where my row marker is right now. But I, that's not a color that I want. It's blue. So I'm gonna go ahead in now and adjust it. I'm going to go to edit and then I'm going to hit the button. It has a little hand on it, a little crossbar over here. That is the button to edit the stitch markers now because I have color work on every row. I want my odd and even rows to be the same color and I do not want them to be yellow and I do not want them to be purple blue. So I'm going to choose a color that makes my life easier. And I think, hm. Well, you know what, I can try a different couple of different colors and see which one works best for me. I think I'm gonna go with the gray. I'm going to make both the odd rose and the even rows, the same color. So Now, if you look right here, if I go back to knit, you can see by tapping the row marker, you can see now it's gray and not yellow. So I'm gonna go back to edit, I'm going to go back to my stitch marker. Now, I did say that I did not want to use the stitch slider, but if you wanted to, you could make it a little bigger if you wanted to see it. If you look at the screen, you can see that that stitch slider is getting bigger and bigger or since I said I wasn't going to use it, I can just turn it off right here and the stitch slider has disappeared. I just have to remember to turn it back on if I decide I wanted to use it. Now, while that gray row marker is marking the row, I knit, my eye can still get distracted by all the colors around it. So there's this little magic button here called the invert button, which I really like. Now, look at this, I'm looking at simply the row I'm going to knit. Now, I can see enough of the rows on either side of it that if I'm comparing the row that I'm knitting to the one I've already knit, which I always tell people when I'm teaching color work in addition to following the chart and trying to count as best you can. You also want to see the road that you've already knit. So if you're looking at this chart and you say, oh, I'm going to knit uh, four of the coral color. One's gonna be on a green, two is gonna be on coral and one's gonna be on the green. I can still see that using the inversion because it doesn't block out the other rows completely. It just makes them not pop. So the only row that pops here is the one I'm going to knit. So this is actually my favorite thing. So once I have this all going, the way I want it to go, I'm gonna go back to the knit menu to save my changes. When I get my knitting out to demonstrate, I personally, I am going to skip all the way up here to uh I think it's row 54. I'll take a look in a moment and I can use my tap, but right here to get where I want to go. Oh, I lied. It was row 56. However, if I've gone too far, all I need to do is long tap on the row button and it gives me two options. I can go back a row or I can reset the whole piece and go back to the very beginning. So I'm going to get my row marker up where I want it. And now we're going to talk about other things we can do using the magic marker function of knit companion. One of the other things I like about using the knit companion for coloring charts is in this example. Now I will tell you the truth. I am the designer of this particular pattern and I made the color chart in my color chart making software and I used the colors that I was going to use when I knit it because that made my life easier. But one thing I noticed when I knit, the first one is that I used a lot more of the blue, which was my main color than I did of the other two colors, which are my contrast colors. And I decided what I wanted was to get a second cowl out of the same three skeins of yarn. So I don't have to buy more yarn. I could make another cow if I switch my colors. So in the sample that I'm working on today, I've switched the blue and the green. Now, I, if I didn't have Nick companion, I was looking at the chart every time I saw a blue square, I think, oh, that has to be green. And every time I saw green square, I would think, oh, that has to be blue. But using knit companion, I can actually Recolor the chart. So it tells me exactly what color I'm using. And when, so let's take a look at how to Recolor a chart using the magic marker function. All right. As before we need to go to edit and we want to tap the magic marker button and that is this guy right here. It looks like a little crossword puzzle and it has the wand on top of it and I'm going to hit that right there and it says tap the plus to add a marker. So we're going to tap the plus and we're going to add a magic marker. Now, it says tap on a stitch to select it. This is the stitch that you want to match. So in the case of the cowl pattern color A is blue. So I'm going to select a blue square. Now for the moment, I'm going to make it blue. I'm just gonna go ahead and uh use my color options over here to get, it doesn't have to be perfect at this point. And I'm going to name that color A and down here, um I want to change it from black and white to color because I'm not doing a symbol search. I'm doing a color search. So now there's my little blue square. There's my custom name. I have it set to color. I'm going to hit this icon and now it has found all of the squares that were blue and marked them and said, well, those are color A. Now, I want to isolate also color B and color C. Once again, we're going to hit the plus sign, add a magic marker. We're going to tap on a stitch to select it. Let's go ahead and do color B, why not? And even though we used it, we switched it to uh color search before we have to switch it to color search. Every time we use it, I'm going to change that name to color B and I'm going to make it a green sort of a color again. Doesn't have to be perfect at this point. And then I'm going to hit that icon again and it's going to mark all my green stitches. Now, I have one more color I have to add. So at hit the plus sign, hit magic marker. We're gonna do our little pink color here. We're switching that color search from black and white to color. We're gonna call this color C. We're going to hit that icon again. And now magic markers have isolated all three of the colors that we have. All right, I have isolated each of my three colors. Color A color B and color C and I have put little color swatches next to them that are pretty close to the colors that they were in the original chart. So right now I'm showing the color C button right here. So all I'm seeing is color C highlighted. But if I flip on show, all you can see my blue squares are blue, my green squares are green, my coral squares are coral. But now I said earlier, what I wanna do is I want to flop my A color and my B color. So I'm gonna leave the C color alone and I'm going to use my green color as my main for my second cowl and I'm going to use my blue color, which was the main. When I made the original cow, I'm gonna flip flop that over to color B so that I can get my second cow out of the same three skeins. So I'm going to pick color A and currently it's showing me all of the, well, here, let's go back. Uh let's take, show all off. So it's showing me all of the blue squares, all of the squares that were originally blue that are isolated as color A. Well, I don't want them to be blue anymore. I want them to be green. So let me pick a green that's kind of similar, doesn't have to be perfect. Let me pick a green that's kind of similar to the yarn color that I wanna use. I'm gonna pick this one. So now you can see on the screen it has changed all of those blue squares to green. Now, I can hardly see my green ones because I've got a lot of green on the screen now. But because I isolated to the colors in the original chart, the knit companion can still tell the difference between which squares were originally A and which squares were originally B. So now I'm gonna go to color B which used to be green and I'm going to make it a blue color. So I would like, hm, I think I'm gonna do this one. So now all the squares that used to be green are kind of this blue color. So now when I go to show all my chart has changed colors, my green is my main color. My blue is my contrast color. My pink stayed the same. So now I can knit off this chart and not have to remember. Oh, I switched the A to green. Oh, I switched the B to blue. It's already telling me this. Now for me, I'm gonna say, mm, that green's a little dark. So I'm gonna go back to the color selector and I'm gonna pick something a little lighter and then I'm like, hm, I think that blue needs to be a little darker. So it has a little more contrast. I'm gonna pick this one. What if I didn't want to use these colors at all? I wasn't using blue, green and pink. I was using red, purple and yellow. Well, I could go into each color and change it. Um, what did I say? Red, purple and yellow? That's gonna be obnoxious. But let's do it. Let's see. Do we have a red? Oh, we even have some contrast here. We can make them darker and lighter. Let's make a red and let's see. Color. A what did I say? I said purple. Let's see. If we have a purple, well, we'll do that blue. So now I can look at this and go, well, either I have these colors in my stash and those are the colors I wanna use or I can take this to the orange store and say these are the colors I wanna buy or I can say, oh, this is terrible. I don't want any of this. Let's start over. So let's go to color A and make it yellow. Let's go to color B and make it coral. Let's go to color C and make it white. Well, now I've got a completely different thing going on here. So again, you can use the app to change up the colors in your chart no matter what color it came in in the first place. And this will help you get an easier visualization of what you wanna use. Now, I am gonna reset back to my green and my blue and my pink to make my own life easier. And then we're going to talk about stitch counts. All right, I have reset my color chart back to my green color, my blue color and my pink color, which is what I needed to work. They're not the exact colors of the arm, but they're close enough and it will help me not have to translate. What does a mean? What does B mean? What does C mean in my head? My color chart is going to tell me while we're in this section. The last thing I wanna talk about is adding stitch counts. Now, one of the things I hate about color work when I have just a paper chart in front of me is you're staring at it going. Is that six? Is that seven? Is that nine? Is that eight? Is that 11? And you have to stop and count. Now, I know personally when I'm knitting something like this, once I get a couple of repeats in, it's sort of intuitive, but I find myself counting 18 times at the beginning to make sure that I am doing everything correctly. So I did want to show you here that we can add stitch counts to this chart. Now that we have it colored the way we want it to be colored. Now, the minimum number of stitches that the app will count is three. So instances like here where it's 12312312. You know, it's the, it's just one iteration of a color. It's not gonna count that out for you. That said if I'm looking at a chart, I can pretty much look at one color figure. It's one stitch. So I don't really need any help there. It's the longer stretches of a color where I would really like to have that little tip that tells me, oh, it's 10, it's nine, it's seven, it's whatever. So here's what we're going to do. We have uh put it down here that we want it to count the stitches that I want to count every iteration of three or more. Now, if I only wanted to count it four or more or five or more or six or more, I can go ahead and alter that here, but three is the minimum. So that's what I'm going to pick. Now, I'm over here where it says show count. Now you have two options and they both have their uses. The first thing I'm going to show you is all rows. So I'm going to hit all rows and look. Little numbers have popped up everywhere. There's color A, there's color B, there's color C while I'm knitting my project though. I personally only want to see the stitch counts for the row I'm working on. So I'm going to reset it to current row. The thing I wanna point out here's my current row button. The thing I want to point out is I have to do that for every marker that I have. So I have three magic markers on this chart. One for each of my three colors. So I'm going to tell each of my three colors that I only wanna see the current row. So there's my color. A current row, color B, current row, color C, current row. And now I'm going to hit knit and I advanced my row marker up to row 56 because or around 56 rather because that's what I wanna do. And now look, it's telling me to knit four green. I have the one pink, I have eight blue, one pink, four green. That's my repeat. There's no other numbers to clutter things up. And one of the things that I love is you'll notice that the little number for the stitch count is even in a similar color to the yarn that you're using. So I look at four. I know it's green because it's a little green oval. I look at eight. I know it's eight because it's a little blue oval using this app to help your eyes focus on the right part of the chart to make your knitting experience better when you're knitting color work. It makes this a much easier process. I know a lot of people are sort of afraid of color work or I can only do it when I'm home and the TV is off and the phone is on silent. Nobody's bothering me because I've got really, really focus. This enables you to focus a little less, to be honest and it makes it TV. Knitting. It's, I'm watching a movie with my friends Knitting. It's I went to my stitch group at my local yarn store knitting. It gives you the opportunity to do color work wherever it is that you like to knit. So I'm just gonna go ahead and start this repeat just to show you what's up. I'm looking at my cul current row, it says knit four of the green color one two three four and then one of the pink. And now it's telling me eight blue and I am delighted that I do not have to look at the chart and count to eight and I have to add a color here. So I'm gonna add my color one two three four, gonna capture my float here. That's not what this video is about, but I like to do it. I like to make sure that I don't have big giant floats floating across the back and there's my other four stitches. One two three four. Then I have one pink bringing my new color under my old because that's how I like to do my yarn management and then I'm going to have four green bringing new under old because that's how I manage my art too. Three four. So there's my 18 stitch repeat and I can compare what I have on my needle to the chart without having to go crazy and count. There's my stitch marker. So here's the beginning of the round 1234 green, one pink, 12345678, blue, one pink four green. So now I can just keep knitting once again. I'm I'm doing a little twist here for yarn management's sake. One two, three, four. I know I spoke about this earlier, but one of the things I like about the inversion when I'm knitting color work. And so, for example, right here on the road before I have a pink, a green and a pink. And I know that I'm closing up this little diamond with the pink. I know the pink is going to go basically between where these two were one row up. I can see it in my knitting. But because of the way the magic marker is inverted, I can still see it on the chart. I really, when I'm teaching color work, I always encourage you while you're knitting. In addition to counting, in addition to yarn management is look at the colors of the stitches that you're working as compared to the row or the round below. Because if I'm knitting away and I noticed that this is not seated where I need it to be seated. It's a much faster way for me to figure out where the problem is. I'm going to know that I've made a mistake before I get three rounds passed and I have to do some crazy un knitting or tinking or pulling out when I've completed this whole round. All I'm gonna do is hit my advance button. Now, look, we've got, see right here. It says 484. I'm gonna hit advance. Now it says 363 because it's only showing the current row because that's what I asked it to do if I've made a mistake. If I need to see all those stitch counts. I'm just gonna go back into edit. I'm going to go back to the magic marker area and then I can go down here and make my changes. When I've made my changes, I'll go back to knit and it'll show me exactly what I need to see to knit my next row or round or fix a mistake. I hope you had a great time learning how knit companion can have a really positive effect on your color work, knitting. I'm Mary Beth Temple and I'm glad you hung out with me today and I hope to see you again here real soon.