Charting a course for Christmas

This weekend I finally got my act together and started my Christmas knitting. Normally, I would be a little more conscientious and start earlier, but I had a few things I wanted to finish up first. There was a little Birdie that had to be finished and find her way home, the all-important stealth knit, which I felt needed to make its photographic debut on Roosevelt Island, and then finally the matter of a lovely pair of charity socks that had to be completed and sent off to their new owner (They're coming, Karen! The socks are blocking as we speak and as soon as they dry they are off post haste!)

Like everyone else I know, I often have grandiose Christmas knitting plans which get severely truncated when I realize exactly how long it will take me if I do indeed knit them all. Do I really want to start Christmas knitting in August? Even worse, do I want to be finishing Christmas gifts in May? Not so much.

My revised "short list" of knitted items includes only two main gifts - one for each parent. The old folks have every other item you could imagine giving them, so really handknits are the way to go. They're personal, useful, and what parent doesn't love something that their kid (even if she is 33) made for them herself? Plus, these gifts will beat the pants off of all those macaroni sculptures I made them a few decades ago.

Here's the start of what I'm making for my dad:

Yes, it is a duck. There's a back story on that which I'll share with you soon!

In the past, I haven't had a great deal of interest in intarsia. Recently, though, I've come across a few intarsia pieces that really interested me. There are some awesome free charts over at Chez Dominitrix - I am so making a Rosie the Riveter tank top next summer! - and I really love Jenna Adorno's mudflap girl tank in Stitch & Bitch Nation. These designs really take intarsia out of the realm of hotel-oil-painting-kitschy-crap and into the world of fun, hip, retro and chic. So when I was thinking of what to make my dad for Christmas and came up with the duck idea, I decided I'd use the opportunity to brush up on my intarsia skills as well.

Here's my favorite detail so far:

Is that not the cutest little tail?

Making your own chart for intarsia is not nearly as hard as you might think. Here's what I did:

1. Choose your yarn and make a guage swatch.

2. Get out a calculator and divide the number of rows per inch by the number of stitches per inch in your guage. This is your aspect ratio.

3. Go to Sweaterscapes and print out custom graph paper that exactly matches your guage, using your aspect ratio. (They also have an intarsia primer if you're feeling a little rusty. I especially like their tip on using clothespins rather than bobbins.)

4. Print the chart grid onto tracing paper or some other paper that is easy to see through.

5. Draw or "find" an image outline that suits your purposes. (Note: If you use a found image, remember to respect copyright. It's fine to make a chart for personal use, but you should not distribute the chart pattern if someone else's copyrighted work was used to create the image, nor should you sell items knitted using a copyrighted image. Whether it's okay to distribute a charted image can be hard to determine - the charts I linked to above are most likely of images in the public domain and therefore useable - if in doubt, play nice and chart for personal use only.)

6. If the image is too small or too large, adjust the size by using the enlarge/reduce option on a copying machine to tweak the proportions.

7. Lay the image under the graph paper and trace its outline.

8. After the outline is complete, fill in the squares of the chart that are inside the lines of the outline by 50% or more.

9. Determine how much background space you want on the sides of your image, and add that number of stitches and rows into the equation. (I'm making a pillow, so I adjusted for a background buffer of 1.5 inches in each direction to accomodate the slope that will be created by the stuffing. This was a guess - let's hope it works!)

10. Knit!

P.S. For those of you wanting to know the outcome of my button dilemna, I'm still deciding! I tried one option this weekend and didn't like it, so I'm trying another this week. I'll let you know what I go with - promise!