Doodle digression – various colorwork charts

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Last week I showed how I turned a doodled colorwork chart into a very different-looking mosaic knitting chart. I had a plan worked out for a series of posts showing how that original colorwork chart would look as a knit-purl pattern, and even as lace. I will come to those blog posts eventually, I hope, but I got whacked in the head by an idea and feel compelled to run with it.

Important note: after the initial mosaic chart, none of the charts in this post are suitable for mosaic knitting.

I was looking at this process illustration:

stages of making a regular needlework chart into a mosaic knitting chart
The three stages of turning a needlework chart into a mosaic knitting chart, if it is a suitable arrangement of slip stitches. (Note that this particular method will result in the final appearance of the mosaic knitting looking quite different from the original needlework chart.)

I realized suddenly that this process could be easily reversed!

I zipped over to Laura Kogler’s Mosaic Knitting Pattern Generator and asked it to generate a mosaic knitting pattern for me.

reverse mosaic

thingy
I made it into a fancy chart.

Obviously this could be used as a regular needlework chart just as it is, but I was curious about reversing the process I used last week.

 

reverse mosaic 3 stages
The three stages of turning a mosaic knitting chart into a very different-looking needlework chart.

The  stages I use as shown in the illustration:

  1. place a slip stitch symbol in each square of the mosaic chart that contains a slip stitch in the actual mosaic knitting.
  2. remove the color from all squares.
  3. fill the slip stitch squares with black.
  4. the last stage is to remove all the slip stitch symbols and make the final chart:

 

(Not a mosaic chart)

I must say I don’t find this terribly interesting at first glance. However, I suspect it might look good as lace (yes, this will be a different blog post). Also, I see a way to tweak this a little (since it’s not an encoded word) and maybe improve things a bit:

(Not a mosaic chart)

Hm, yes, that has promise. Oh, hey, if I add a couple more black squares to the chart, I’ll have a single pattern that alternates in inverse colors. The name for this kind of pattern just floated to the front of my head: counterchange.

(Not a mosaic chart)

I think this is a feasible method for transforming mosaic charts into needlework charts that don’t necessarily look like the original.