Links
You might have noticed that search engines aren’t as helpful as they used to be.
I’ve seen suggestions that it can be helpful to share lists of useful resources with each other, and so I’m going to gradually build up a list of sites I have found useful or interesting or reliable, and not only about handcrafts.
So here’s a random list of stuff that I hope to add to over time, sporadically, as I think of things.
Last updated 15 August 2024.
Craft information
General
- The Spruce Crafts has lots of good basic written tutorials about lots of craft techniques including knitting.
Knitting
- Knittinghelp.com is a great resource if you want short videos demonstrating basic knitting techniques.
- Knitty has a bunch of useful articles and tutorials.
Design Tools
- Incompetech has customizable free graph paper (including hexagonal graph paper and also a wide variety of lined paper including staff paper for music.)
Mosaic chart web apps
- Laura Kogler’s mosaic knitting pattern generator is just what it says. You can specify some basic things about what you want.
- Scott Pakin’s Create your own mosaic knitting pattern. Draw a design with this web app and it will check that it’s a valid mosaic knitting pattern.
Reference
Language
- Etymonline is an excellent etymological dictionary of English.
Miscellaneous
- Dimensions.com has drawings with measurements for all kinds of things, fictional and actual.
Search
- A list of search engines with brief reviews, each of which has its own index. (For instance, unless they’re Bing, they don’t search the same list of websites Bing uses.) How many websites each index contains will vary, so you might not find the same websites in each of them. This is both good and bad.
- Feedle is a search engine that indexes blogs and podcasts. You can submit your blog or podcast to it! One thing I like is that I can make an RSS feed for a particular set of search terms, so if there’s a new result, I can see it in my RSS feed reader.
Hi there,
just wondering where you got the idea for binary code in knitwear?
Would love to here the story,
Adam x
I didn’t actually start with binary, I started with the Dewey Decimal System! I’m trained as a reference librarian, and one day I was reflecting on how call numbers are kind of like a code, and then since I’d been thinking about how knitting abbreviations are like a code, I wondered if I could put them together. That’s where I started, and everything else evolved from there. Next I started turning letters into numbers like a kid (A = 1, etc), then I realized that using numeric bases would give me more options. I only sometimes use binary. There’s other people that have used binary for knitting also, and some people have come up with methods for Morse code or braille.