DIY Life

When you're doing any kind of fiber craft, it can be fun to make your own charts: you can put any motif you want into needlepoint or around the cuffs of a sweater. But actually creating the charts can be a hassle to do, involving pixelizing things in Photoshop or drawing into an Excel grid by darkening cells. It's nice to find ways to make it all easier.

KnitPro allows you to upload any graphic to a web application, which will automatically turn your picture into a chart suitable for knit, crochet, and needlework projects. The process is similar to what you would do yourself in an image editing program, but it's entirely automated.

KnitPro's parent site, MicroRevolt, is involved in anti-sweatshop activism: the creator, Cat Mazza, uses KnitPro to create graphs of the logos of companies that have been known to use sweatshop labor. The logos are then knit by hand or machine into garments and other items that are meant to raise awareness of unfair labor practices around the world. You can see some of these "LogoKnits" at the KnitPro site (note: mildly saucy photo at that link!), and read more about MicroRevolt in this article from the Winter 2006 Interweave Knits.

(There are a few more sites to help you make graphs for fiber crafting listed near the end of our article DIY Toolkit: Knitting and Crochet.)