Letters

The evolution of names on the blankets has taken a while. The charting of each letter was done in Excel, using cells as pixels. In my usage, one cell on an Excel page represents one stitch of crochet. I learned fairly early on that in crochet, stitches are not square. If I followed a pattern that was charted on a page of squares, my finished crochet work would look very tall and skinny, simply because my stitches are not square like the graph. It took a lot of fiddling and fooling until I found the proper ratio for my stitches. When charting on graph paper, my pixels - one pixel representing one stitch - needed to be taller than wide. These letters were made early on in the scheme of things, and so look pretty tall and skinny.














Since making the above, the letters have come along nicely. This letter C, for example, is better proportioned. The proportion was getting straightened out, but the lines still didn't look quite right. The horizontal lines looked fine, and even the diagonal lines looked better than the vertical. In experimenting, I found that the trick lay in where to switch colors of yarns. I had been changing yarn colors after a completed stitch, but found that I got a much better vertical line by changing colors halfway through a stitch. This leads to its own particular set of troubles, but it does solve the problem of letters looking all spiky and zippery along their edges. Contrast these two vertical lines, each from the letter i.