Sunday, October 11, 2009

Map of the World charts

Bit of a blog experiment today. Someone on Ravely was reading about my crazy obsessive recharting of the Vogue Map of the World afghan and asked if I could put my new pattern online (the originals are painstakingly drawn out on graph paper). I've never charted anything in Excel before - not for public use anyway, I've never converted a Microsoft document to a PDF, and I've certainly never uploaded anything to be downloaded by others, so I have no idea if this is going to work at all. So, Marni (and anyone else who's interested), please let me know if this works properly.

Knittingwise, I've done about 1 and a third of the charts and I've just finished embroidering the first complete panel.



Yep, all those colourful little blobs next to Australia are the individually french-knotted island clusters of Polynesia. They don't show up on the chart I'm afraid, the whole point being that they would be smaller than a knit stitch, so you have three options

a) Find a map and go insane trying to get them as accurately placed as possible (In the absence of an atlas, I've found Wikipedia pretty useful.)

b) Forget the map and just embroider them on willy-nilly. Go crazy. Make pretty patterns. Maybe spell out some secret message in morse code.

c) Do the sensible thing and ignore the islands completely.

Ok, the original pattern is available online at Vogue, and my new charts - fingers crossed - should be downloadable here:

Map of the World Edited

9 comments:

CatR said...

That is truly fabulous. So much effort! Have downloaded both for reference. Thank you!

Marni said...

Hey, your upload of the PDF worked like a charm. Thank you so much for putting such great effort into sharing this with me and others. My brother is a "world explorer" and will be happy as a lark to have something so unique and accurate!

KS said...

Oh. My. GOODNESS! That is INCREDIBLE!! Nicely done! I'm very new to knitting but SO IMPRESSED with your work!! I'm going to have to share this link with my mom :)

SAS said...

Awesome! Thank you!
Also, how did you create the graph lines on the map? I'm thinking about doing a globe... Need to chart a sinusoidal map projection lol

twigletqueen said...

SAS, the chart is drawn out in Excel - I used Marnie Maclean's tutorial
http://www.marniemaclean.com/words/2007/02/tutorial_using.html

Hope this helps.

kaela said...

IThank you so much for this. You've done an amazing job. Mine will end up as a record of my travels over some 15 years length (this will probably end in the next year or two though) I had a mind to embroider symbols on the places I've lived, and I need also to acknowledge all the places I've visited...maybe showing pathways...I'm not sure yet. It will be a long project, but I'm happy to do this so that eventually I have a complete record knitted.
Did you use the original colours of the pattern....Im not sure that the teal for the ocean might be a bit light.
Thanks again, truly!

twigletqueen said...

Thankyou Kaela! I love you idea for the pathways. I didn't use the yarn originally called for - I can't get Takhi Yarns here - so I just picked whatever was on sale. I ended up using Debbie Bliss Donegal Aran Tweed, it was cheap because most of the colours I picked were about to be discontinued, but the blue I picked was more of a royal blue than a teal

Margy Levine Young said...

I wasn't able to download the PDF in the Chrome browser -- so frustrating, because I'm making this for my son, who is a history and politics buff, and precision is what will make it fun. Then I tried the link in Internet Explorer, and the PDF is downloading. Yay! Looks great! Thanks for doing this!

twigletqueen said...

Hi Margy, I'm glad you like it :) If you're going for precision watch out for Sudan - it's split into two countries since I finished the charts (aargh, stupid politics spoiling my knitting!)