echo knits

The thing about knitting is that it can be as simple as knitting one stitch, or as complicated as advanced lace or fair isle work. This is true for the technology that surrounds knitting as well.

When I first learned to knit, I was about 8 years old. I knew one stitch, had access to one kind of yarn, and the needles I had were hand me downs from my great aunt. I never finished anything because I didn’t know how to bind off. Which was probably just as well, because I didn’t have the patience to make anything big enough to make it worth finishing.

When I relearned in college, I kept track of my rows with hatch marks on small pieces of paper, or the familiar stitch markers that stay on the end of your needle. I never liked these much because you couldn’t move them one handed and they don’t work well for knits in the round on dpns or circulars. The problem I have with paper is that I loose track, my post-it goes missing, or I misplace the original pattern, or similar ridiculous mishap. Those seem to follow me for no reason.

I’ve made and tried to use an abacus style stitch counter, but I either don’t have the patience to use them, or mine doesn’t work quite right, because I’ve never really gotten into the swing of using it.

What I do use to keep track is my iPhone.

There are two really good stitch keeping applications for the iPhone, Knit Buddy and StitchMinder. I use both, having found the other ones available on the iTunes store unreliable.

StitchMinder, on the left with the purple background, has been around longer, and is free. I’ve been using it since I found it and like it a lot, except that you can’t set the names of the counters to anything except the preprogrammed choices. This makes it mostly useful for one project with several things to keep track of, but not several projects at once. However reliable and makes a satisfying clicking sound, and was the first knitting app available for iPhone.

KnitBuddy is more than I usually spend on iPhone apps, at $4.99 it’s on the higher side of the scale. However, it has several features not found in StitchMinder, the ability to add several projects, keep track of needles or hooks, and of your yarn stash. I especially like the fact that you can photograph your projects and add as many counters as you need to each project. Since I keep track of my needles and stash in Ravelry I haven’t used the needles, hooks, or yarn feature, but if there were a way to import it from once place to another I’d do it in a heartbeat. I wish I knew cocoa so I could volunteer to write a Ravelry app. It’s pretty tedious to enter that much info into a phone app, especially when it’s already online somewhere.

Anyway, you can set up multiple counters for each project so you can keep track of row repeats and pattern repeats, increases, decreases, and stitches. There’s also a note section in each pattern, to keep track of needles, yarn, special notes or whatever. You can also switch between US and Metric sizes for your needles and hooks, and add size, type, length, and material as well as any special notes. The yarn section is set up similarly, with sections for weight, fiber, color, dye lot, number of skeins, yardage and grams, as well as a section to keep track of your swatch gauge and notes for each. You can even take a picture, or use an existing picture of the yarn in question. So all in all, worth the $4.99.

Coming later, an actual knitting update! I’m still not back to my usual amount of knitting because of the tendonitis, and I’m theoretically supposed to be packing, but I haven’t stopped completely. That would be ridiculous.

I recently bought myself an Amazon Kindle. Being a technology-whore, I’ve wanted one since they first came out, but wasn’t ready to commit to a first generation product that kept selling out. The Kindle 2 is not only available and in stock, it also came out right around my birthday and right before my company distributed bonuses. I held out for the better part of three weeks, after I paid all of my bills and made sure I could still afford it, and then splurged. It’s estimated ETA is the middle of next week, so until then I get to plan what kinds of books to put on it, and what documents I might want to convert. Of the various features, the thing that drew me the most to it is that it supports .pdfs as well as several other formats.

You know what this means, right? It means that I can carry around a whole collection of knitting patterns all the time. Without printing pages and killing trees. Now, I know that full .pdf support isn’t quite up to snuff, but work with me on this one. The kindle has Amazon’s whispernet technology, like mobile broadband for cellphones. This means constant contact with the internet, which I clearly cannot live without, and constant access to Ravelry. Now, let’s be fair, I already have an iPhone, so I always have the internet around, but it’s hard to read patterns easily on the small screen, and browsing can be a pain. And I have an asus eee (bought after last year’s bonus), but you need wifi to connect, and it’s battery life is dismal. The Kindle though has a long battery life, is easily readable, and compact so I can add it to my knitting bag or larger purse. Now, let’s be fair, I don’t need one. I just wanted one. So all of this might be that I was seduced by a shiny piece of technology. But man do I love shiny technology.

The other thing I find intriguing is that there is already a decent selection of knitting books available for Kindle. Even patterns, like this one for fingerless gloves, and electronic copies of old knitting books and patterns, like this 19th century book of needlework instructions. I love that old texts and magazines are being preserved this way, even if they aren’t accessible outside of the Kindle format yet. Project Gutenberg has been making out of copyright books available for years now, I used to download them to read on my old palm 100 about 7 years ago. Google Books already makes many books available to read online, and recently made a deal with Sony to add it’s public domain books to the eLibrary. Many of these can also be downloaded in .pdf (the Sony devices aren’t natively compatible with .pdf files).

If the Kindle really takes off and similar products get produced, it’s likely we’ll see even more esoteric and rare books be converted to digital copy, making them actually available. Without the cost of printing, books that have been out-of-print for years could be digitized and downloaded and actually read. Which would frankly be kind of amazing. I would love to have access to a whole archive of old knitting patterns to pour over and translate into modern technique and knitting style.

If nothing else, I’m hoping it will actually get me reading books again, instead of listening to countless audio books. I love audio books for lots of reasons, the primary one being that I have my hands free while I’m listening. This lets me listen in the car, and then pick up where I left off while I’m knitting, doing housework, or whatever. It’s difficult to read a typical paperback while knitting because they don’t stay open unless you break the spine, and I treat my books better than that. I like that the Kindle will stay upright if you have the right case or stand, so I can read hands free.

However, this could all be speculation. I don’t have it in my hands yet, and it’s highly likely that I’m overestimating it’s usefulness. I’m hoping at the least it will be great for knitting patterns, all those classics I’ve been meaning to read, and all kinds of other documents I can get digitally and would read if they were more convenient. At most, I’m hoping it will do all those things and be a worthwhile investment for leisure and school (downloading scholarly articles from jstor anyone?) and possibly be popular enough to stimulate publishers into making more things available in digital copy. Hey, a girl can dream right?