Scanning Your Knitting Projects Directly into the Computer

Do you like to do any of the following?

• Send pictures of your knitting projects to others via email

• Post pictures of your knitting projects on your (or somebody's) website

• Send pictures of how to do some complicated knitting technique to someone

• Design patterns and need to include photos of your projects, especially close-ups

• Design patterns and need to draw graphics of special techniques

If so, do you have the following for your computer (mine is a PC, not a Mac)?

• flatbed scanner

• software to modify photographs (often these come with the scanner, I use "Adobe PhotoDeluxe Business Edition")

• software to play with bitmaps (often comes as a standard accessory, I use Microsoft's "Paint")

Then you are in luck!  I've discovered how to easily do all of these things pretty easily for small projects (must be smaller than the size of the scanner).  Here's what I discovered I could do for the patterns I design -- 

One day as I was working on a new knitting pattern and needed to draw a graphic of how to do a particular step for the pattern, but didn't want to wait to photograph the steps and then get the film developed (no digital camera yet), I tried just laying my partially knitted project on the scanner and hit the scan button.  I was delighted to find that it scanned just great and that it was even better than a photograph, because I could reposition the knitting to my heart's content with immediate gratification of seeing if the picture worked the way I wanted it to.  

I've since discovered that I could also turn photos into graphics by knitting samples in white or cream yarn (so they photograph pale), then scan them in & convert from color to black & white photo, then print a hardcopy photo, then draw around the desired parts of the picture with a fine point black marker, then rescan it and use my photo and "paint" programs to turn the pictures into a black-and-white drawing and fine tune it on a pixel-by-pixel basis in the resultant bitmap.  

I've started using this technique for all of my graphics and drawings because, even though I'm a reasonably good artist, this way I never need to work very hard to get all the proportions right. 

I've even found that I can scan in a picture of my hand holding the needles and keep it as a photograph or turn it into a graphic, as was done in Eyelet Edged Coasters

Below are pix of each step of the process as I prepared a graphic for a recent pattern (see the lattice bag set in Lattice Bag Set).  

If you've got the hardware and software components, try it and see if you like this method.