So my project this last weekend was to turn the chicken from that book I did last year, Margaret, into a knitting pattern.  For Christmas my mom made a sweater vest for my close friend Henry Jardim that had an image of a frog knitted into the front.  She had a lot of fun making it and Henry has had a lot of fun wearing it.  When she finished the sweater she told me that she would like to do one for me and asked me what I wanted.  I’ve never been very picky on what gifts I receive – I always like it when people think about it themselves – so my mom suggested that she would like to do one with Margaret on it.  She had found the knitting pattern for the frog on the Internet and thought that an image I had made would be much more personal and creative. I am inclined to agree.

Originally she just wanted me to print out a picture of Margaret on graph paper and she would figure out where the stitches would go.  However, I thought I’d be nice and make it into a knitting pattern for her. I took screen shots along the way, just so I could show you.

(click on any image to make it larger)

First I made a numbered grid in Photoshop and added it as a layer mask:

See the mask on the right

Then I found an image of margaret that I liked and cut her out, pasted her into the document under the grid layer and quickly drew on some feet:

Sloppy feet

Then once I had it resized to fit the grid, I set about removing all the details that would be impossible to knit:

taller than 60... Painting out feathers

After that was the lengthy part. I made a new layer and blocked out the colors, according to the grid – kind of like pixel art:

This took longer than I thought it would

I had considered just reducing the image to 60 pixels wide then upscaling it back to a printable DPI without compression but decided that I would have no control of the resampling and that I would have a much better result if I did it by hand.

Here’s the finished pattern (left) and the original image overlayed (right) to give an idea to where outlines should go:

Without outline  With outline

There you have it!  If you would like to download the knitting patterns for yourself or someone you know who likes to knit, you can view and print the PDFs from here:

Margaret Knitting Pattern No Outline  &  Margaret Knitting Pattern Outline

Part two will be a follow up on the progress of the sweater.