This? This is alas another of those things best done by pointing and gesturing and talking. The video that goes with this is up on a public post on patreon and also on instagram, and you should go look at one of those for a second first so this makes sense!

Ok, so first I must emphasize, Do Not Fret If This Looks Like Gibberish!

But this is sort of how I draw out stitch patterns when it’s JUST for me. Just for my own use, not ever to be inflicted on anyone else in any but the most informal of settings! So if it looks like nonsense, that’s fine, it’s my own personal shorthand.

But…this is what I (often) do when I want to scale a stitch pattern up or down (or tile it, or offset it, or otherwise play with it). I first draw out the important bits (in this case the cable crosses) of the stitch, which lets me get a sense of the logic and rules of how it works. Where do the cables (or decreases, or increases, or whatever) sit in relation to each other. How many of them are there. What lines up with what. Then, once I have a good sense of the structure of the stitch, I can mess with it.

In this case, the stitch on the mitt works with four cable crosses on each row, and that covers 20 stitches. And I want to scale it up to cover more stitches and down to cover fewer stitches. So I doodled out the equivalent set of important bit for three cable crosses (which will use 16 stitches) and two cable crosses (which will use 12). And by that point I see how it works enough that I can go up as well as down.

The next step is either drawing proper charts or swatching, depending on my brain and how tricky the stitch is. But both of those will go much faster and with less ripping out/erasing and trying again thanks to drawing them out a bit and getting a feel for them on paper.

So…wanna do a version of this where we walk through what it looks like as a paper doodle, as a chart, and as a piece of fabric? Like just do a post with pics of each of those, and how it works as you scale it up and down?