Needle-Tek Machine Knitting Seminar and DAK Tips
Over the weekend I escaped with friends to Portland, Oregon for Needle-Tek’s Fall Festival Machine Knitting Seminar. I had a fantastic time. I spent the entire weekend in the same chair in Tricia Shafer’s Designaknit classes.
I have had DAK quite awhile and never really used it. I was determined to come away from the weekend with enough knowledge to enter a simple sweater similar to the Adrienne Vittadini sweater I’ve admired in Vogue Knitting International (Winter 2003/04 #9 pg. 63). Its clean lines should translate well to machine knitting.
I also wanted to use the Stitch Designer module to design a pair of hand knit gloves promised to my mom ages ago. I was able to do both.
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My favorite Designaknit tips from Tricia were:
- Always keep the right mouse button (RMB) on the Main Color. This is usually the background, or non-selecting needle color with an X on it. If you do, when you go to use the scissors to delete everything, you still have your chosen background color waiting for you. Also, if you lasso and move an item, the correct color is left behind so you don’t accidently leave a different color imprint of that which was moved.
- Don’t waste time manually entering stitch patterns you might have on old punch cards, mylars, or even graph paper. Use your scanner or digital camera to take a picture and import the graphic into the Graphic Studio module. You can lay a grid over the picture, search for the dark color of the punch card holes, and with some minor tweaking, your punch card becomes an electronic DAK file. Pretty cool.
- If you are trying to find a favorite stitch pattern and it seems to have disappeared, check to make sure you’re not searching for a .pat file in DAK 7’s .stp folder or vice versa. Most commercial DAK disks come as .pat files because they are compatible with multiple versions of Designaknit. However, the default extension for stitch patterns in Designaknit 7 is .stp Your files are not lost, just tucked in a different drop down menu.
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October 2, 2006
4 comments
I’m looking for camouflage yarn in a 3/15. Do you have any available?
Ann
Iam attempting to reinstall Form6 into Creation6. I cannot seem to get the mouse loaded, nor the Form6 Zip folder activated. I have installed Dos 6.22 and have tried “unzip”Form6, reloading the mouse program into Creation 6, etc. No luck so far…………..
Any suggestions?
I am really glad that knitsings is so generous. I’ve learned a lot and expect to do a lot more. Thanks Knitsings. Carole in Oregon
I am having a horrible time understanding the manual on how to go about changing the stitches?
I have found the stitches but don’t understand how to enable them into a garment?
Is it me or is the manual not detailed enough?
Joann