Digitizing Vintage Knitting and Crochet Patterns

Show and Tell
1

26 years ago, I bought a knitting pattern for a beautiful sweater. I finally got around to knitting it, and I realized that the designer was stuck in 1999; the charts were hard to follow and read, and the instructions were crammed into six pages to save on printing costs.

Text Blaze and Data Blaze to the rescue. I put the size parameters into Data Blaze and set up a dropdown for size selection. I re-drew the charts using a knitting pattern tool and wrote aText Blaze snippet to generate the written instructions. I output the instructions in PDF format using Google Docs and combine them with the chart in Adobe Acrobat.

The resulting pattern is easy to read, and I've been able to pull into my favorite knitting assistant app just like any contemporary pattern. Since I've been knitting for 67 years, I've got a bunch of vintage patterns that are candidates to be next, but I'm pretty keen to knit this beautiful sweater. Here are a few pages from the pattern. Everything was generated from the snippet.

250205RevisedNavajoChiefBlanket-Judy Dercum_Page_5
250205RevisedNavajoChiefBlanket-Judy Dercum_Page_51700×2200 324 KB

250205RevisedNavajoChiefBlanket-Judy Dercum_Page_4
250205RevisedNavajoChiefBlanket-Judy Dercum_Page_41700×2200 307 KB

250205RevisedNavajoChiefBlanket-Judy Dercum_Page_1
250205RevisedNavajoChiefBlanket-Judy Dercum_Page_11343×1738 155 KB

3 Likes
2

@Mary_Walker - Thanks for sharing such a creative use of Text Blaze! Your vintage pattern digitization project is truly inspiring. :yarn: We're lucky to have you as a user.

3

By the way, have you tried using AI Blaze to automatically pull the data you need from the old instructions?

4

I had not tried AI for that! The vintage patterns were never digitized, so they have to be scanned in. OCR doesn't catch everything, but it provides a good start. With Text Blaze, I can isolate the pattern to one size. That makes it much easier to read and reduces the possibility of an error. That said, the snippet can be redone to render the pattern traditionally, which lists all the sizes side by side.

Vintage patterns are pretty popular with younger knitters, and being able to do a digitized version increases their accessibility and ease of use.