Diana's Latest Design-A-Knit Adventure

I have a love-hate relationship with DAK.  I bought it early in the professional version, upgraded it along the way, bought the lace tool, bought the CD, and even set up an old desktop with a serial port at one point just for DAK.  I think DAK users already know why the "hate" part - despite my very careful and very "legal" (spirit of the agreement, not just the letter) use of DAK, I have to run it from the disk because of the oddball copy protection problems.  It would be SO nice to simply run it from the hard drive.  I also had to buy the CD when the floppies went bad, and they charged me $50, or something like that, on top of all the other money I'd paid.  The cables are expensive, too...I had two cables and will soon own three.

The "love" thing about DAK is it communicates with my knitting machine, and for someone like me, since I am utterly compelled to knit the visions in my head and not just follow other people's patterns, DAK is a godsend.  I used to spend hours with graph paper and a card punch, but now, I doodle in DAK and create all my stitch patterns.  I also create shape files to knit for people, in addition to using the Knitleader.  I even used to "knit from screen" for years, because it was a great way to cope with knitting with kids in the house.  The kids would interrupt me, but DAK would keep my place.  It is an awesome program.  Fabulous.  I'm even rather sympathetic about the copy protection issues, now that I'm designing and selling knitting patterns and wanting to protect my own intellectual property.

Yup, I have a Brother disk drive, and a PPD.  DAK is better for me.

Another thing I love about DAK is how helpful it is when I don't get it right the first time.  Trust me, with lace, I almost never get it right the first time!  Most of my lace is done by placing the dots, as opposed to using the DAK lace tool, because I do peculiar things like partial knit-shaped doilies.  There are usually mistakes in my charts.  I just hop up as I am knitting and noticing what's wrong, fix it in DAK, download the pattern again, and try again.

DAK wouldn't download my lace edgings to the 965i last week, and I thought it was the cable.  After borrowing a friend's cable, we finally realized it was the laptop I've been using the last 5 years.  Thank goodness it wasn't the 965i!  I've moved back onto that ancient DAK computer, which hadn't been turned on for about 4 years, after John did quite a bit of computer maintenance, and I'm back in business.  Hooray!  I've even realized what I liked about that old computer.  It is too old and slow for the family to bother it; it has a trackball to make drawing all those dots easier; and it's in a very quiet corner but in cable reach of the machine.  He'll fix the serial port on the good old laptop, hopefully, and I'll be able to doodle stitch patterns again while "watching" TV.  I'll also be able to carry the laptop to the other machines.