Old Knitting Files

A few years ago, when I bought a new computer for my knitting, I took the old computer apart, and it has sat in a corner of the room now for three or four years.  

Thinking about some goodies I have on that computer and that I wanted them, hubby helped me fish it out of the corner and set it up today.  I pulled off dozens and dozens of old knitting files, and I've been having a good time browsing through them.  

Most of them are Design A Knit pattern files.  I have a real tendency to entertain myself by making up stitch patterns, whether I ever knitted them or now.  I also worked out a lot of more complicated knitting in DAK first.  I'd download them to the machine, discover problems as I knitted, go to the computer and fix the problems, and download and test again.

There are about 30 doily patterns, some much better than others.  Just as I have used the slip buttons on the Brother machine to make scalloped lace edgings, slip can be used to make short-rowed lace in pie shapes so that you knit and knit and get a round doily, tablecloth, shawl or whatever.  With a good invisible graft between the ending and the beginning, these things are lovely.  It's not that most people use doilies any more, but I just love figuring them out.

There are baby blanket files.  I had made a lot of garter carriage baby blankets for gifts where I would choose background and edge stitch patterns, and use the DAK font tool to program the baby's name into the center. 

There are about 35 garter stitch pattern files.  I made a number of big afghans that were stitch samplers.  One of them had garter stitch lace and hand-turned cables on it, as well, but my favorite thing to do by far was make afghans 3 or 4 panels wide with all sorts of stitches that didn't require any manual intervention.  The garter carriage would run for days, but these afghans were a wonderful weight and not much work after I figured out the first one.

I also found dozens of thread lace patterns and a gob of patterns styled after Norwegian fair isle themes.  

I also found old club demonstration files, photos from our knit club that reminded me of people I haven't seen in years, and Toyota, Brother, and Silver Reed stitch patterns saved in DAK.  

As a person who pack-rats data, there was a bunch of stupid stuff there, too, ridiculously outdated resumes, school essays the kids typed, and plenty of duplicates.