Links, Tutorials, and Non-Knitting Help

Here is a list of non-knitting tutorials, help files, and YouTube videos. This page will be edited regularly to add new links and keep the old ones up-to-date. If you don’t see your favorite Inkscape Reference on the list, leave a comment or contact me through the about page. Please make sure you include the url as text only (i.e. copy it and paste it into the comment or the form without telling the system it’s a link).

• Official Inkscape Tutorials and Help
  • Inkscape: Guide to a Vector Drawing Program
  • Inkscape User Documentation (List of Official Tutorials)
  • Inkscape for Adobe Illustrator Users (Useful for converting Adobe Illustrator Tutorials…)
  • Inkscape Tutorials Blog
  • Inkscape (FLOSS Manual)
• YouTube Tutorials (YouTube, bastion of internet video, has some nice hand-on tutorials.)
  • Heathenxyt’s YouTube Tutorials
  • Learn Digital Design’s Inkscape Tutorials (These are quite possibly the best tool by tool introduction I’ve seen to date.)
  • Rfquerin’s Inkscape Tutorials
• Other Unofficial Tutorials
  • Pixel2Life Tutorials (These are mostly geared towards graphic artists, but there’s still some interesting ideas here.)
  • 25 Tutorials to Get You Started With Inkscape
  • Inkscape – Mosaic
  • MicroUgly’s Quick Guide to Inkscape
  • Nicu’s Gimp and Inkscape How Tos
  • Learning Game Tutorial: Inkscape
• Blogs
  • Heathenx’s Inkscape Screencasts
  • Linux for Designers Inkscape Posts

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A Geek Plans Her Color Work Knits

Have you ever designed an intarsia or fair isle design, ordered your yarn online and discovered that the colors were either a) hideous, b) didn’t match, c) too girly for the man in your life, or d) all of the above? If you have, let me say welcome to the world of the online LYS. If you haven’t, either you don’t order online or you are incredibly lucky.

Let’s go ahead and establish that I am not a lucky knitter. In fact, I would describe myself as the person who experiences the worst that the knitting world can offer (frequently all at the same time). Yes, I have ordered what I thought was a lovely pale pink yarn only to discover that the delicate pink was best described as pepto-bismol pink–a nauseating shade which instantly turns other knitters green and not with envy. After a multitude of bad yarn experiences, I have turned to my web design toolbox to solve my yarn problems. My tools of choice: Colorzilla and ColourLovers.

Colorzilla

This handy little Firefox extension lets you pick hex colors from pictures and web pages. Just go to your online LYS of choice and click the eye dropper icon in the left hand corner of your screen. Hover over the yarn and scribble down the number on a handy pad of paper.

This is much better than eyeballing the color on your computer screen and saying, "I think that’s a light purple." At least, this uses a real picture of the actual yarn for color. (Pictures are still pictures and colors aren’t 100% accurate, but digital cameras are normally more accurate than holding your box of Crayons next to the monitor.)

ColourLovers

I can’t say enough about this site. I do freelance web design on occasion and it has saved my butt several times. (I particularly love COPASA, which helps you generate your palettes and integrates some color theory into your designs.) For finding palette ideas and creating your own custom palettes, this is an excellent starting place. A few things to note:

1. It only allows 5 colors per palette. (Designers who love using 10 different colors will need to create more than one palette per design.)
2. It will generate patterns, but that requires a bit more effort than using COPASA.
3. You can download the palette in many different formats. (I use GIMP and Inkscape for most of my sketching, which means I click the GIMP button for the palette. (Inkscape uses .gpl files too!))

I’ve already done this exercise for the KnitPicks Swish DK, which I’m planning on using for a project. Since this is designed for use on your desktop in conjunction with an graphics program for sketching, I’ve put the file in a GoogleDocs spreadsheet.

You can create one of these for any yarn you are considering, but you do need good quality pictures. Use a single palette for a hand painted yarn.) Happy (tear free?) planning!

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