pre-generate pictures of your knitting

[Update: I’ve made a website for this: http://www.plannedpooling.com/.]

This was a birthday present for my spouse. (Don’t worry–I also covered a lot of things — fruit/nuts/cocoa puffs/etc — in chocolate. But I think both were appreciated!)

Sometimes people knit with with yarn that has a repeating sequence of colors — for example, purple, then yellow, then green — in a more-or-less regular repeating pattern. Most frequently, the colors in the finished product combine without making much of a distinguishable pattern (somewhat like the picture in the lower right, below). But sometimes stitches of the same color group together (as in the upper right picture), and sometimes other patterns emerge.

Inspired by someone at www.ravelry.com who seems to have done the same thing in SAS, I’ve written some R code that tries to predict what sort of pattern will emerge in the finishes product based on the repeating pattern of colors in the yarn (how many stitches of each color?), the width (in stitches) of the square, and whether your knitting is “flat” (back and forth — starts next row where last one finished) or “circular” (starts the next row where the last one started).