This blog post has been many years in the making! I’m so excited to announce that now knitCompanion’s famous Setup tools are available on Android and Apple to use with ALL YOUR PATTERNS.

That’s Right! All those lovely tools like automated chart recognition, one tap markers, magic markers, reminders, repeats, shaping, and more are all now on Android! In this post I’m going to do a high level overview of some of the key things. Then in future blog posts we are going to break down the details.

One Tap Marker, Keys & Reminders

The one-tap marker is fundamental to everything Setup enables. With it you can advance your row with a tap, for both charted and written instructions. Our automated chart detection makes it super easy because the app can identify your chart and its rows and stitches AUTOMATICALLY. With the one tap marker, you can add row reminders, shaping (for those pesky “at the same time” instructions), repeats, and more. And with the Setup tools you can have as many keys as you need, crop them so your bottom view shows only the key rather than the whole page.

Magic Markers

Magic Markers are really kind of amazing (if I do say so myself). No longer do you need to hand color in your colorwork charts, or manually count longer stitch runs. Using some of the same special magic found in our automated chart recognition, Magic Markers will find ALL the matching stitches in your chart. So you can select a sample of a knit or purl, and Magic Markers will find ALL the other knits or purls. This works for “wide” stitches such as cables too. AND it works for color (so you can find all the red stitches or all the medium grey stitches).

All of the Magic Marker features below are available for ALL YOUR PATTERNS!

• Count long stitch runs! Have Magic Markers find all your knits (or purls, etc), and then ask it to show counts! You’ll get an easy to read count right as you are knitting. Never put your work down again to count the 17 stitches before the next k2tog.
• Re-color your colorwork charts! Now you can knit from a chart that matches your yarn color choices! No matter if your chart is color, shades of gray, or symbols you can have it match YOUR YARN.
• Color code stitches! Would you like all your ssk to be blue and your k2tog to be red? Now you can easily do this with just a few taps. Even if there are HUNDREDS of each in your chart.
• Custom Bead Placement! If you love to bead, you might find you want to add beads even to charts that don’t have beads included. You can use Magic Marker’s Custom Marker option to easily mark each stitch you want to place a bead on. And you can color code if you are using several different types of beads.

Join

We’ve all been there. The designer just couldn’t fit that lovely chart on a single sheet of paper, so she split it up across pages. Or, it is a complex pattern that is made up of many separate charts (eg A, B, C, B, C, A). The join tool in knitCompanion makes it SUPER EASY to cut out all these separate parts and join them together into a single piece to knit from. Having to use scissors and tape, multiple photocopies, huge wide pieces of paper, or heaven forbid flipping across multiple pages, tracking your row on each page, are all a thing of the past. When knitting, knitCompanion offers a whole host of wonderful tools for working with large format instructions (even from a smaller screen). And during Setup, it offers drag and drop ease of assembly, automatic scale-to-fit for different grid sizes, and templates to make even complex assembly fast.

Wow! I can’t wait to show you all of the above and more in step by step detail. Stay tuned for more in our Guide Post Blog Series!