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In this episode,
we will learn how to make reusable building blocks to put together
complex charts with minimal cropping.
I strongly suggest you familiarize yourself with cropping charts
and the options covered in combining pieces advanced.
Templates are very useful when you have a situation where you need to reuse the
same chart several times.
A good example is if you have a central motif with shorter repeating borders
that stack up each side.
What templates do is allow you to crop an image once and then use it many
times in building up your piece.
Templates do not show up on the piece bar.
Instead
you can think of them as building blocks or legos for more rapidly
assembling complex pieces.
Let's look at our pattern.
This is the November Square by Tami Thompson whose designs can be found on
Ravelry.
Here we can see that this pattern provides a central motif.
There is also a shorter border
that repeats up each side of that central motif.
Let's get started by making our first
template.
Tap the plus to make a new template.
These are charts, so select chart.
Tame your template
and be sure to use a good name so you will recognize it later.
I will name mine "Border".
Crop your chart just as you would any chart and tap save.
Return to the setup screen.
I have already created a piece for the center motif chart.
I'll tap it to edit.
Now we need to add our new template to this piece.
Tap add image
and select
add template
horizontally.
Pick the border template.
You can see that by default the border is added in a perfect spot.
Tap save.
Again,
let's tap new image,
add template horizontally. Pick border.
Now we have a little work to do.
We need to move the border from its default spot,
up and over.
To move it up,
we will select align by rows and add the new image at row 1.
to the existing image at row 9.
This moves it up.
To move it over, we will specify to overlap it by 13 stitches.
Now it is in the correct spot.
Tap save.
Let's add one more border.
Tap new image,
add template horizontally,
pick border.
Let's start out left side border.
Our border is currently added to the right, so if we tap to add it to the
left instead we see it moves to the left side.
Tap save.
As you can see,
the use of templates makes assembly of your complex charts fast and easy.
Simply continue to add your templates, aligning them as needed to stack them up.
Happy knitting!