Color Charting; Another Use for Excel

I saw a wonderful children's sweater design called "Crimson Toadstools" in the book Country Diary Book of Knitting by Annette Mitchell. I made a copy of the photo for my knitting ideas notebook, but returned the borrowed book without making a copy of the pattern. Squinting at the photo gave me a pretty good idea of how the color pattern was laid out, but I didn't want to take a chance with it. I remembered reading a post called My Super-Sophisticated Charting Software in the Wendy Knits blog wherein Wendy reveals that Microsoft Word and Microsoft Excel will both work for charting out designs, and so I began my big color charting adventure.

It turned out to be easy and fun, once I remembered that the cells needed to be resized. Knit stitches are twice as tall as they are wide, something I've only recently paid attention to. (If you want to download knitting-style graph paper, you can get some here). After a bit of fiddling around, I came up with the chart that you see above. Here is what the resulting sweater looks like so far. The actual colors didn't come out so well in the photo--they are more like what is in the color chart.