[NFB-Krafters-Korner] Latch Hook from Rugsmith Art

[jean.e.menzies at gmail.com]

Accessible Latch Hook Patterns 

First, some background

Rugsmith Art is a public Facebook page devoted to latch hook designs. Eric,
the designer, publishes his patterns for download on this page. He has
recently learned that blind people do latch hook, and is now putting better
descriptions on his posts. Yay! I gather his designs are gorgeous. 

The designs are made with free web-based software called Grid Designer.
Anyone can use this software to create all kinds of craft patterns. The
creator of Grid Designer is Agnes Freese of Freese-Works.com 
https://www.freese-works.com/
Agnes Freese also has three accessible latch hook patterns on her site. 

Rugsmith Art is on Facebook at: 
https://www.facebook.com/p/Rugsmith-Art-100093140057930/

As mentioned, he has almost 70 accessible designs there so far, and puts new
ones up very often. Under the posts where he has posted patterns, there is a
link that reads: 
Grid Designer

This is actually the image for the pattern. If you have a way to run AI on
this image link, you will get a description of the pattern. AI can be a bit
suspect at times, but it will help you know more about a pattern. AI will
get better, but it's what we have right now. 

Press enter on this link, and you will be in a window telling you that a
pattern is being shared with you. Note that the title of the pattern is at
the top, so take note of it for later. 

Click on the link that says 
Load as Project

Now you are given the message: 
A project has been shared with you. Click Load to load your copy of the
project.
Press Enter on the Load button. 

This launches the pattern in Grid Designer. A sighted person could change
the pattern or do whatever they might like to it here, but that's not for
us. (wink). 
Just know that you are free to change or have someone change the pattern
here if you like. 

The second line of this window says No Project Name and then tells you the
columns and rows for the pattern. Example: 140 columns x 200 rows. So you
can know the size from that.

Three or four lines down is a Project button. 
Click the Project button to open a menu of choices. 
I often find Jaws slow to respond, and it sometimes takes a number of tries
for this button to open the menu. Perhaps things are happening in the
background, I don't know. 

Once it opens, you can arrow down through the Project Options until you get
to Download. 
Press Enter on Download. 
You are now prompted whether or not to continue. 
Choose Yes. 

Leave all of the download options at their defaults. Go to the bottom of the
page and find the Download button and press Enter. 
Now move across until you find the Download xlxs button and press enter. 

Ah, if you took note of the name of the pattern, now go to your downloads
folder and rename it. It will download with a very obscure name of letters
and symbols. 

Now you can open the file in Excel. The first worksheet is the yarn and
color key. Each color is given a letter. 

The second worksheet in the file is the pattern. Like any pattern grid, I
believe Row 1 of the pattern is the bottom row of the spreadsheet. Each cell
is one latch hook stitch or color and is shown by its corresponding letter. 

Once you enable editing for the file, you can copy it into Word for editing.
Paste into Word as unformatted text using Paste Special. 

Each stitch letter is now separated by a tab symbol. 
Adding row numbers, counting and converting into text with search and
replace is now however you prefer to do that. 

Hope this helps. I've spent a number of days running AI on all the patterns
and downloading them into my saved files. It's so nice to now have some
independent choice for my next latch hook projects. 

Jean