How we check charts
Every chart is read from a scan of the original book, then a person checks it against that scan, square by square, before it goes up.
Step by step
- Find the book. Scans of needlework books printed before 1931, from Internet Archive, HathiTrust and Project Gutenberg.
- Clean up the page. Yellowing, stains and uneven light come out first.
- Find the grid. The size of one square, and where the grid sits on the page.
- Read each square as stitched or empty, or dark, light or empty on two-shade charts.
- Redraw the chart from those readings.
- Check it. A person compares the new chart with the scan, square by square.
What else we check
- Mirror check. Most old motifs are symmetrical, so any square that differs from its mirror image gets a second look.
- Repeat check. On a border, every repeat should match. Comparing them shows up a smudge in any one copy.
- A second copy. Libraries often hold several scans of the same book, so a damaged page can be read from a better one.
- When in doubt, we skip it. A chart we can’t read with confidence doesn’t go up.
No AI
No AI patterns, no AI images, no AI clean-up of scans.
On every pattern page
Each pattern says which checks it passed and links to the scan it came from.