Knit Stitch Library

Collection Items

The items in this collection were chosen, hand-knit, and photographed by the creator of this collection. Because of this, all of the sample photographs shown are owned by the creator, but the stitches are public domain. and the stitches are public domain. All items in this collection have undergone slight enhancements, which are noted below.

Imaging Standards

These swatches were photographed using an iPhone on a flat background in natural lighting. The photos were then uploaded to a laptop, cropped to best show the pattern, and slightly edited to enhance color and display.

Metadata Standards

The metadata for this project was deliberately chosen and added to make this site very user-friendly and informative. Each item entry has various fields that have helpful or interesting information for the user. As a result of knitting stitches being a very detailed topic, the collection uses Dublin Core and original elements to best describe the content. The vocabularies used are also established, such as Library of Congress Subject Headings, as well as custom subject headings.

Below are the elements implemented in this site and their description within the context of this collection.

Dublin Core elements

Title - Required, 1 or more.

The title element is for the title or name of an item. In the case of this collection the main title is the most well-known name for a certain stitch, and if there are variant names the item has an additional title entry.

Example: Stitch: Moss Stitch, Also known as: Seed Stitch

Description - Required, 1.

Each item in this collection receives a description of the stitch pattern, possible projects to make with the stitch, or helpful tips.

Subject - Required, 1 or more.

All entries need to have correlating subjects ascribed to them to aid in searching and filtering.Some subject headings come from Library of Congress Subject Headings related to knitting, but the majority of them are custom for this collection.

Example: Knitted lace.

Coverage - Optional, 1 or more.

This field correlates to origin on some items in this collection. My hope was to give the origin location/region to certain knit stitches, but some of them don’t have a clear location attached to them so only a few items have this field..

Format - Required, 1.

In accordance with Collection Builder, each object is described with their format. In the case of this collection, the format for all objects is image/jpeg.

EducationLevel - Required, 1.

Each item in this collection gets a difficulty level attached to it to aid in search and filtering. .

Example: Beginner, Intermediate, Advanced..

## Custom Elements

Abbreviations - Required, 1 or more.

Because knitting patterns rely on various abbreviations of terms each pattern has the abbreviations listed before pattern instructions.

Example: k - Knit.

Special Instructions - Optional, 1 or more.

For patterns that have certain instructions that don’t relate to other stitches in the collection the entry will have special instructions to make certain stitches.

Example: Cornflower 1, Cornflower 2, Daisy, etc.

Pattern Instructions - Required, 1.

In order to make this an effective resource for those interested in knitting pattern instructions had to be added. Each item has information about the number of cast on stitches and instructions row by row.

Needle Size - Required, 1.

For each swatch made for the sample image the needle size used is listed under this element according to US size standards.

Yarn Weight - Required, 1.

For each swatch made for the sample image the yarn weight used it listed under this element.