Coming Soon, to an App Store near you

This weekend, I’m teaching at Vogue Knitting Live Pasadena (will I see you here?). So I’ve traded my barely-there crocuses and thinking-about-budding trees for the relatively lush Southern California landscape.

These teaching weekends are wonderful and frenetic and jam-packed. And some of the best things I’ve done have been born from spending a few hours getting personal with a couple dozen knitters. It’s especially wonderful to be able to get a sense of where knitters get hung up – their descriptions of that point where they just decided to give up, and knit something else. Or put down their knitting entirely.

As some of you may know, but many probably don’t, before I quit my day job to launch and run this small business, I worked in tech for more than 15 years.

…Actually, I should say I worked only in tech for that time, pursuing knitting as an ever-growing hobby and then side business. Because in this new phase of my life, I get to combine those passions. I still work in tech – CustomFit makes us a small tech company, even if we don’t look like one in some ways – but the blending of my passion for knitting and my understanding of what can be solved with computers is more personally rewarding than anything else I’ve done.

Into every knitter’s life, a little math must fall.

It’s a fact, even if you’re knitting a scarf or baby blanket. And even if math doesn’t make you shudder, your hobby isn’t math, it’s knitting.

As someone who has been solving problems with computers for decades, it gives me great pleasure to be able to take some of the pencil-and-paper out of that math, and help knitters spend more time knitting, and less time calculating.

Soon, in the Apple App Store**, you’ll be able to get another tool in that arsenal:

kt-1-help

The Knitter’s Toolbox is exactly what the picture says – an app we’ve written that contains four super-useful, general-purpose knitting calculators:

  • A buttonhole spacer, which will space a number of buttons easily over a number of stitches;
  • A multi-purpose gauge widget, which will take any two of the following, and tell you what the third must be: row/stitch gauge, row/stitch count, and length;
  • A shaping placer, which will tell you how you must space your increases or decreases to get as smooth a line of shaping as possible while keeping the number of “even” rows the same;
  • A pick-up calculator, which will tell you not only the total number of stitches to pick up along a vertical edge, but what that translates into as a ratio.

Want to see it in action? I made a short video:

Naturally, I’m crazy excited about this. I hope you will be too. Over the coming weeks, I’ll be sharing some videos on how to use Knitter’s Toolbox to make your knitting life easier, and we’ll definitely let you know when release date comes, too!

**(In the interest of transparency: Yes, for the moment the app will only be available on Apple devices. We absolutely plan to make an Android version too – it just isn’t as simple as clicking a “make it available everywhere!” button. We’ll need to rewrite the whole thing from scratch to support Android. It’s in our plans, but since we’re a one-developer shop, and CustomFit will need a little attention first, I can’t promise a specific timeline yet.)

But I felt like VKL was the perfect weekend to let you know about it, since the app grew directly out of me being able to sit with knitters, and ask them about their least favorite parts of knitting.

Happy weekend to you & yours!

–Amy

29 thoughts on “Coming Soon, to an App Store near you

  1. Thank you for the clarification about Android. I’ll try to be patient! 😉

  2. Amy,

    The app looks great and I am looking forward to be able to try it out. Have a great time in the green of California and safe travels!

    Pat

  3. What a great idea! Love it.

  4. Where is the link for the video?

    1. Never mind. Obviously an issue on my end.

  5. My iPhone and iPad are ready and waiting. Math is definitely my least favorite part of knitting.
    Thank you!

  6. This is great! I have been turning to my husband for years and saying, “I have this many stitches and need to decrease this much, how many and how frequently do I need to do this?”. Lucky for me he has a weird math brain, but it will be nice to have a back up for when he’s not home!!

  7. Looks like you nailed it! Can not wait for the app!

  8. Thanks for not forgetting us Android folks! I look forward to it.

  9. Cool!! Can’t wait 🙂

  10. I love knitting apps. Looking forward to it!

  11. Very cool! Kudos!

  12. It love that you are applying technology to this age old craft. Cheers to you!

  13. Amy, you are crazy smart!!! Thank you!!!!!

  14. One thing thst always trips me me up : Finishing the ribbing at the start of a sweater and being told to “increase evenly across the row”. And then lists,the number of stitches I should have. Not as much of a problem in more recent patterns, but it was all over the place when I started knitting,

    So glad you’ll have the picking up stitches! I always pick up too many, or it’s unbalanced,

  15. I cannot wait for this app to be available! Thank you for working so hard so that we don’t have to!

  16. And for those of us still in the previous century with a land line, will there be something for the pc? It might be interesting to see if there are others without iphones or techie stuff!

  17. Thanks for thinking of the Android users. We’re used to being patient! 🙂

  18. Holy crap! words cannot express how excited I am for this app!

  19. The app looks great. I look forward to being able to use it.

  20. The app sounds absolutely great.

    Just one thing, it isn’t Math(s), it’s Arithmetic. It just involves a few numbers, not complex formulae and letters from at least two different alphabets!

  21. Is there a way to be notified when the app is available?

    1. We’ll let you know on the blog!

  22. This app looks genius. I will buy this as soon as it appears on the android platform. Congratulations on such smart thinking and sharp skills.

  23. I am buying this the second it comes out. Yay!!! Great idea!!!

  24. The App sounds fabulous and I’ll happily wait for theAndroid version.

  25. What will the price be?

  26. […] Amy Herzog is taking her genius and making it available as a smartphone with her Knitter’s Toolbox app. […]

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