We have a guest post for you today from Joeli of www.joelicreates.com.
“In this post we are going to talk about the key and different ways you might want to edit this key.
The first thing you might want to do is change one of the entries.
I previously showed you in the video about customising your stitch library how you can permanently change what shows up here, but there are plenty of times where you just might want a one-off change. To do that you just move your mouse cursor over to the text and if you click once and then click again you can edit the text.
The next you might want to do is change the order of the symbols in the key.
When your stitches show up in the key they show up in the order that you put them in the chart, but you might wish to have them appear in different order.
You can just click on the square, and then you can drag it to a new spot and it reorders the list.
The other thing you can do is change the layout of the key.
If you go to the top menu, and you select key and then edit key properties, you’ll see that you can also change the key title there.
You can also change the key to appear as a single row or you could have multiple columns. You can select the number of columns, you can choose whether to make them equal width or not, and then that’s what that looks like.
By default the key is on the right hand side of all the charts but you might want to put your key in a different placement.
First click outside of the key, and you’ll see the cursor changes to the crosshairs and gives you this selection tool. If you just select all of the key — click and hold down — and you’ll be able to drag it and then you can move it. The new position is represented in the screenshot by the grey box.
Now let’s talk about exporting the just the key on its own.
What you want to do is use the select tool and hit Select Key and then when you export as an image it’s only going to export what we selected. This is really useful if you need to put the key in multiple places on your pattern or if you want a little bit more control of where things go in your pattern and not just use the layout that Stitchmastery gives you.
So those were a few different ways that you can customise the key in Stitchmastery. I hope you found this helpful.”
Is there a way to color a key entry such that all the stitches of that symbol are colored the same in the chart instead of have just a color swatch which is then named to correspond with a stitch key. Eg. Want all 1/1 RC to be yellow in Chart. Key shows stitch symbol with definition and a yellow symbol that can be named. Would like stitch symbol to be colored yellow thereby only 1 entry in the key.
Hello, yes this is possible. You will need to have set up your own User Stitch Library – this video goes through setting that up, if you haven’t got one already: https://youtu.be/Jndie9gVRnk
Then go to Tools, Preferences, Stitch Libraries and open your one. Chose the 1/1 RC cable stitch and click Duplicate (if you would like to have a white background version available in future) or Edit (if you will always want them to be yellow). Click Edit Appearance in the dialog that opens, and at the top you’ll see an option for Background Colour. This is set as “None (takes colour from yarn)” as default but uncheck that box, and click on the white rectangle to choose a new colour. Click ok, and ok for the Edit Stitch dialog, and ok to close back to your chart.
The final step is always to go to Diagram, Edit Diagram Properties, and choose your updated user stitch library under the under the Stitch Library tab, and check the “Refresh text in key” box. If you chose to edit the original 1/1 RC symbol, the new colour + updated symbol will replace in your key. If you’ve chosen to duplicate the stitch instead, you’ll need to add it to your chart to replace the original 1/1 RC.
Hope that helps but please let me know if I can clarify anything with screenshots. Also this video shows the customising appearance procedure but it doesn’t include the colour changing options – we’ll make a weekly tip about that soon! https://youtu.be/5jxkLtEzt4g
Is there a way to change the box outline of the key to black or another color?
Hello, do you mean the outline of the individual symbols? This matches the colour of your chart grid, which you can change by opening Diagram, Edit Diagram Properties and then the drop-down arrow for Grid. If you mean the selection outline around the whole of the key when you select it, then it is not possible to change that colour.