One of the first things I disliked about hand knitting was the wordy patterns. I've been sewing since I was in middle school and sewing is a very visual art. It's easy to visualize how a garment will turn out by looking at patterns, and pattern instructions tend to be well illustrated. Knitting patterns, on the other hand use all kinds of cryptic abbreviations and the user is required to meticulously keep track of the location in the pattern, which is much easier said than done, especially considering one row could take me 20 minutes to knit. Lose your place in the pattern, and experience the joy of ripping back, assuming you actually CAN find where you deviated. And then there's the question of getting all the stitches back on a needle without dropping any. Fun.
If you don't have a charting device, you'll still be using a wordy pattern with a knitting machine; it's just easier to keep up with your progress because machine knitting is orders of magnitude faster than hand knitting. You still have to count the number of rows between increases and decreases and shape armholes on certain rows, etc. I have to do this when I use my Bond and it's still icky.
Enter the knit contour. It is built into some machines and is an external attachment on others. This is a wonderful contraption that looks like a typewriter drum and advances an outline of your garment as you move the carriage. You put a scale drawing of your garment into it like you would put paper in a typewriter and dial in your row gauge. It looks like this:
Other people have written articles that explain the principal much better than I can, and there are videos of people demonstrating it (susyranner.blogspot.com) but the basic idea is that because it advances at the same pace and row gauge as your knitting, there is no counting and you never lose your place! If you can draw something, you can knit it without having to devise a pattern first. The little ruler at the bottom of my pattern in the photo is for stitch size. The numbers on the scale tell you what needle you should be on. If you're using a half pattern, then your left and right end needles should be the same number as the pattern indicates on the scale. As the garment outline changes, you increase or decrease as necessary to make your end needles correspond to the scale. You determine your stitch and row gauge by knitting a swatch of a specified size in your stitch pattern and measuring between two points with a special ruler. Then you select the stitch scale that matches your gauge and put it into a little holder on the front of the drum and set row gauge by adjusting a dial on the contour. All this stuff will be included with your knit contour (if you're lucky--I wasn't). So there's no counting of stitches and rows, either! It's all streamlined and easy! Not only that, but if you aren't satisfied with your finished garment, alterations are as simple as drawing new seamlines on your contour pattern. No recalculating necessary.
To make the pattern in the photo above, I scaled up a schematic for a hand knitting pattern. It is half of actual size, however, because my contour is half scale. Some are full scale. I drew the basic outlines in ink, using the largest neckline I thought I would ever wear. Then I drew another neckline in pencil that is smaller and only applies to the garment I'm knitting right now. I can erase it the next time I use this pattern, I can change the side seam to add ease, change the ribbing to a hem, make fitting adjustments to correct badly placed seams, etc. All kinds of changes are possible from this one pattern.
If you're a cut-and-sew knitter, using a pattern in the contour will tell you exactly how big your blank needs to be so that you don't waste more yarn than necessary.
