Transformation of a bias ground

In literature or workshops, you may find patterns like 3086 of “Gründe mit System” by Uta Ulrich, similar to F4 (though no corner pins are used) in the gallery created from the sampler of mrs Whiting. See also the MAE-gf gallery.

GroundForge does not know how to draw pins, so stitch-pin-stitch becomes a kind of short plait. Hence, the first transformation step is drawing straight lines from pin to pin.

GroundForge also wants stitches at grid positions. So we move some intersections to the nearest grid position.

An optional step is to squeeze the pattern to make it more compact.

So far the preparations. Now we are ready to go to GroundForge: encode the pattern and assign stitches.

For F4 that are cloth stitches and winkie pins. In this case, the winkie pin is: cloth stitch, twist one pair twice around a pin, cloth stitch. Remember that GroundForge does not draw pins and treats the winkie pin as a single stitch.

This thread diagram is the result, please click the wand for the thread diagram after following the link.

Another option is to interpret the pair diagram as thread diagram. A single unit of the ground uses four pairs. So we need only one stitch of four threaads: clcrct. Again: click the wand for the thread digarm. We call this approach the droste technique.