When creating your own pattern, you sometimes have a picture or design that needs to be converted into a knitting chart in order to be useful as a final pattern. The inherent problem with creating knitting patterns from pictures or other printed material, is that knit stitches are not usually square, and hence cannot use straight grid/graph paper to create the charts accurately. For most common weights of yarn, the gauge of the knit stitches is wider than they are tall. This leads to the need for a landscape-oriented rectangular graph paper to do charting on.