Make your own knitting motif

Hey does my blog take a really long time to load? I'd love to hear back if it does. I realized most of my posts are picture heavy and I'm wondering if that's causing my blog to load slowly.

Now on to the, hopefully not so picture heavy, blog post. I've been knitting so much with silk I decided I need a change and I also need to get started on my fall and winter knitting. My little one loves to wear stuff I knit for him and I also want to bust my stash. So I found some acrylic yarn in there- yeah I've no idea when I bought "acrylic". I'm a bit of a yarn snob now, but not enough to let all the synthetic yarn in my stash go waste. He wanted a "Rocket ship" on his sweater. So hunted down some pictures of rockets online. Zeroed in on this one. This site has an amazing number of pictures you can download for free for personal use. And I changed the colors, took off one of the wings, simplified the flame and this is how it looks now.

Now to convert this into a chart for Intarsia knitting. I found this amazing online tool that does it, for free too - KnitPro.

Now the only problem with this is that everyone's knitting gauge is different. And though this charting tool has rectangles instead of squares to accomodate for the fact that knitting stitches are longer and narrower, I'm not sure how it guarantees that the proportion is right.

My gauge is 14 sts X 20 rows for 3"X 3" square. So that makes the stitch size = 0.21"X0.15". Another person's gauge might be different. So the same motif will end up looking different for different gauges. Unfortunately, I learnt this after knitting a part of the motif and it looks skewed right now. I'm going to continue and if it does look skewed, and it can't be fixed with duplicate stitch, I will rip it and do over. I'll make my own graph paper this time using a spreadsheet with the right proportions.

See how the flame is not symmetrical in the sweater below where as it IS in the picture above?

EDITED: Fixed the problem! Knitpro takes care of the fact that stitches are actually wider than longer and I'd earlier used the portrait mode on knitpro. I used the landscape mode and it fixed the problem! 

Sigh! Apart from all this blue going on here with my knitting, I've listed this new Banana Fiber yarn, in a beautiful blue colorway. (Not a great picture but, pssst... I've ordered a new lightbox for taking better pictures of my yarn).

Blue Skies, Banana fiber yarn

Happy crafting!

Edited to add accurate gauge.