Saturday, October 27

Hairy Math

The Large Rectangle in leaf and trellis pattern with trellis border in Victorian Lace Today calls for 1200 yards of fine weight yarn.

Many people have found that they require more yarn than called for in VLT patterns.

I have three skeins of a fine weight Domy Heather, 100 grams, 475 yards each. A total of 1425 yards, 19% more than the requirements from the pattern.

Will I have enough?

You can skip the math and go right to the conclusions if you wish.

The main body is 94 stitches wide. 30 pattern repeats, 16 rows per repeat. Plus 5 set-up rows.

The border has an 18 row pattern repeat. There are 24 repeats on the long sides, 9 repeats on the short sides and 4 repeats at each corner.

The number of stitches in each row of the border varies, from 19 to 24, averaging 21.9 stitches per row. Not including the spit splicing, the ends woven in or the grafting of 20 stitches to finish the shawl:

Total number of stitches in shawl is 77,914

94 x 16 x 30 + 5 x 94 + 18 x 21.9(48 + 18 + 16) = 77,914

My first skein got me exactly 17 pattern repeats (plus 4 initial rows).

17 x 16 x 94 + 94 x 4 = 25,944

Therefore, I have enough yarn for 77,832 stitches.

25,944 x 3 = 77,832


I am 82 stitches short on yarn. But the border is done on smaller needles. I will optimistically knit on.

6 comments:

Anonymous said...

Dorothy... OH MY! Now that's a lot of numbers... :-) I wish you luck...

Unknown said...

Hi Sis,

I just found a photo of this item - gourgeous. You have got me thinking about giving knitting another try.

Maggie

Lindy said...

Wow. I think my brain just screamed. I'm sure you'll have enough yarn!

Kathleen said...

Ok... math overload! :)

Hope you'll have enough when the stitches get a bit smaller.

Anonymous said...

Isn't math a handy thing to have around? About that 82 stitch shortfall, how about just omitting every 914th stitch? (77,914 / 82 = 914.17)

You're welcome ;-)

Anonymous said...

Wow, what a geek! I mean, I'm a math librarian, and I would've just guessed.