Friday, June 01, 2007

Living on the Edge

Thank you all so much for the kind words! To show my appreciation, here are some current photos of the $1.50 Cardigan sleeves:


I am thouroughly amused by the stitch pattern so far, let's hope my facination lasts through two fronts and the back of this bad boy. Another thing I'm hoping will last is the yarn supply. I very rarely use the prescribed yarn for any given pattern, but lately I've been doing larger projects with rarer yarns, which makes for an utterly paranoid knitter. Let's go to the math portion of the blog, shall we?

Pattern calls for:

14 balls of yarn at 94 yards each = 1316 yards

I have:

8 balls of the discontinued Totem yarn at 164 yards each = 1312 yards

If you've all done your stashonomics homework, you'll note that, if my gauge is dead-on and I don't have any bad patches of yarn, I will be

4 yards short

I know that there should be a certain amount of yardage padding in the pattern, but if push comes to shove I may be forced to sew up the sweater with a different yarn.

Then, I'll go on to my next yardage nightmare: the Kyoto Bolero from Knit.1.

Pattern calls for:

6 hanks of yarn at 236 yards each = 1416 yards

I have:

320 grams of the precious Kyoto yarn at 2.2 yards each = 704 yards

I am going to add a new element to our studies now, the concept of doubled yarn. The pattern yarn calls for the yarn to be doubled, so we will only need half the yardage of our substitute yarn, which is not doubled. So, take that 1416, split it in half, and we now have 708 original yards, which leaves me... let's see...

4 yards short

Class dismissed.

1 comment:

Sidney said...

Actual yardage always varies. Be frugal with your cast-ons and pick up matching embroidery thread for the seams... or if you're really worried, trim the sleeves down a couple rows. 4 yards is nothing and patterns typically call for a little more than you'll need.