Sunday, September 29, 2013

There is a LOT of Math in Knitting

I have been cruising along on my niece's cowl, but there was some issues with the pattern.

There were two pattern repeats.  A small leaf pattern and a larger pattern I will call a fan.

When I started the cowl, I was reading the fan pattern as a 10 row repeat and the leaf a 15 row repeat.  

Mathematically, the patterns would match up every 30 rows, or every two leaves.

So I've been knitting happily along and then I'd find a leaf not matching up,so I would adjust the leaf to get back on track.

This was giving me large and small leaves; I wasn't digging that.  Further, I hadn't been doing the three stitch decrease correctly and had twisted veins on the leaves.

Then it hit me.  The fan had a 10 row repeat, and the leaf a 16 row repeat (counting all WS and RS rows), which has patterns meeting up every 80 rows.

So, last night, the cowl looked like this:

I reworked the pattern on graph paper, subtracted a row, a couple stitches, changed the order of the patterns and we are back in business.  

Had over 20 inches before I frogged it, and am sitting with 3 inches now.



I would not have been happy with the cowl, even if it is going to someone who wouldn't see the errors I had made.

2 comments:

Caffeine Girl said...

How frustrating! I hate it when I make silly math errors, which happens more than I'd like to admit! It looks like a gorgeous pattern, though.

FiberJewels said...

Thank you, Caffeine Girl -- it is turning out very nice. I am liking the changes I have made to the pattern. The issues would have never bothered the recipeient, but I had reached a point where I wasn't happy knitting it!