…sometimes you have to geek it into submission!
Do you ever get that panicky feeling when you’re working on a knitting project? Is the hat going to fit? Have I got enough yarn? Is the scarf going to be long enough? Sometimes a project just messes with your mind, and you just feel like it’s not going to be right.
Sometimes that voice inside is the voice of reason! You need to listen to it, and recheck your gauge. Or perhaps block the sweater, pop it on some waste yarn and try it on. And just sometimes, it’s a feature of the construction that makes it hard to know for sure whether things are going to turn out OK or not.
I’m in that second position with my Parallelogram Wrap. I fell in love with the samples I tried on when I was at Rhinebeck with Team MDK. I had the kit at home just waiting for me to cast on, so almost as soon as I had come in the door and dropped my suitcase, I dived into the stash, pulled out the yarn, and found Field Guide No. 5 Sequences in my bookcase. I took the esteemed advice of Cristina, who suggested casting on more stitches than in the pattern, and off I sailed…
Oh my! The knitting of this is JUST what cosy evenings require. It’s a very simple knit-purl pattern with a clever twist that makes it absolutely gorgeous. Sequence knitting in general is like this. Very simple stitch patterns that look really complex because of the way that they are applied. If you haven’t tried sequence knitting, I really can’t recommend it highly enough. It’s perfect for newer knitters and the more experienced! Cecelia Campochiaro wrote a magnificent tome on Sequence Knitting, and you can get a summary version in the wonderful MDK Field Guide No. 5, which contains this parallelogram scarf or wrap pattern as well as 3 other clever sequence knits.
But as I have knitted along on this lovely wrap, I have been plagued with doubt about whether it would turn out big enough to wrap comfortably around my neck. I am a serial project tracker. I love to work out how much of a project I have completed and update the percentage bar on my Ravelry project page. Yes I am an utter GEEK and hopefully it’s one of the things you like about me. I like it about me! But sometimes it gets me in to trouble… I weighed the balls of unknitted yarn, and I had used 25%. But my knitted fabric seemed so small. It didn’t seem possible that if I continued and made it four times larger, that it would turn out big enough. I contemplated ripping it out and casting on fewer stitches.
I’ve now worked further on and used 30% of my yarn and I’ve worked out why this project is making me feel so uncertain… I had a lightbulb moment.
It’s because it is knitted on the bias. So the row depth of the project is that length that is perpendicular to the cast-on edge. My cast-on edge measures 55cm and the row depth is now 23cm. Adding another 70% to the row depth only takes it to 76.5cm, which isn’t enough for a good sized scarf. And this is what was making me feel so uncertain. I knew it wasn’t going to be long enough in that dimension.
The good news is that the row depth isn’t the dimension that matters! I think we need a diagram here to explain what I mean…
This is a line drawing of the section I’ve knitted, with rough measurements added. The normal dimension for the growth of a scarf is the row depth, which is the distance shown by the arrow saying 23cm. It’s not very deep, even though I’ve already worked through 30% of the available yarn. You can perhaps see why I had that irritating feeling of worry about how big it would end up…
But in reality, that 23cm is pretty much irrelevant, because you wear this wrap with the diagonal length wrapped around your neck. So as it stands, the length is actually 95cm. Not long enough yet! But not so worryingly short. Ever since I realised what it was that was bothering me, I’ve been itching to open up Illustrator and draw a diagram to reassure myself of the finished size of my wrap. So here it is!
Based on working another 60% of the yarn (two more sections the same size as the one I’ve already worked) I made this picture. By the magic of maths, and specifically Pythagorus’ Theory, I have calculated that my finished wrap will have a length of…
…180cm
Ta da! And 180cm is absolutely fine for a beautiful cosy wrap.
Thank goodness for that! Maths to the rescue!
Has your knitting ever had you worried like that?
For the record, I worked out the red diagonal by calculating the total horizontal width (55+37+37+37) and the total vertical depth (23+23+23). That gave a width of 166cm and a height of 69cm. So to calculate the diagonal red arrow, you square both the width and height, add them together and then do the square root of the answer. Which gave me approximately 180cm. And with the last 10% of yarn used, my wrap will be a bit longer again.
If you’d like to join me in some sequence knitting, then grab a copy of Field Guide No. 5 and cast on! I’m also taking part in the MDKGiftalong happening over on Instagram, so do join me!