Redford, post 1

[janestarz]

After receiving my yarn I had to wait for Eisirt to get out of the house, although I did sneakily take his upper chest circumference while he was being distracted by talking with Kat. I am sooo smooth. Let's hope he doesn't make much of it...

So the yarn is gorgeous and as soon as he went to work on Saturday I could start the math. Of course, my usual cross-calculus doesn't quite add up. If you know anything of math you will see this is wrongity wrong.



This is because gauge is the number of stitches needed to get a certain size, 10 cm in the above example. More stitches per 10 cm means your stitches are smaller. It doesn't mean if you can wedge more stitches into 10 cm you will get a larger jumper.
I normally use cross-multiplication (kruislings vermenigvuldigen) to calculate percentages of ease, but it really doesn't work with gauge.
My first clue was when I cast on the first panel, it turned out to be smaller by a good couple of centimeters than intended -- thank goodness the pattern clearly states how wide each piece should be. As soon as I noticed, I climbed back on my calculator and rode into battle!

With gauge, you should take a completely different approach.
The first step is to find the finished measurements of the piece and the amount of ease your garment should have. If your intended knit-wear-target has a chest circumference of 100 cm, and there's 10 cm of ease, you should aim for the size on or around 110 cm.
But if your gauge not the same as the pattern -- and in this case, I am working with light fingering-weight yarn, so there's no way I can make the gauge of fingering-weight yarn -- there's math involved.

First, I calculated how many stitches the finished measurements would be, at the hand of their gauge.
If their gauge is 25 sts per 10 centimeters, that means you need 2,5 stitches per centimeter. For a 110 cm finished garment, they would need 110 x 2,5 sts = 275 stitches all around.
Then, I would take my own gauge and calculate how many centimeters those 275 stitches would make me. If my gauge were 27 sts per 10 centimeters, 275 stitches would only get me a circumference of 100 cm in the finished garment. (Math: 275 / 2.7 = 101 cm)

The short and non-mathematical: if you need MORE stitches to get 10 cm, your stitches are too small. Word.

I re-calculated every size to number of stitches in their gauge, and then divided them by my gauge to see which size I would need to knit to make things fit. My first calculations that were wrong and are forever to be mocked because of above picture, told me to make the second-smallest size. My new calculations came up with the second-largest size. Doh!



I have one skein from an odd dyebath and while the difference is truly minimal, I learned my lesson with the Harvest Cardigan. Yes, you will see the difference. So I cast on the side piece first, in hopefully the other dye bath -- it's very hard to spot! And because of the twisted selvedge on either side I can't blend the skeins, so I'm hoping I cast on from the right odd dye-bath skein.
Also, the first side panel is alllllmost done by now. Eisirt worked all weekend, which had me two full days and an evening for knitting.

Also, if a pattern states "First, purl one row to prevent the bottom hem from rolling, you can see it is a BIG fat lie.

Now I should really wrap this post up before Eisirt figures out what I'm doing. He came home as I was typing, and luckily all the pictures were already set up!