As say not Do July 17, 2012

This summer has been a whirlwind thus far!

Lot’s of traveling, presenting, organizing, writing and sampling…

Add a heaping dose of torrid weather, and, maybe, just maybe, I have SOME kind of excuse for not being finished with this:

Here’s my black cotton CINNIE that I started few weeks ago.

Now, if you have the pattern, you might notice there’s something a little screwy with mine. :)

All was going really well until I started to realize something potentially embarrassing: either I’d lost a ball of yarn or horrors of horrors!

I didn’t get enough to make the project!

It would’ve been perfect to blame this discombobulation on the 100+ degree temperatures, day-after-day of screaming weather, here in the Big Windy, but no.

After a thorough hunt around the hut, and a look-up of the original sales receipt, it was all me. I simply didn’t read my own directions!

I was unoriginally (and pathetically), in a word: short.

Now comes the part that I hope you will always choose to miss: trying to rationalize HOW one can squeeze it out of what’s on hand ANY WAY.

Sidebar: this is one of the top 5 support email requests that land in my mailbox. Usually it’s fine – the knitter is off by a few yards and I can suggest a couple of quick tweaks to make it fly.

But this?

Witness my denial: this pattern includes top down sleeves. That means you can stop at any old point that you like. So, instead of following the pattern to the sleeve hem, in my confabulated state, I decided to go as far as the underarm joins, then try for the win.

The sleeve stitches were put on scrap yarn and the Body of the sweater was then next in line.

Pretzel Logic or Clown Knitting?: I figured if I could make this about an inch shorter (typical tweak to stretch low yardage) I could appraise what yarn was left to finish.

Now you can do this a few ways, but I like to weigh things.

I have a postal scale and can measure the ounces left in a partial ball pretty quickly.

Then, using the yardage on the ball band one can do some basic algebra (I love math!!) and get it going.

For instance, here’s the equation:
 
135 yds per full ball divided by 1.75 oz (in 50g) = X (where X is the unknown leftover yardage) divided by 1 oz (example weight)
 
Solving the equation for X, in this example, means there’s about 77 yds left.

And sadly, I discovered, that even with this algorithmic magic, I was not going to be able to pull it off.

SO: I decided to do what I should’ve done to begin with: get on the phone and order more yarn!

AND: get an extra ball, because now, I’m all about making some longer sleeves…