Monday, June 26, 2006

Yikes! Math problems!

I've been using the shawl percentage calculator. Um, ok. I've done three full repeats of rows 19-42, plus 9 more rows. So I've worked 123 rows of the shawl. The calculator tells me that I've done 26.9% of the shawl. Depressing, but whatever.

So I went to my handy dandy scale and weighed my yarn. I've used 34g of the 50g ball of Misti Alpaca laceweight. That's 34% of my yarn, and I've only done 26.9% of my shawl. That's a big fat, ugly problem. Especially considering that I ordered it online and the chances of getting the same dyelot are probably like nil.

Even if I take out a full repeat of the five, I'm still cutting it way too close. I'll have used 34% of my yarn and only done 33% of my shawl. What if I find a knot? What if I have some other sort of colossal screw up? I am one unhappy camper!

ETA: Shoot I miscounted the rows. I'm even worse off than I thought.

5 comments:

knitbysue said...

Oooh, I hate worrying about whether I have enough yarn or not.How long ago did you purchase the yarn? Whatever you do don't assume you can't find a matching dyelot.
I bought some Kidsilk Haze last fall on Ebay from a seller in Great Britan. I finally decided what to make with it and realized I need two more skeins. I started e-mailing Ebay sellers (who had posted that color yarn) and on-line yarn shops asking if they had that dye lot. Believe it or not an on-line store in Minnesota did have that dye lot.
So, in my opinion you should at least give it a try.
If you do have to finish the shawl with another dye lot consider starting the edging doing alternating rows of dyelots. So you would have two skeins of yarn attached (one of each dyelot). You knit back and forth with one yarn (i.e. two rows) , then drop it and pick up the other dyelot and knit 2 rows with the second dye lot. If you have enough of the old dye lot to knit the edging portion alternating dye lots I bet no one will ever see the different dyelot in there.

Anonymous said...

Another idea is that you can do the lace charts in an alternate color -- someone earlier had a little dyelot issue and did the lace chart in a darker shade and it turned out wonderfully.

Good luck

Kate A. said...

Yes, exactly - look at the edge of Merlin the Cat's - doing the last few rows in a slightly darker dyelot now sounds like a really cool design element to me...

Susannah said...

You're still in the eyelet rows, right? Echoing the "try a contrasting or complementing color" advice (I ran into this problem too and am now running on hope alone :P), maybe you could make kind of a gradual color change through one or more of the "levels" of the Chart 2-4 patterns. That could produce a great sort of ombre look.

Good luck!

gray la gran said...

i'm using misti alpaca lace wt. too. what color are you using? my LYS carries it too. maybe we can find you some more :)