Lobolita

Since the Great Third Trimester Stomach Flu has got me pretty much glued to the couch, this has become a knitting blog for the time being. Forgive me if I’m not much inclined to bake, paint murals in the bathroom, or crawl around cutting out sewing pattern pieces at the moment. But the crafting continues.

Foolishly, rather than finishing weaving in the ends of the Drops cardigan, I have started another sweater for Tim. Coming in high off the success of the last sweater, I decided to try again, this time generating a classic, top-down raglan using the percentage system. To get my numbers, I made a spreadsheet. I’ll post the real file of this after I’ve played with it a bit more.

What I did was make a gague swatch with my yarn (more on the yarn later) and put the gague into the spreadsheet as stitches per inch. Since I knew I wanted a 38″ chest measurement, I made a list of the percentages given by Zimmerman, then created formulas that would give me the correct number of stitches at any given point, such as neck, upper arm, wrist, chest, etc. Then, I decided how many to cast on for my v-neck raglan using the funny cross-shaped set of numbers at the bottom, and took off in 4×2 rib. It’s pretty easy, especially since Excel does the math for me. I may have gotten a little carried away by this, since I dragged the formula boxes out to figure numbers for sizes from 36″ to 54″. Not that I will ever knit a 54″ sweater, but someone else might. The cool thing is that if I want to make another sweater using the same spreadsheet, all I would have to do is change the number in the gague box, and all the other numbers would change along with it.

There are various websites out there that will generate a raglan pattern automatically, but I prefer to see the nuts and bolts of the math myself, so that I can feel confident fudging the numbers where I need to to make them fit into the stitch pattern. I can also add measurements directly into the spreadsheet wherever I want them, and make adjustments manually as I go, rather than relying on somebody else’s program. For instance, I added a line for waist shaping, even though Tim doesn’t need it, so that I could use the same spreadsheet for a sweater for myself…which I may or may not have cast on for as well.