Sunday, February 28, 2016

Ombrelieveable!

As you may have gleaned from a previous post, I've got a zazzy ombre handpainted shawl on the needles...
 
 and I forgot to weigh the yarn before I started, which in my world means there is no way for me to tell how much yarn is getting used.  My evolution as a knitter has led me in a very spreadsheet-and-scale-based direction; for someone who doesn't like math very much, I tend to depend on it in my crafting, even when faced with harsh non-theoretical realities (I'm looking at you, swatches, you lying liar liefaces).

Generally I have a spreadsheet, and in that spreadsheet I precisely estimate the total stitch count for the project and set it up to automatically calculate completion percentages; I can then weigh the remaining yarn as I go to evaluate and figure out oh, I have used 50% of my yarn to complete 75% of the estimated total, I can make the shawl bigger than originally planned.

But without that system?
Flying blind!  Who even knows?  Magic!  Unicorns are real!

The yarn arrived already caked up and pretty:
More art than science!
so in the face of my poor planning, I absolutely stabbed a guess that each color segment was roughly a third of the yarn...

Turns out: not true.  I ran out earlier than budgeted and skipped straight from 86% done to OOPS BINDING OFF NOW:
Thank goodness I found Jennifer Dassau's tricks for predicting how much yarn one will need for a bindoff row.  Two inches left at the end.

Anybody have a middle ground for estimating yardage, some reckoning midway between vanilla computation and a reckless shot in the dark?

Sunday, February 21, 2016

Seams Like It Will Never End

I started a crocheted "granny pixel" blanket in March 2015, making tiny tiny proto-granny squares for  eventual assembly into an 8-bit rendering of an anime character...
I'm only 46% finished with the blanket right now.
Almost a year later.  Yeah.

My friend Honeyspoon and I had a discussion last year about the merits of seaming-as-you-go for a giant project like this one, and I still believe that biting off small chunks of the finishing work is preferable to trying to do it all at once at the end...  but sheesh, is it tedious.

This morning, I added lots more squares to the evergrowing mass of pixels, and what it amounts to is this:
his hair. is ALMOST. done.


AND his body looks like a coral reef:



It is a bit exciting to see the thumbnail of the photo and immediately see the resemblance to the original inspiration, a fuse bead creation by Etsy's .  So I dunno.  I really really want to give this to its recipient, so right now that's my only motivation.