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?
