which_chick | Socktoberfest #7

You people are really not helping. At all.

I direct your eyes to Socktoberfest #4, where I say things like At 10 sts to the inch, a pattern of 82 sts is going to be about 8 1/4 inches around.

I also say my calves are about 14" around and (t)he swatch has 10 sts. to the inch.

Then I make the entirely WTF statement that I need about 68 more sts at the given gauge to go around my calves than exist in the design.

Nobody, it seems, is checking the damn math. Not even me.

Look. If the pattern has 82 stitches and I need 140 (10 stitches per inch x 14 inches) stitches, then I need to add (140-82) stitches, which comes to 58, not 68. Oops. The ONLY reason I did not cast on more stitches than I actually needed was that I did the algebra thing there with the equation to figure out how many stitches I needed. I know that this is the case because further along in my abuse of our fine system of numbers, I say More math-oriented readers than I am could have generated X (23) by subtracting 12 from 68 and dividing by two. In the reality-based world, no, they could not have. Normal people who take 12 from 68 and divide the result by 2 come up with 28. I'm apparently the only person who does it differently.

It would appear that I'm not particularly good at math. Math does not work at all if I do it as math. I have to actually write down the freaking equations and algebra my way to the bitter end. (This is why I've switched to asking the nice teller lady how much money is in my checking account -- it's a lot easier than trying to balance the damn checkbook.)

Anyway. Today's topic for discussion is How do you know when the ribbing is wide enough? Why is that the topic for discussion? Because that's where I am in my sock project. To make socks, I decide what pattern I'm going to ignore and pick out yarn and generate a gauge swatch or a reasonable fake and make with the handwaving and inaccurate math and cast on an appropriate number of stitches. I've done all of that already. The next order of business is determine how much ribbing is enough and proceed to generate that much..

Because I'm not using a pattern except as something I can hold my knitting up in front of and say things like, "La La La, I can't *hear* you!", I figured I'd give the more pattern-bound people a taste of the unbearable lightness of being over here on the more like guidelines side of the fence. The ribbing will be long enough to enclose the elastic I am going to use to hold up the socks. I have the elastic (leftover from the eyestrain purple socks) and I hold it up to the ribbing every so and when to see if the ribbing is long enough yet or not. If not, I keep knitting. It's anarchy over here, I tell you. Anarchy.