May 18

I am working steadily on the lockdown blanket, and it has been growing apace. (Well, we might need to define "apace" loosely for the purposes of this post.) 

Two weeks ago:

And here's tonight's version:

Here, let me show you the couch for scale:

I want it to be big enough to wrap up in on a chilly winter day, so I have quite a bit more knitting to do. It is a hefty thing-- it will probably weigh three pounds when I am done with it. 

If you are able to zoom in on the couch picture (it is a sign of the times that I had to go back and un-capitalize "zoom"), you might be able to see a notebook page with a column of numbers and a graph. I was trying to figure out how the math works for stitch counts per square based on starting side length. Almost all of the squares in this blanket are mitered, so if I pick up 40 stitches on one side of the square, the first two rows will each be 79 stitches long (40 on the first side + 1 center stitch + 40 on the second side - 2 stitches consumed in the double decrease) and the next two will each be 77 stitches long.

I am mostly using up odds and ends of worsted- and Aran-weight yarn for this project, though I seem to be constitutionally incapable of getting through any project designed to use up leftovers without buying a little more yarn. The result of using odds and ends of yarn to knit up squares of varying size? A lot of yarn chicken. "Sure," I think to myself, "I can knit a 25-stitch square with this blob of yarn. Looks about right." And you know, sometimes I'm exactly right. But sometimes I'm biting my nails. WILL I MAKE IT? WILL I HAVE TO KNIT THE LAST ROWS OF THIS SQUARE IN A DIFFERENT COLOR? CAN YOU STAND THE SUSPENSE? 

Math to the rescue: it only took a few minutes of looking at the numbers to see that it was a quadratic function, and a few minutes more to figure out the details: if I cast on x stitches per side, the square will eventually contain 2x²-1 stitches. This way, see, I can knit up a quick 50 stitches and chuck them on the scale, and I can tell in advance whether I have enough yarn to finish the square I'm planning. 

...I am suddenly and self-consciously aware that this is a super SUPER niche post, and that the Venn diagram of "people who sketch out quadratic functions in their bullet journals" and "people who like to read knitting posts" might look like this:

So! Happy reading! If I were not in the middle of a May blogging streak this post would go straight into drafts, but here we are.