Math

I have a very, very special houseguest visiting next week. A guest SO nice, I said "very" twice. My guest room looks like a Jasminian Devil has been let loose in it. Which is actually *exactly* what happened.

It's a very nice guest room/office/stash den; there is an EXTREMELY comfortable bed (ask Mom or Dr. Gemma), a flat monitor hooked up to a DVD player and an Apple TV, a nightstand with speakers for your iPod and a little lamp to read by. Sounds idyllic, right?

There is also A LOT of wool in there, in its various forms. Like, enough wool to realize that the outside walls of the house aren't insulated. (This is exactly why we all need a million fleeces, by the way.) Enough to get me on "My Strange Addiction", or "Hoarders Lite". (Is there a "Hoarders Lite"?) It's all special and I NEED ALL OF IT.

Ahem.

I stashed with a purpose. I planned for my time home as an artist. And then I promptly lost my mojo.

So, here's a little math that has become increasingly apparent to me, in the form of a word problem:

If you buy ANY yarn/wool, and don't knit (or spin), the amount of stash GROWS.

Many of you, being intelligent people are saying, "Duh. You can do math, Jasmin."

Yes. Yes I can. The problem is that in my mind, I can knit a sweater in three days and spin a sweater's worth of wool in a week."

In theory. The problem is the application. Hopefully my Very Very special houseguest will find it in her heart to forgive me. And not take photographs of the room for blackmailing purposes.

Houston? We have sleeves!

I mentioned having to do a little math to make the body of the sweater work with the yarn that I had. I finished the body of the sweater on Monday night, which left me with no Olympic knitting until I did some math for the sleeves.

So, the process goes like this:

Step 1: Reverse the shaping on the sleeve so that I can knit it top-down, and to the right length.
Step 2: Check math with a calculator.
Step 3: Taking the gauge of the yarn in consideration, rewrite the sleeve with the appropriate number of sts/rows. Proportion is fun!
Step 4: Check math again.

This took maybe 15-20 mins, and then I got started on the sleeves. One night of knitting, two episodes of MI-5, and I'm down to just under the armhole (neck down, not bottom up). On both sleeves. Mom thinks I'll finish it by the end of the week.

I won't hold my breath.

The socks have landed

I got a phone call from TEMom. Evidently, someone sent her a generic looking package. With suspiciously neat handwriting. And a pair of handknit socks.
What I may have neglected to mention in the previous post is that TEMom is a recreational knitter. Meaning, of course, that she doesn't take her knitting as seriously as those of us who are true addicts. It also means that her projects take longer to finish, and thus, all knitting is perceived to be very time consuming.

Since we know that the corollary :

[Time] = [Love]

we can conclude that

Lots[Time] = Lots[Love]

TEMom couldn't stop raving about them. The label seems to have sealed the deal, with the care instructions, sizing, etc. I can now see the joy in knitting for knitters.

I *heart* Math!

It's true. Despite what I thought in high school, I'm pretty good at math. I discovered this when I was doing my internship at XRX three years ago- I was working on Module Magic, and actually REMEMBERED how to calculate the hypotenuse of a triangle (as well as a number of other geometric formulae).

I know a lot of women have "math phobias" or "math blocks", and I get it. From seventh grade through college, I thought I wasn't good at math. I got good grades, but I didn't *get* it, you know? Knitting is why I'm math confident. Since I've started using math in terms of knitting, I can do unit conversions in my head (usually), and can usually get a realistic grasp on a number of other things.

So, now I want to knit the Tilted Duster, and I had a (potentially) wicked awesome idea, involving math. I'll talk about it more if the math works in my favor.