Knitting

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Pin of the Week: An Awesome Stitch Pattern Calculator

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stitch pattern calculatorIf you’re the kind of knitter who hates math — and I think that covers a lot of us! — you need to know about the Stitch Pattern Calculator from Laylock Knitwear Design.

This is a really simple, powerful concept. Just plug in the number of stitches the pattern repeat you want to use has and how many stitches you intend to cast on and it will tell you how many full repeats of the stitch pattern you can do and how many stitches you’ll have left over.

To test it I put in a pattern (totally made up) with an 8 plus 1 stitch repeat. I suggested I had 50 stitches, and the calculator told me I could work 6 repeats and would have one stitch left over.

Even better, it tells me I could use either 57 or 48 stitches and have no stitches left at the end, which is what you really need to know so you can adjust your pattern as needed.

So much easier than using a calculator!

Comments

  1. Hate math, so one of these would be a blessing. Would like to get
    updated on knitting and learn some of the new ways since I knit
    (knit and purl) but never learned to knit socks

  2. so for example: If I am knitting a fair isle chart, would I input my chart repeat and then add the beginning and ending row stitches?

  4. Hi, I have a question, if I do have extra stitches, and for some reason can’t exclude these stitches, how would I integrate these stitches into my pattern? For example, I want to use two different stitch patterns on the same project. One stitch pattern requires an odd number of stitches and the other requires an even number. Is there a way to reconcile the two? Thanks for your help!

  5. I would probably just work any extra stitches in Stockinette stitch at the edge of the work. If it’s only one stitch difference you could possibly alternate which side you do it on but I’d want to test it on a swatch to see how it looks before committing to that for a full project.

Have you read?

Knit a Leopard Print Shawl and Learn about Yarn Substitution

When I was looking around for free knitting patterns to share recently, I came across this fun leopard print wrap from Yarnspirations. 

This fun bulky wrap gives you tons of practice with instarsia and makes a bold statement while keeping you warm. It’s rated for intermediate knitters and the design is charted but pretty easy to follow. And it’s only 50 rows and worked in bulky yarn, so it wouldn’t even take that long to knit. (You can grab the free pattern from Yarnspirations.)

So what’s the problem? The yarn that the pattern calls for has been discontinued, and it’s not a yarn that a substitute for immediately springs to mind. 

The original yarn was Patons Alpaca Blend, a single ply bulky yarn that was a combination of acrylic, superwash wool, nylon and alpaca. 

My first thought was Lion Brand Hue + Me, which is an acrylic and wool blend, with two plies instead of a single. It looks like it has the colors you would need to make this fun shawl. 

But as I was thinking about it, I thought this would be a good opportunity to introduce you to YarnSub if you don’t already know about it. This website is a giant database of yarn that can consider the qualities of the yarn you want to substitute and offer potential substitutions. 

It’s not only thinking about yarn weight, like I was, but also fiber content, number of plies, gauge and even the difference in yardage between one ball and another. It even looks at the price and can be filtered by your price range or preferences about fiber content (if, say, you’re sensitive or allergic to wool, for example, or don’t want to you acrylic). 

When I plugged in Alpaca Blend, it gave me a lot of different options, though many of them were self-striping or multicolored, which wouldn’t work for this project, and I don’t see a way to filter for solid colors only. 

Still, it’s a good tool to give you some ideas you might not know about or might have forgotten about, and it tells you how the new yarn is similar to the old one and how it differs, allowing you to make smarter choices when substituting yarns. 

[Photo: Yarnspirations]