Cheat Sheet for Stripey Things

As you could see in my felted slippers, i made up a color design with two alternating colors, one more dominant at one and and fading towards the other end, while the second color did the opposite.

Do get that done i did some math that i wanted to share with you now. It works perfect for my felted slippers shared in my other blog entry but can surely be used in any other striped work as well.

The idea of it is rather simple - i knew i had to knit 71 rows and i figured out that i have to start out with 8 rows of one color. After one row of the second color, another 7 rows of the first followed. Then i worked two rows of colors two, after that 6 rows of color one... You see where this is going? Indeed simple. While one color gets less and lesser rows, the other gets more and more. Just - by what number do you need to start?

I didn´t know whether there is a smart way to do it, i simply wrote down all the numbers, starting out with a simple two stripe design and went up to the point where i needed to end.

2 - 1- 1 -2 -> Total of 6 Rows

3 - 1- 2 - 2 - 1 - 3 -> Total of 12 Rows

4 - 1 - 3 - 2 - 2 - 3 - 1 - 4 - > Total of 20 Rows

5 - 1 - 4 - 2 - 3 - 3 - 2 - 4 - 1 - 5 - > Total of 30 Rows

Where are we going with this? Luckily i did study some math in my bachelor degree, so i recognized the pattern of the so called pronic numbers. A pronic number is, as wikipedia says a "number which is the product of two consecutive integers". To get the pronic number 6, you need to multiply 1 * 2. To get the pronic number 12, you multiply 2 * 3. And luckily, the pronic numbers are easily to be found on the internet!

So here we go with the amount of rows that the first color has to start out with, when you want to have a certain amount of rows in total.

What you see here, is my personal Cheat-Sheet out of my beloved yarn-notes-notebook.

You will see, that some problems might occure (what to do when you need to work 100 rows? Or 75?) and sadly there is no real solution to it - you pick the number that comes closest and then you have to work out a way to hide those extra (or missing) rows, that you need to get to your number.

My slippers were worked with 72 rows, so i started out with 8 rows and simply added one row somewhere along the slipper. Its not noticable.

Or is it? If you find it in those gigantic, pre-felting slippers... Let me know :)

Huch... Nichts auf Deutsch? Nicht immer habe ich die Zeit, alle Artikel zweisprachig zu verfassen. Eventuell kommt die Übersetzung noch nach. Im Zweifelsfall könnt ihr mich aber auch immer anschreiben, wenn Bedarf besteht mache ich mich gerne sofort an die Übersetzung dieses Eintrags!

#stripes #stripeythings #cheatsheet #felted