Tuesday, January 18, 2011

Bias-V Progress

Bias V progress It took me a few days to recover from the chaos of the stripes colliding with the shaping.

I resorted to building a massive chart of the entire sweater in Excel to see how it would all work together.

Yes, that took an hour or two.

Why the entire sweater? Because I thought it would be easier to have the stripes progress up the chart and seeing where the colors end up rather than trying to start at the armholes and having to determine the color placement from the sweater.

The chart turned out to be a good idea not only for the stripes but also for the neck shaping.

Despite having reworked the numbers for the v-neck shaping I rebelled against the new figures and was going to go with my original math.

However, when I plotted it on the chart I saw that it did indeed not work. The neck shaping stopped at a point beyond the end of the shoulder shaping. There was a distinct lack of stitches where stitches needed to be for both sets of shaping to happen.

It was a simple matter of flipping the page over to get to the new neck numbers. I plotted them with a red boarder so I could really see the difference. I also had to replot the shoulders since they were based on the top of the v-neck. I was able to cross-reference the revised chart rows with the number of rows I had predicted for the armholes in my original round of number crunching.

I'm pretty sure everything is happy now, but the real test will be when the sweater is done.

The result of plotting the stripes was that I decided to maintain the charcoal grey on left shoulder even though it's only going to be three stitches. I like having the colors continue.

I was also able to see that the dark blue was not going to jump across the gap and eat the black/white yarn until all the way up at the shoulder.

What I did was box out the shape of the sweater, then copy paste the colors up to the neck shaping.

Then when I got to the neck shaping I used a lighter version of all the colors to plot them across empty space. This allowed me to follow their natural progression. Also, it gave me a chart of the back of the sweater.

After all that work I realized there was something I could have done to make my charting life easier.

I made the chart by copying each individual color two rows at a time, moving my cursor up and over, and pasting.

The next day, after I was all done, I realized I could have copied the two rows all the way across the sweater. The relation of the colors to each other would have been maintained just as well.

sigh.

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