Math uggh

One of the dangers of taking children to a yarn shop is that you will be so distracted you will end up buying more (or less) than you wanted. The other danger is that they will fill up a basket with yarns tha they can't bear to leave behind. That is how we ended up with a small bundle of pink and purple cotton yarns chosen by my dd, 4. The ensuing dilemma, of course, was what to do with them. She requested a scarf, but a scarf in cotton won't be warm enough to withstand our New England winters. A purse? She lost the last one. Finally, I decided to break my no-blanket rule and make her a blanket. Stripes? Squares? Log Cabin? I thought about them all before settling on small diamonds. I'd seen the pattern in my pattern-a-day calendar from two years ago and came across it again during a web search.

Now for the math. Every diamond is about 5 inches across and 5 inches tall. I'm figuring a good size would be 50 inches by 60 inches or ten diamonds by 12 diamonds. That means 120 diamonds. Each diamond takes about 30 minutes. So that means 60 hours of knitting? Really? Huh. Weeks? Months? Years? What if I can get the knitting down to 20 minutes per diamond? I never was that good with story problems!

This addition/multiplication/division doesn't account for all the mis-knits - the diamonds that aren't on gauge. All the yarns have roughly the same stitch per inch count on the label, but they're very different in real life.

I'm not good at math, but I'm great with deadlines. Right now, there's no deadline so no incentive to finish. I'm thinking maybe this should be a Christmas present.

The other issue is that the three skeins she picked out already won't be enough for this project. I figure that, however, is a good thing because now we'll have something to look for when I take her to the yarn shop.

And if we're going to finish this in time for Christmas, we better get shopping! (And I better get knitting!)

On a separate note, my friend Danielle over at knitting niche has some yarn in need of a project. She's looking for suggestions and running a contest.