Some Estimation

[atherleisure]

I think I have a decent estimate of how much yarn I need now. I spent yesterday and today knitting away madly at the trunks and managed to finish one half.* Math should be good enough to estimate what I need for the rest of the dress. I cast on a sock and did the first three rows, but my left forefinger is sore from pushing the needle through the stitches on the trunks so I'm not going to knit any more today.

I used just over 4 balls on the back of the dress. Since it's 144 stitches wide and the front is 194 stitches wide, if we assume the back took 4.25 balls (it certainly didn't take more), then the front should take 5.75 balls. The trunks used just over 2 balls of yarn for one leg. The other leg is to be identical.

I looked up a couple of modern knee sock patterns on Ravelry that are knit on about the same size needles with sport-weight yarn, and they seem to need about 600 yards of yarn.

That means that I need ten balls for the dress, five for the trunks, and about four for the socks. I started off with fourteen so I need to buy five more. My coupon isn't good until mid-August so I'll work on the sock I cast on to see if I can get a better estimate by then.

*I mostly knit the trunk leg directly from an old Zouave bodice thing that I hated so the yarn was all kinked up. It looks rather awful so I'll be pulling it all out and straightening out the yarn and reknitting from scratch, but I learned what I needed to learn. That includes learning that the old yarn's dye lot is definitely different from the new yarn so I'll be using new balls to start each leg and switching to old yarn higher up.

Comments

[danabren]

As a society we have lost the appreciation for the amount of materiél required for an item. Now we go "oh, a sweater" which is obviously the same amount of effort as a t-shirt from WalMart. I don't know where I am going with this comment except to say that it's a LOT of yarn and you're doing a fine job.

[atherleisure]

Thanks. It's an interesting thing that as fewer people make their own clothes, it becomes less (and now not at all) economically advantageous to do so, which means only those who actually enjoy it continue to do it, further cutting the numbers and thereby the demand for fabrics and yarn. That in turn makes more people not realize what goes into clothes making.

This is a pretty yarn hungry project. I've got about 12 50g balls in the dress where my 1935 bathing suit just had 7 50g balls, including both the suit and the skirt. I knew going in that crochet went through yarn faster so it's not a huge surprise.

[danabren]

Now it's just quilters and cosplayers who sew, according to Joann's. Feh

[atherleisure]

And my mother wonders why I buy fabric online, even though I can’t feel it.