HMD and scarf calculations

First Happy Mother's Day! I am blessed to be the mother of two wonderful children and consider my son-in-law a third. ;-) I am very proud of them all and love them more than I could ever say. They bless me every day.

I hope you and yours enjoyed this special day, set aside for us mothers. Being a mother doesn't mean we're perfect - I certainly wasn't and am not - but we do our best and hope the love fills in the rest.

Now on to crochet ... well, sort of.

If Math scares you, run now. LOL

Susan suggested that since I know the total length of the scarf (9' or 108") and I know the total number of rows (314), I can figure out the length of each row and thus the supposed length of each color stripe. She is absolutely correct. But knowing this and putting it into practice might be a bit more than my little brain and fingers can do. I am going to give it to the old college try though now that she has laid it out for me so well.

I decided to go with mm since it is a small measure which would be easier to see than trying to figure out a percentage of an inch. Being American, working with mm does not come naturally to me. Yeah, we learned it in school, but it apparently did not "take". LOL

Anyway, my research (I googled inches to mm online) showed that 1" is 25mm.

My total scarf is to be 108" which is 2700mm. My actual scarf was 93" including fringe which is 2325mm. That is 375mm (or 15") shorter than desired.

Since my total number of rows is 314 and I need to increase the total length by 375mm, I divided 375mm by 314 rows. That tells me I need to add 1.19mm to each row. We can round that off to 1.2mm.

I measured a section that was 6 rows long on my actual scarf. It was 40mm. Each row has to be 8.6mm. (2700mm / 314 rows).  8.6mm x 6 rows would be 51.60. That's how long it should have been.  Take my word for it that I was 1.29mm off per row. Rounding THAT off to 1.3mm, not bad.

Now the question becomes how to increase my rows by that amount. The difference between a sc and a hdc would be considerably more than any of those figures.

What I have to do now, if I want to get the scarf to approximately the same length as the knitted scarf, is to swatch until I find a hook that will give me 51.6mm per 6 rows.

Tara tells me that her scarf before blocking is about 12" and after blocking 10" in width. Mine was about 10 1/2" (no blocking) so I'm pretty good there. I think I read somewhere 11" width but I can't remember where I read that now. Will check that out later.

I'm thinking of possibly working Chris Brimelow's pattern, just for fun, using the same colors though as I don't want to purchase more yarn right now. I bought a few skeins of Vanna's Choice to supplement what I already had leftover and that should be enough. Michael's had a clearance sale today. :-) [addition: Chris' pattern uses 816 rows (to be divided in half in this case, which is 408 rows]

If anyone is a math whiz and finds an error in my calculations - which could VERY well be LOL - feel free to holler out.

I will keep you posted on the scarf saga.

Happy crocheting!
Sandie